It’s been a while since I made a post revolving around Japanese idols, no?
How much do anyone of us actually know? When I asked this to myself the other day, I noticed how little I know about what goes on in Japan compared to Korea. In my opinion, it is good to know about the industry and it’s background as a fan. You can be aware of what goes on behind the scenes and understand how the music industry works more. Just to say, I know nothing about traditional music but I do think it is beautiful when I listen to it.
So let’s take a look and see.
I realised recently that I don’t have much to say about the Japanese music industry these days. It’s just come to my attention by how I write my blog entries of J-Pop in comparison to K-Pop over the years. I’m getting there now but still… I’ve never really got involved in any forums or found any updating new sites until last year. And the entertainment industry is now more cutesy, girl group dominated and money hungry.
Are you all enjoying your last days of 2011? We have reached of another year 2011 has been in my opinion, a better year than 2010. However, there weren’t a lot of things to talk about 2011 that were good or bad, only a few.
AKB48 is the girl group that has risen up and took Japan by storm. As a Hello!Project fan, I wanted to look into the grop’s history instead of disliking them for succeeding Morning Musume. To make it short, I wanted to talk about a few things.
Got to say in terms of 2010, it’s been a pretty tiresome year. J-Pop has made me realise some things that I never knew before – in a negative way. K-Pop has just upset me so much despite comebacks of my favourites and news that depressed me. It’s not all been so bad but…I had kind of hoped from all the artists that came back (e.g. Queens of J-Pop were present this year, BoA and Se7en who have been seen for years) that they would have a bigger success than usual.
Due to the sudden triple graduation of Eri, Lin Lin and Jun Jun, my liking of Morning Musume is shaken as much as Jin from Sora to Kujira is. Truly, for him his three favourites are leaving; in my case it’s my #2 and #3 favourites.
But anyways, I posted an entry on their graduation [link]already; this post is about who people prefer more; Morning Musume or AKB48. With Morning Musume’s reputation as the head group of Hello!Project failing to keep their popularity up, AKB48 is rising in the charts with fan service PV’s like Heavy Rotation and wearing schoolgirl uniforms for an eternity (Ok, maybe since debut then).
I’m going to look at the comparison and show you why Japan prefers AKB48 being their top girl group in Japan at the moment over Morning Musume.
It’s weird because I remember in 2008; I read an article saying Morning Musume is Japan’s Best Selling Group so I also assumed their popularity was still on the rise. But now that I think about it, when I went to Japan last year, places like Akihabara and Fukuoka where I went to buy merchandise had more AKB48 posters and CD on display. I don’t remember seeing any Morning Musume albums anywhere to be honest really.
So I came up with a few things in comparison between Morning Musume and AKB48:
