[Japanese] 2016: The 10 Words That Show What Japan Was Talking About

Show business still took a healthy share of them.

1. SMAP Disbands

For the Japanese public, one thing in 2016 came out of nowhere: SMAP, the national idol group that had just marked its 25th anniversary, broke up. From the first reports of a split, to the group going on television to apologize to fans, to the final confirmation that it was over, with fresh revelations all the way through — SMAP's story ran like a thread through Japan's entire year.

The breakup outgrew entertainment news and became something closer to a social event. NHK cut away from its live coverage of the Rio Olympics to report it. On December 26, as the last episode of the group's variety show SMAP×SMAP neared its end, the Chinese Embassy in Japan posted a tweet in Japanese: "Thank you, SMAP." The day after the group officially disbanded, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga took questions about SMAP at a press conference. Television stations around the country made SMAP specials and asked fans how it felt to watch the group end — some sobbed, others looked oddly calm.

Fans drew more media attention through the breakup than they ever had. Trying to keep the group together, they organized on social media to buy The Only Flower in the World; the 2003 single sold out at one point, and on December 8 it passed 3 million copies sold within 2016 alone. Fans also ran a petition drive, and in the end 370,000 letters asking SMAP not to disband arrived at the group's agency, Johnny & Associates.

After the bubble burst, Japan settled into a long economic slump, and in 1995 the Great Hanshin earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyo sarin attack came one after the other. SMAP's song "Ganbarimashou" ("Let's Do Our Best") kept the public company through those years, and it was then that the group became a national institution. Most of SMAP's best-known songs are full of ordinary life, the kind that makes a listener think the cheering is meant for them personally. SMAP debuted in Heisei 3 (1991); in Heisei 28 (2016) Emperor Akihito told the nation he wished to abdicate. In that sense SMAP stands for the whole Heisei era, which explains why one idol group breaking up could shake a country. People were not only letting go of SMAP. They were letting go of their own youth.

2. The Despicable Affair (gesu furin)

From show business to politics, an unusual number of affairs came to light in 2016.

Shukan Bunshun broke the story of an affair between Enon Kawatani, front man of the rock band Gesu no Kiwami Otome ("Girl at the Peak of Sleaze"), and the popular TV personality Becky. The day before the issue went on sale, Becky held a press conference and insisted, eyes wet, that she had not come between a husband and wife. What neither of them expected was that Shukan Bunshun had their LINE messages — messages in which the two, with no hint of remorse, wrote things like, "Thanks to Bunshun we can finally be together out in the open, sentence spring." ("Sentence spring," the magazine's name translated word for word into English, was nominated for the year's New Words and Buzzwords Awards.) Angry internet users gave the affair a name: the despicable affair.

Hirotada Ototake, a disabled author preparing to run for the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, was exposed by Shukan Shincho for carrying on with five women at once. Ototake had turned his own struggles into the bestselling memoir No One's Perfect — in Japanese, literally "five limbs, unsatisfied." Once the affairs came out, Japanese internet users could not resist: "five limbs, fully satisfied by affairs," "Ototake at the peak of sleaze." The third case was more ironic still. Diet member Kensuke Miyazaki was caught by Shukan Bunshun having an affair while his wife was pregnant, and his own political platform was paternity leave so that men could look after their wives. Internet users handed him a new title: the despicable-affair lawmaker. Then the married singer Funky Kato was found to have slept with a close friend's wife, and readers who thought they had run out of shock reached for a bigger word: beyond despicable.

Becky took the worst of it. Her work was suspended, the ads she appeared in were pulled, and she paid enormous penalty fees. Kawatani went on playing with his band, and ticket sales for his Budokan show actually rose (his agency suspended him later, over something else). Ototake and Funky Kato also returned to public life once the noise died down. After this run of despicable affairs, Japanese internet users started talking about who in show business pays for them.

3. The Bunshun Cannon (Bunshun-ho)

Much the way gossip watchers in China wait for the next "see you Monday" tease from a scandal reporter, Japan's gossip-loving public keeps its hopes pinned on Shukan Bunshun. The phrase "Bunshun Cannon" started with AKB48 fans. AKB48 and its sister groups forbid members to date, and Shukan Bunshun kept exposing their romances anyway; members hit by a story faced discipline, and in the worst cases had to leave the group. So AKB48 fans gave the magazine a new name. The cannon's range is wide: sports, politics, business — wherever there is gossip, it fires.

A tally of the Bunshun Cannon's 2016 rounds: the Kawatani-Becky affair; bribes taken by Akira Amari, the minister for economic revitalization; an interview with Johnny & Associates executives right after the SMAP breakup broke; Miyazaki's affair; a stakeout of a serial killer just out of prison; drug use by the former baseball player Kazuhiro Kiyohara; and match-fixing by players on the Yomiuri Giants. Having given the country so much to talk about, "Bunshun Cannon" made the top 10 of the year's Buzzwords Awards.

That success gave Shukan Bunshun the confidence to start selling news on LINE. From January 10, 2017, the Bunshun Cannon would post a teaser for each scoop the day before the print issue went on sale; pay 240 yen and you could read the whole story the day the magazine hit newsstands. The magazine also released a set of LINE stickers called "Shukan Bunshun × Despicable Bear."

4. The Koike Theater (Koike gekijo)

Four terms on the Buzzwords Awards shortlist — "the soil-fill problem," "Tomin First," "athlete first" and "legacy" — all traced back to Yuriko Koike, Tokyo's first woman governor. If the first half of 2016 belonged to despicable affairs, the second half belonged to the twists of the Koike Theater.

Koike won the governorship by a landslide and then ran into one obstacle after another. As we wrote in "Tsukiji Market's Delayed Move," environmental problems and design flaws pushed back Tsukiji Market's relocation to Toyosu. Toyosu Market stands on the site of a former gas plant. To deal with the contaminated ground, Tokyo officials decided at the time that the site needed an empty space underneath rather than a layer of clean fill, so no soil-fill work was done. That underground space has since turned out to be flooded, with mercury above the legal limit.

Koike delayed the move anyway, despite the economic losses it could cause, and used the phrase "Tomin First" — Tokyo residents first — at a press conference. But the delay also held up the demolition of Tsukiji, and if Tsukiji could not come down on schedule, the road building for the Tokyo Olympics could not be guaranteed to finish on time either. "Athlete first" had been one of her campaign slogans too.

Her bigger headache was where to put the Olympic venues. To cut the cost of hosting and help the earthquake-hit Tohoku region recover, she considered moving the rowing and canoeing venue to Miyagi Prefecture as a temporary structure. Sports bodies objected, arguing that host venues should be kept as "legacy." In the end, construction in Tokyo had already begun, and once the penalty fees were counted, moving to Miyagi would not have saved much, so Koike dropped the idea.

5. Touched by the Divine (kamitteru)

In our roundup of Japan's 2014 buzzwords we mentioned the "Carp girls" who follow the pro baseball team Hiroshima Toyo Carp. In 2014 the Carp were just a team picking up fans. In 2016 they won the league title for the first time in 25 years.

Carp manager Koichi Ogata, talking to reporters in a rush of excitement about Seiya Suzuki after he homered in two straight games, called him kamitteru — touched by the divine. The closest thing in Chinese might be that old, overheated soccer commentary line: "at this moment, a god has entered him." The word is not in any Japanese dictionary; Ogata invented it on the spot. It has since loosened into a synonym for "amazing," as in "your hair today is so kamitteru" or "your room is kamitteru messy." Suzuki, the divinely touched player himself, said he does not like it: "Kamitteru makes it sound as if something other than my own ability made me succeed. I'd rather people stopped saying it about me next year."

6. Pokémon Go

Pokémon Go reaching the top 10 of the Buzzwords Awards surprised nobody. Crowds of young people gathering in parks late at night to catch Pokémon were the biggest story of the summer of 2016. But what goes up comes down. In a survey by My Navi, Pokémon Go tied with PPAP as the trend Japanese university students most disliked, for reasons such as "I got bored of Pokémon Go immediately," "going outside is too much trouble," and "I'd rather not hear the word lately, and hardly anyone around me still plays." A November 2016 survey by the software company JustSystems found that the share of players aged 20 to 29 had dropped from 60.7% in July to 29.9%.

Japanese players, who love a region-only promotion, asked the developer for region-exclusive Pokémon. Niantic did not go that far, but it offered a compromise to keep interest alive. Using the recovery of the Tohoku earthquake zone as the occasion, it raised the spawn rate of the rare Pokémon Lapras in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, from November 11 to November 21, 2016. City figures show that the 11-day event brought 100,000 visitors to Ishinomaki to catch Pokémon. Tourism in Kyushu had been badly hurt by the Kumamoto earthquake, so some internet users suggested Niantic run a similar event there to help the local industry back on its feet.

7. Couldn't Get My Kid into Daycare — Japan Can Drop Dead (hoikuen ochita Nihon shine)

This may be the most venomous entry in the history of the Buzzwords Awards.

In February 2016 a mother furious that her child had not gotten a daycare place wrote this on an anonymous forum: "What on earth is Japan doing. Weren't you going to build a society where all 100 million people are active? My kid didn't get into daycare — what am I supposed to do, how am I supposed to be active? Never mind the affairs, never mind the bribes, just build more daycare centers. Tens of billions of yen have already been thrown away on the Olympics. I don't care what the emblem looks like, build more daycare centers. If there's money for a famous designer, spend it on daycare. What is going on here — now I have no choice but to quit my job. Stop messing around, Japan."

The post, a straight blast of anger at Japan's daycare system, found unexpected support from other parents whose children were also on waiting lists — taikijido, "children on standby." Public daycare centers are so far short of demand that places are often decided by lottery. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was promoting "womenomics" to get women back to work after childbirth, but with a child stuck on a waiting list, a woman who wanted to return to her job simply could not.

When an opposition lawmaker asked Abe what he made of it, he answered coldly: "The post is anonymous, so there is no way to confirm it is real." Parents, angered by that, gathered outside the Diet holding signs that read "I'm the one who couldn't get into daycare." After the phrase won a Buzzwords Award, some asked whether language that crude belonged on the list; the judges said plainly that it was a chance to take a hard look at how daycare works in Japan.

8. Hydrogen Water (suisosui)

Suisosui means hydrogen-rich water. Japanese actresses have praised it on their blogs and on television for improving their skin, and some say they bathe in it. Norika Fujiwara, a true believer, gave her wedding guests hydrogen-water generators engraved with her husband's family crest. For a while hydrogen water was the new health miracle, and it appeared in convenience stores and supermarket drinks aisles across Japan at prices far above ordinary bottled water.

Then Japan's National Consumer Affairs Center, the country's consumer-protection watchdog, tested 10 brands of drinkable hydrogen water and 9 hydrogen-water generators on the market between September and November 2016. Two of the waters contained no hydrogen at all the moment they were opened, and three of the waters and three of the generators delivered hydrogen levels that did not match the figures on the label or in the manual. Takeo Samaki, a professor at Hosei University, put it bluntly: "Curing disease and slowing aging with hydrogen water is a sales gimmick. There is no medical evidence that it does anything for your health."

9. Your Name. (Kimi no Na wa.)

When we first wrote about Your Name. in October 2016, its box office had just passed 10 billion yen. Three months later, by the New Year holiday, it had passed 22.4 billion yen at home and set records for a Japanese film in mainland China, South Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong and Taiwan. RADWIMPS, the rock band that wrote the score, was invited for the first time to play the theme song "Zenzenzense" at the New Year's Eve Kohaku Uta Gassen. The film also brought its distributor, Toho, a company-record 40 billion yen in operating profit.

The phenomenon of 2016 has every intention of staying hot through 2017. In 2016 the film ran a special-train-car and station-stamp campaign with JR East; in 2017 the partner became JR Central, which was marking its 30th anniversary and announced a transit card with Your Name. artwork on it. In January a Your Name. café opened for a limited run in Tokyo's Ikebukuro, and a nation famous for queueing again showed what it can do: a table at the café cost five and a half hours in line.

10. Pilgrimage to Sacred Sites (seichi junrei)

For otaku, "pilgrimage to sacred sites" is an old term — the pleasure of standing in the real place that matches a scene from a beloved anime or manga. Your Name.'s greatest success was making ordinary moviegoers feel the pull of animated film, and even fans who were not otaku found themselves wanting to make a pilgrimage. Hida, in Gifu Prefecture, one of the film's settings, became the most popular destination.

By one estimate, Your Name. will bring Gifu 751,000 pilgrimage visits; with two other 2016 animated films also set in the prefecture, these trips alone should be worth 25.296 billion yen to Gifu and could lift its GDP by 0.19%. Gifu sits in Japan's Chubu region and normally draws 80% of its visitors from Chubu itself, but pilgrims come from a much wider spread: 32.4% from Kanto, 22.7% from Kansai. Given how popular Your Name. is abroad, the Gifu municipalities of Hida, Takayama and Gero, along with Shirakawa village in Ono District (yes, the one with the World Heritage gassho-zukuri farmhouses), decided to launch a joint pilgrimage route. The reasoning could not be simpler: a pilgrimage to one site is too short a trip, and only by pooling what they have can these towns keep visitors from overseas around longer and get them spending.

Cover image from Jpop Wiki