How Japanese Boy Band SMAP Became a 25-Year Miracle | QDaily Business History

A hit product that has sold for more than 20 years — that, at least, is how it looks from where their agency, Johnny & Associates, sits.

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There is a line in a 2008 Cantonese song by Joey Yung that measures a short romance against an unlikely yardstick: the years Kimura Takuya and his group SMAP had already been together.

The song is 《心甘命抵》 (Willing to Pay With Fate). What the two people in it had, the line says, was over far too soon — briefer even than SMAP's run, which by then meant 20 years since the group formed and 17 since it debuted.

Then, at the start of 2016, the group, about to mark 25 years since its debut, went through a scare that was neither small nor huge.

Word spread in the early hours of January 13 that Japan's national idol group SMAP might be breaking up, and the entire entertainment industry shook; within a few hours the news had reached the Chinese internet. By the time people woke up that morning, waves of J-pop fans were already talking it over on Weibo and in WeChat Moments. Even bystanders with no idea what was going on joined in — some could not tell SMAP from SAMP — to lament that the idol group that had kept them company through childhood was now facing a breakup.

The day after the breakup news broke, every headline in the sports pages of the Mainichi Shimbun worked in the title of an SMAP song as a quiet tribute. 《Otherside/愛が止まるまでは》, the single released the previous September, climbed into the top five of the Oricon Style chart, Japan's answer to Billboard. On Amazon Japan and the major online stores, fans rallied and bought out the album containing SMAP's signature song 《世界上唯一的花》 (The Only Flower in the World); a 75-year-old Japanese man shopped online for the first time in his life just to leave a message asking the group not to break up. This CD has sold more than 2.5 million copies, and the song on it is one nearly every Japanese person can sing.

In two days it sold another 200,000 copies,

closing in on 3 million. Even outlets like the BBC, which rarely pay attention to Japanese show business, ran the story — in the business section, no less.

Calling it a shockwave through Japan's entertainment industry is no exaggeration.

The uproar ran until the evening of January 18, when SMAP's variety show SMAPxSMAP cut to a live segment. All five members appeared in black suits and said it themselves:

SMAP would not break up.

"From now on, whatever happens, the five of us will move forward together, looking ahead and pressing on. Please keep supporting us." Their faces were grave and drawn, as if they were apologizing for something they had done. Fans who had been on edge for nearly a week could finally breathe: they had the answer they wanted, from the members' own mouths.

Relieved too were Universal Studios Japan in Osaka, the retail group Seven & i Holdings, the Tokyo Paralympic organizing committee and many other companies and institutions. Their brands, ads and programs all lean on this 25-year-old group for endorsements and appearances.

Two of its members, Katori Shingo and Nakai Masahiro,

tied for 13th among all of Japan's male idols in the number of ad campaigns they appeared in during the first half of 2015, with six each.

Twenty-five years after its debut, the group has not slowed down. Barely two weeks earlier it had made its 23rd appearance on the Kohaku Uta Gassen, Japan's answer to the Spring Festival Gala, and, as always, drove the show's ratings to their peak. In 2015,

the second film spun off from HERO, the drama that made Kimura Takuya a star, topped Japan's box office for domestic live-action films,

drawing more than 550,000 viewers in two days.

For an idol group 25 years past its debut to keep this much life in it would be a miracle in any pop music scene. SMAP also still holds the status of a national act, which is hard to imagine in Japan, South Korea, the West or the Chinese-speaking world. Taiwan's Mayday? South Korea's Shinhwa? Both debuted around 1999, by which point SMAP had already hit its peak, and neither counts for as much at home as SMAP does in Japan.

How SMAP got famous

When Nakai Masahiro, Kimura Takuya, Inagaki Goro, Kusanagi Tsuyoshi, Mori Katsuyuki (who later left) and Katori Shingo first formed SMAP in 1988, the oldest, Nakai, was not yet 16, and the youngest, Katori, was 11. Like the other boys at their agency, Johnny & Associates (more on what that agency means to Japanese show business later), they danced backup for their seniors, Hikaru Genji. Three years after forming, they debuted with the single Can't Stop!! -LOVING-.

A debut did not mean clear sailing. Three years from forming to debut was slow going, and once they got there, the first single sold badly. Japan was still working through the aftermath of the bubble economy and no longer chased idols the way it had in the 1980s. SMAP caught on only with young students, and by 1994 there were rumors that the agency would break up the group.

SMAP had no manager then; the leader, Nakai Masahiro, passed the day-to-day arrangements along to the others. Iijima Michi, at the time only an office clerk, could not stand watching it. She started dropping by their shoots, and eventually became their manager.

Under Iijima, SMAP began taking a route no Johnny & Associates act had taken before. From 1992 they were regular guests on the variety show Yume MORIMORI, which the agency had until then treated as off-limits. On variety shows SMAP dropped the idol act completely: they dressed in drag, told jokes, even took on stunts like chopping bricks with their bare hands. To get noticed, these young men would do anything. It raised their profile, and it became the standard road to fame for the many Johnny & Associates groups that followed: go on funny variety shows and be memorable.

SMAP back when it was still a six-member group

The biggest break came in 1993.

That year Iijima Michi got Kimura Takuya cast in the drama Love White Paper (《爱情白皮书》).

He played the devoted second lead who watches over the heroine from the sidelines, and a wide audience remembered him for it. In March the following year, SMAP's 12th single finally reached No. 1 on Japan's weekly Oricon chart.

From then on, act in a drama first was how Johnny & Associates talent got famous. As it turned out, every SMAP member could act: at the Television Drama Academy Awards, Kimura Takuya has won Best Actor 10 times, Kusanagi Tsuyoshi 5 times, Katori Shingo 3 times and Nakai Masahiro 3 times.

At 10 p.m. on April 15, 1996, the variety show SMAPxSMAP went on the air. Nobody imagined it would last this long — today it still draws ratings close to 20%. The show let audiences see the other side of an idol group: hosting, comedy, skits, games, talk, even cooking.

The guest list is enough to make you blink. Wikipedia's roster includes David Beckham, Shinzo Abe, Michael Jackson, Avril Lavigne, Tom Cruise, Lady Gaga and Mikhail Gorbachev. A show of their own drew in people with no particular interest in idols or music, and in the end it made SMAP the national idol group.

"The only one who can outdo Kimura Takuya is Kimura Takuya"

In 2001, HERO, a drama that made Japanese television history, sent Kimura Takuya to another level of fame and lifted SMAP with him. HERO, released in China as 《律政英雄》, averaged more than 30% ratings an episode — a number Japan had never seen before.

After that Kimura was a phenomenon. Anything he touched turned into a hit, which is where the line comes from: the only one who can outdo Kimura Takuya is Kimura Takuya.

Look back at where he stood when he took that role, though, and you could say the drama saved him. Why?

Start with Mori Katsuyuki quitting just as SMAP was picking up speed. He left in May 1996, saying he wanted to chase his own dream: motor racing. Outsiders guessed that he had entered a race in 1995 without telling the agency, which was angry enough to let him go. Johnny & Associates did not allow its idols to ride motorcycles outside of performances, for fear of injury or a scarred face, let alone race cars, a far riskier sport. In the end Mori said publicly that leaving was his own decision; whether the agency pushed him has never been confirmed. From then on the agency cut Mori out of footage wherever it could, and worked to give the impression he had never really been part of SMAP.

HERO came along at exactly the right moment.

Kimura also kept testing the agency's tight rules. In 1997 he said publicly that he had a girlfriend — unacceptable to a company that forbids its talent any romantic scandal. In Japan a star's popularity can swing hard, even collapse, after dating or marriage. The clearest case is Fukuyama Masaharu: after the national heartthrob married last September his popularity fell, his wife received a stream of threatening letters, and his agency's stock dropped too. The couple is said to be living apart now to avoid more trouble.

Pressure from the public and from the agency eventually broke up Kimura and that girlfriend, Ito Kaori. His answer was to marry his next girlfriend, Kudo Shizuka, now his wife, in a hurry at the end of 2000, a year later, and announce it to the public at the same time. That took his conflict with the agency to its peak.

HERO proved Kimura Takuya right: he became the first person at Johnny & Associates to marry at the height of his career and keep his popularity.

His fame reached China at about the same time. On the strength of HERO, and later the film 2046, he was one of the first Japanese idols to break into the Chinese market. Back then Takeshi Kaneshiro and Kimura Takuya were the two Japanese men everyone knew, and "looks like Kimura Takuya" turned into a stock phrase in sappy novels and on teenage girls' lists of what to want in a boyfriend.

The business miracle Kimura Takuya and SMAP made

Kimura kept rising with his SMAP bandmates, and after the single 《世界上唯一的花》 (The Only Flower in the World) sold 2.5 million copies in 2003, Iijima Michi set up a company, J-Dream, to handle the production, distribution and copyright of SMAP's video releases on its own. Johnny Kitagawa was chairman and Iijima was president — the only case at Johnny & Associates of a manager running a subsidiary. The company sidestepped the agency's usual financial arrangements.

According to Japanese media, each member of Arashi, the Johnny & Associates group young people like best today, takes home about 20 million yen a year, after taxes, the agency's cut, a slice set aside for future benefits and a portion spent on company shares. SMAP did not have to deal with any of that. Their income was managed directly by Iijima and J-Dream and ran to roughly 100 million yen each, with the top earner, Nakai Masahiro, taking in around 500 million yen.

The records kept coming. In 2005 their cumulative single sales passed 20 million, the fourth act ever to reach that mark on the Oricon chart. Five years later, at a concert on September 15, 2010, they announced they had become the first Johnny & Associates act to sell more than 10 million concert tickets. Today SMAP brings the agency more than 25 billion yen a year, with cumulative CD sales above 35 million.

Albums, concerts, variety shows, dramas, films — working every front at once put them in every kind of media and pushed their exposure higher still. For more than two decades, whenever Japanese viewers turned on their favorite channel, SMAP was there, in dramas, variety shows, music programs and commercials. How is a group like that supposed to go out of style?

The "beautiful-boy dream factory" behind SMAP

Anyone who follows Japanese show business knows that a conversation about the country's popular male stars runs into one name it cannot get around: Johnny & Associates, the J family for short.

Founded in 1962, the agency now has a lock on the great majority of Japan's young male idols. Behind Arashi, TOKIO, Kanjani Eight and the other boy groups young Japanese women favor today stands a powerful and rather frightening business empire. Run by 84-year-old Johnny Kitagawa (Kitagawa Hiromu) and his elder sister Mary Kitagawa (Fujishima Yasuko), this family company is Japan's beautiful-boy dream factory in the literal sense: for more than half a century it has sold male idols to one generation after another, SMAP included.

A strict, all-covering system turns out one idol group after another. A boy in his early teens, sometimes not yet ten, can send his application to Johnny & Associates, and if he is picked he joins as a Junior, or Jr. In that stage the boys train in singing, dancing, gymnastics and more, so their performing skills develop across the board. Most of their stage time comes from dancing backup and doing backflips while a senior act sings — as SMAP once did — or from singing along and appearing on shows with their seniors. This is their chance to be seen: a lucky few catch the eye of audiences and of the agency before they ever debut, but most stay unknown.

Seniors bringing juniors along is not only a way to build a following; it is also how the boys learn. Teenagers have to master every performing skill there is, including planning segments and improvising skits — the foundation on which SMAP, and every idol group after it, could handle any kind of program. Meanwhile a Jr.'s living conditions are tightly controlled: no manager, no car and driver, no salary. They learn to stand on their own on the pocket money the agency hands out.

Once a set of boys has some ability, some name recognition and the right age, the agency puts them together and debuts them as a group. From there they enter the agency's formidable entertainment-capital machine.

Johnny & Associates, which has all but cornered Japan's male idol market.

Johnny & Associates owns two record labels, a concert production company, a film production company, two advertising firms and more than a dozen other entertainment businesses covering merchandise, publishing, copyright management, fan club operations and stage productions. It is a business empire built to measure for idols, where you can consume every idol product going — CDs and DVDs, photo books, stage stills, ads, even yearly calendars. Johnny & Associates guarantees that as long as you are willing to pay, your idol will fill your life in every form available.

With a full set of idol-ready assets, making a group popular is no great challenge for Johnny & Associates. Better still, its acts can lift each other. Kis-My-Ft2, a young group that debuted in 2011, overlaps with SMAP again and again in variety shows, songs and performing style. That pulled the new group along on its seniors' backs, and in 2015 it ranked fourth in revenue among acts on the Oricon chart, counting singles, albums, DVDs and Blu-rays. At the same time it put SMAP in front of younger fans who might not know the group well. Johnny & Associates also uses its clout to keep its groups from releasing music on the same day, so they compete with each other as little as possible.

Having produced so many idols, Johnny & Associates has chips to bargain with when it deals with the media. Its talent are fixtures on the music programs of the big commercial networks, TV Asahi and Fuji TV among them; TV Asahi's Music Station has a Johnny & Associates act on almost every week. News and variety shows need its stars to pull ratings too — Katori Shingo, one of SMAP's five, has hosted Japan's annual charity telethon, "24-Hour Television."

Anyone who wants to print a photo of a J-family idol in a magazine, or use footage of one on television or online, has to get the agency's permission and pay for it. To the agency every photo is something to sell, so entertainment magazines and programs court it and pay up for the right to use images their readers want. In Japan, the world's second-largest music market, Johnny & Associates owns its own magazine and video companies and would rather print every photo only in its own products, which it never has trouble selling. The rule has loosened somewhat since the internet arrived, but next to other agencies it is still a freakish way to make money and keep control.

Unlicensed images of Johnny & Associates idols are replaced by a gray silhouette or a drawing; this one stands in for KAT-TUN's Kamenashi Kazuya.

The agency keeps its fans inside its own fan clubs as well. If you want to see an SMAP concert or follow the latest news, you join the fan club Johnny & Associates runs, which gets you into the ticket lottery and gives you access to updates. The idols themselves are not allowed to post on any social media or blog outside it; their weekly diaries go on the agency's official site, where only fan club members can read them. SMAP's fan club has around 1 million members — only the second largest at the agency, but at 4,000 yen a year that is 4 billion yen in revenue. It also keeps fans loyal, since it gives them some contact with their idols. Johnny & Associates talent may not sign autographs, and may not accept gifts other than letters — so if you want to send something, you join the fan club and write.

Most of the agency's acts are evergreens. Among the big idol groups still working today, TOKIO debuted in 1994, V6 in 1995 and KinKi Kids in 1997 (though they had been active since 1992). Arashi, which topped the Oricon revenue chart last year, debuted in 1999. Even the best of them has never passed SMAP.

How much longer can SMAP stay on top?

Hard to say. As far back as the second half of 2015, a story circulating among fans and in the media — a factional fight between Iijima Michi, the woman who made SMAP, and Fujishima Julie Keiko, Mary Kitagawa's daughter and the agency's designated successor — had many people guessing that SMAP might leave Johnny & Associates.

Iijima's resignation was accepted in December 2015 and made public on January 12 this year. She left the agency she had served for 35 years, and J-Dream, the company she had built herself. Before that she had wanted to take the SMAP members independent. Kimura Takuya turned her down, saying he owed the Kitagawa siblings for raising him since his Jr. days and would stay where he was.

"This time Kimura-kun created the chance for us to apologize to Mr. Johnny, and that is why we can stand here. Having the five of us together puts my mind at ease," Kusanagi Tsuyoshi said in that live segment on the night of January 18.

All five members bowed in apology during the live segment cut into SMAPxSMAP

Picking over what each member really thought during the breakup scare no longer means much. For most people, the fact that SMAP survived is good news by itself.

What happens to SMAP from here is unknown — whether it will be slowly put on ice or squeezed for whatever value it has left depends mostly on the agency, not on the group. Johnny & Associates presumably has no further use for an act that works miracles but cannot be controlled. Over the years the media have tipped plenty of idols as the next Kimura Takuya: Takizawa Hideaki, Matsumoto Jun, Yamashita Tomohisa. None of them became it. To Johnny & Associates, idol groups are products, and the best products are the ones that can be replaced by newer ones people like even more — and that always do as they are told.

That is what Cheer Chen sings about in 《我喜欢木村拓哉》 (I Like Kimura Takuya): she likes him, she knows he will never be hers, and she is already scouting for the next Japanese idol who might take his place.