by Kaori Shoji
Renai Saiban (International Title: Love on Trial) opened in theaters across Japan last month and it’s rumored to overtake Kokuho’s box office popularity within the year. Like Kokuho, Love on Trial premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year and is now slated to make the rounds of theaters across Asia, parts of the US and Europe. Director Koji Fukada told reporters in Cannes that Love on Trial was a passion project and that he had taken a decade to prep, write the screenplay and gather funds before taking up the megaphone.
The origin of Fukada’s enthusiasm was a small newspaper article from 2015, about an obscure 17-year old ‘idoru’ who was sued by her agency and put on trial for having a love relationship when she was 15. He was moved by her plight to start researching the blanket ban on “relationships with the opposite sex”stipulated in most contracts signed between teenage idoru (regardless of their gender) and the agencies they sign up with.
This stipulation would be laughable if it wasn’t also kinda pathetic. Japanese talent agencies are notorious for keeping tight reins or to be more precise, chokeholds on their teenage idoru, fearful they would have sex at some point and lose their ‘seiren (cleanliness and purity).’ Fans expect their idoru to be pure and untouched. When it turns out that’re not as clean as the fans thought, they take it very, very personally and accuse the idoru of betrayal. In retaliation, fans stop paying for concert tickets, merchandise and other idoru paraphernalia, trash the idoru on social media and in some cases, lead to criminal stalking. The fall out is tremendous and burns the agency in two ways: plummeting current sales and no hope of return on the fees that went into training, clothing and feeding the idoru. In the case of the 2015 trial, the plaintiff agency slapped the defendant 17-year old with a 5.1 million yen fine for damages incurred. And you wonder why the dating scape in Japan is so dismal.
Love on Trial traces this narrative arc, but with an excruciatingly sanctimonious emphasis on the selflessness of a typical Japanese idoru. It tells the story of Mai (played by Kyoko Saito), a young girl idoru belonging to a popular girl pop group. Mai had the audacity to fall in love with a street performer her own age, and was subsequently sued by her talent agency. Later, she appears in a courtroom scene to declare that she had wanted to “be my own self” – which is the reason she had allowed herself to “have sexual relations” with um…(whisper) a man. Gasp.
Kyoko Saito, who herself was a central member of the enormously popular girl group Hinatazaka 46, plays Mai with a polite, restrained adroitness which is a prerequisite trait for any successful idoru. Saito’s Mai is cute without being coy, earnest without being capable and most importantly, is never, ever sexy.
Traditionally, in-the-flesh idoru must be detached from anything fleshy. Anime idoru on the other hand, are expected to go whole hog on the flesh thing, with tiny, cinched waists and cleavages popping out from unbuttoned school uniform shirts. They get to form a whole other genre of the idoru phenomenon, hold their own concerts and hologram press conferences and adored by millions. Not that they have much fun either, as touched upon by William Gibson in his masterfully prophetic 1996 novel Idoru. The point is, human or algorithmically generated, the common denominator of the idoru lies in the slavish dedication to the idoru identity and industry. “I was an idoru and as such, was in a very honored and privileged position, which I abused,” explains a tear-soaked Mai in one scene.
One major problem facing the human idoru is the sell-by date. Once they hit 20, group idoru must leave the nest (group) where it was all cheerful, girlish camaraderie and swapping make-up tips, and shift to a solo career. Saito is an example of a group idoru who made it to the big leagues on her own. The other 40 or so girls in Hinatazaka 46 along with rows and rows of other girls in other girl groups large and small, are destined to fade into the ether once they stop fluttering on their teenage wings.
This particular culture is nothing new – it has been part and parcel of Japan’s entertainment world since the 14th century or even earlier. Noh performers, Kabuki actors, dancers and singers belonged to the ranks of ‘geino,’ where romance was banned to favor the ‘gei,’ or the art of the craft. In the 17th century the Tokugawa Shogunate banned love relationships altogether for everyone. This spawned periodic endemics of double suicide whether people were involved in geino or not. If a couple couldn’t be together in the current world, it was just better to be reunited in the next. This feudalistic fatalism set the tone for Japan’s romantic relationships and it’s still being played out in movies like Love on Trial.
The logic was that youth and prettiness is precious, all the more so if a pretty youth will relinquish personal desire and agenda to a greater cause, i,e., serving the organization (clan, family business agency, theater group, etc.) and entertaining and or/benefitting society (sponsor, audience). Until the fall of the all-powerful Johnny Kitagawa and the Johnnies Talent Agency in 2022, the obliteration of the idoru’s individuality in order to give joy to others, including sexually predatory agency presidents – was an undisputed virtue.
That was then. But even before the shattering of the Johnnies empire, talent agencies were being forced to loosen their grip on the young talent in their stables. In 2016, another teenager and ex-idoru was sued by her agency for breaching the no-relationship ban but she was never charged. The court ruled that “having a relationship with a member of the opposite sex is necessary to live life to its fullest potential, and should be viewed as a basic human right.” Only in Japan can such a sentence be read aloud in a court of law.