Japan Is What Late-Stage Capitalist Decline Looks Like

Is America next?

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…

saved by

• Katherine Huang
• Jaclyn
• Linda
• Aryan Naik
• Karthik Suresh
• Alicia Ran
• Jean Y
• Nicklaus Tran
• Agnim Agarwal

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