The danger of idol-fan relationships, and how the former encourage the latter to come close

Scene: A dingy hole-in-corner “live house.” Air: close. Noise: stifling. Room to move: none – except onstage. There the movement is intense, frenetic: Six miniskirted “idols” flinging themselves about in frenzied dance in frenzied keeping with their frenzied song.

The performance ends, the idols descend. The fans gather round and line up, getting their money ready. A thousand yen buys a handshake, a smile, a greeting, a photo op. Many line up twice, some three times.

You never know what’s going on in the hearts and minds of strangers. More than what shows. Varied emotions surge, sown by unknown causes – in the idols, excitement or boredom or anything in between; in the fans, love or resentment or jealousy or… anything in between. When two opposites meet and clash, the fusion brings light or tragedy. On March 11 the “underground idol” scene turned tragic.

“Chika (underground) idols” are distinct from “major idols.” Major idols are celebrities who make records, grace TV shows and get star treatment. Chika idols play small sweaty venues and livestream street performances, surviving (the lucky ones) on what fans spend on them – a great deal sometimes; in expectation of what in return?

Airi Sato, 22, was a chika idol. On March 11, walking home from a livestreaming in Tokyo’s Takadanobaba, she was stabbed to death. Kenichi Takano, the 42-year-old suspect arrested at the scene, was a fan. She owed him money, he said, a claim apparently supported by a 2023 court order that she repay him 2.5 million yen.

The behavior that links fan to idol is known in Japanese as suishikatsu. There’s no clear English equivalent. It suggests fans going to great lengths to show their appreciation, loyalty, sometimes love for their idols. It thrives on close encounters. That’s what the fans seek; it’s what they’ll pay for. Shukan Gendai (April 5-12), citing Sato’s murder, sounds the alarm: “The suishikatsu business has become too dangerous.” The murderer, it is speculated, was a fan in unrequited love, his gifts accepted, his love spurned.

The magazine traces the history of this peculiar phenomenon to the 2005 debut of AKB48, still going strong 20 years later, forever young as aged members make way for new. They, of course, are not chika idols – they’re major idols, the most major of all idols, having sold more records than any girl group in Japanese pop history, the Mainichi Shimbun reported in 2019. They – their managers, rather – originated the fan-idol relationship. Life is bleak, life is lonely, it’s hard for men to meet women, Japan’s environment, with its long working hours and various constraints on spontaneous self-expression, isn’t conducive to it; nor, it may be, is modern life in general, which starves social skills in favor of technological prowess.

There seems a general sense of something essential to the good life – something we know not what – being missing; lost, maybe. Might it be idols? They’ll smile at you and you’ll feel befriended, speak to you and you’ll feel loved, chat with you online and you’ll attend the next event; hope rising, you’ll buy their records, make offerings of gifts and money. It’s fine until the illusion bursts. Hopefully it won’t. Illusions, like dreams, sometimes come true.

Major idols are besieged by fans; chika idols face a harder grind. “You perform let’s say 20 “live house” shows a month,” a former idol tells the magazine, “and in the mingling with fans afterwards you take in, maybe, 20-30,000 yen a month. So in picking up one or two hard-core fans” willing to spend (or lend; misunderstandings here are an occupational hazard, as Sato’s murder suggests) millions of yen, a hard-pressed idol may well feel duly idolized, with financial security, if not stardom, in sight if not in hand.

A lot of the fans, Shukan Gendai speculates, are social and sexual innocents well on in middle age, easy marks for idols who string them along with empty promises while gouging them for rent money, gifts of brand name products and so on. Managers get very generous cuts and keep a close eye on their golden-egg-laying geese. Idol taboo number one: no boyfriends – at least no trace of one visible or otherwise detectable to a fan.

“I went out for dinner with my father one night,” says the former idol. “A fan saw me. ‘But he’s my father!’ ‘Sure he is!’” No wonder she got out of the business. It would be interesting to know what she’s doing now.

© Japan Today