Tsuyoshi Kusanagi, the "nice guy" from the pop group SMAP, was arrested for cavorting through the park naked and drunk in the wee hours of Thursday morning (no pun intended).
The Japanese media is turning this into a circus by raining down condemnation and expressing "disgust" at his lewd behavior. When I think about the fact that thousands of college kids in the U.S. do this every year on their respective campuses ("streaking") I can't help concluding that people are making way too big a deal out of this.
Companies that use Kusanagi and other SMAP members in their ads (and there are a lot of them) are canceling their advertising contracts left and right. Despite the fact that SMAP is represented by Johnny and Associates, one of the biggest pop star agencies in Japan, Kusanagi is being dumped, and dumped on, big time.
I like Kusanagi. Believe it or not, I had the chance to talk to him on the phone directly one time (I won't into detail of how or why) and he lived up to his "nice guy" character. He probably needed to let off steam because of the absurd pop star system and world that he lives in, where all his words are chosen, all his songs are written for him, and his very "character" is molded for him.
But despite liking Kusanagi, I don't like SMAP and all that it represents. This incident is representative of all the problems of the pop star system, where companies rely on pop stars, and pop stars rely on companies, and nobody really cares about the quality of the music or who these pop stars really are. And also it shows just how much the media is controlled by those very same companies. It is a thin fantasy, and maybe that's what everyone is realizing now.
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