MUST WATCH. You can find this documentary on Netflix and it is FASCINATING. Makes you wonder which gender is being exploited?
Added 2019-06-25 05:06:13 +0000 UTC
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From IMDB: Girl bands and their pop music permeate every moment of Japanese life. Following an aspiring pop singer and her fans, Tokyo Idols explores a cultural phenomenon driven by an obsession with young female sexuality, and the growing disconnect between men and women in hyper-modern societies. This documentary casts a balanced eye over a very strange phenomenon I had never even heard of, the Idol culture of Japan. This essentially amounts to teenage girls who double as pop singers and objects of idolisation for a fan-base. So far, not very strange, but the catch here is that the biggest percentage of the fans are older men, many in the 40s. It is a very strange spectacle to see older men faun over teenage girls in quite this way. Clearly, by this very fact this is by default a pretty controversial subject. In the west, such young girls would have fan-bases of even younger girls, not older men. So, there is a troubling aspect to the whole phenomenon where the motivations of many of the fans must clearly by somewhat dark in nature. While the sub-culture involving the even younger pop idols definitely seemed to be coming from a questionable place. But when watching this I couldn't help but sense a cultural gap that I could never quite bridge. I could never really understand the motivations of the men who followed these teenage girls, it remained very odd indeed and it did seem to stem from a Lolita sub-culture which is embedded in Japan in some complex way. It was partially disturbing, yet bizarrely innocent on a different level – I essentially left the theatre baffled by it all.
Alexander Grace
2019-06-25 07:51:53 +0000 UTC
