Japan Is What Late-Stage Capitalist Decline Looks Like

One of the more bizarre and traumatic incidents in Japanese pop culture was when music group AKB48’s Minami Minegishi publicly shaved her head in penance for breaking a band rule.1 The crime? Having a boyfriend in her 20s. Public humiliation rituals are a typical punishment for the idol industry. So many aspiring pop stars are brutally ridiculed for normal adult woman behaviors. Minegishi’s shaming was just the first incident that was shocking enough to be reported on in the West. The idol industry’s machinery was revealed worldwide for how bestial it truly was: organizing itself on enforced sexual purity, parasocial entitlement, and female infantilization fetishes. It was portrayed as a cultural quirk — Japan having this ultra-serious, ultra-discipline focused culture where cruelty is an accepted, common sense outcome for rule breaking. But this is essentialist thinking that exoticizes dysfunction simply for it being foreign. Rather than culture, I believe that this “weirdness” is mor

One of the more bizarre and traumatic incidents in Japanese pop culture was when music group AKB48’s Minami Minegishi publicly shaved her head in penance for breaking a band rule.1 The crime? Having a boyfriend in her 20s. Public humiliation rituals are a typical punishment for the idol industry. So many aspiring pop stars are brutally ridiculed for normal adult woman behaviors. Minegishi’s shaming was just the first incident that was shocking enough to be reported on in the West. The idol industry’s machinery was revealed worldwide for how bestial it truly was: organizing itself on enforced s