Make Believe Mailer #126: What Was FAKY?

The Group's Role In Modern J-pop History

FAKY circa 2013

J-pop project FAKY’s place in history was cemented last week when former member Anna Sawai won the Emmy for best actress in a drama series. It was a historic triumph, coming off of her performance in this year’s Shogun as Lady Mariko. It guarantees that the musical project she spent half a decade in would always have a place in entertainment history.

I think from a certain angle, perhaps with your head tilted in just the right way, this could be seen as a good development. How many pop outfits have been lost to time completely due to disinterest? FAKY don’t have to worry about that anymore! The group — which carried on after Sawai left in 2018, but officially called it quits earlier this year —  will now always be remembered as the starting point for an Emmy-award winner, the name dotting Wikipedia and magazine articles and who knows maybe even biographies some day. That’s good…right?

Hmmmm…well…

As Shogun gained critical and commercial success, her past in FAKY started becoming more prominent as she made the media rounds starting in the spring. The first instance of it coming up was on The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, during a special live recording at Chapman University released in April. This would actually end up being the most in-depth discussion of her J-pop career, with actual context given to the company FAKY belonged to (avex which…more on that later) and as nuanced Sawai gets about this period (statements like “You are basically they’re…I don’t want to say product” are balanced by appreciation for training…and the fact they had acting classes¹). This is also where she reveals FAKY’s manager stopped her from auditioning for Suicide Squad, as it would disrupt the group’s activities.

From there, reactions to her time in FAKY became more fragmented, ranging from sort of silly (the above late-night clip) to gosh-that’s-interesting (People post) to really viewing this pop period as a hindrance. That final one becomes more prominent as the Emmy ceremony approached, and ratcheted up a level following a W magazine feature where Sawai dismisses this time much more harshly (including literally, if we trust the writer, rolling her eyes at it all).

“I would never recommend to anyone, ‘You should go join the J-pop industry.’ I would not want my kids—if I have kids in the future—to do that,” she says. This became aggregated news on its own before and after the Emmy win, including by what reads like bots trying to write headlines ( “We Are Lucky Anna Sawai Sacrificed Her Music Career After Her Record Label Blocked Her From Being an Actor”).

This is all fine and fair. It’s a central component of Sawai’s story, and she’s telling it in the way she wants². Yet I’m interested in what ends up being lost — or perhaps, never being surfaced at all — because of her rise and the subsequent relegation of FAKY as “the group that held Anna Sawai back” from now on. Specifically, what FAKY represented in 2010s J-pop.

In Sawai’s story, it’s a footnote. Yet in 21st century Japanese entertainment, it deserves more attention.

One did not need to do any research about FAKY in 2013 to know exactly what this group was about. The sound and visual image presented in debut “Better Without You” and subsequent song “Girl Digger” screams “we have seen what K-pop is doing and we want in.” FAKY arrived three years after the summer of hallyu, wherein acts such as KARA and Girls’ Generation became phenomena in Japan. They took shape during the first round of K-pop trying to go global too, when the South Korean industry was receiving lots of attention even if the actual hits on a global scale weren’t developing (“Gangnam Style” being the surprise exception sort of underlining the underperformance of others).

The important context of the period was how different J-pop and K-pop girls were, at least when comparing the top groups. In Japan, this was the imperial era of AKB48, the school-uniform-clad project emphasizing kawaii via its maximalist pop rush. In Korea, it was a mix of coolness and sexiness, with 2NE1 and Girls’ Generation being the brightest standouts. I think the competition this prompted has always been a bit overblown, especially as time has proven quite kind to AKB’s approach, but in the early 2010s it was clear. For a few years, Japanese companies were trying to find their AKB48 or Momoiro Clover Z to take advantage of the J-pop idol boom — see avex’s own Tokyo Girls’ Style —  but K-pop’s booming popularity caught attention.

FAKY was an effort for a Japanese company to take these aesthetics and apply them to J-pop in the 2010s. Critically, it came from avex, a name critical in helping transform K-pop into an entertainment force in Japan. It’s that company that help kickoff K-pop-mania version one in the 2000s by bringing BoA and TVXQ into the market. They partnered with South Korean music force YG to create YGEX in 2011, a label based in Japan only featuring YG acts trying to make moves in the world second-biggest music market. As newspaper JoongAng Ilbo reported at the time, it was formed largely to protect the “musical color” of YG, and avoid a common practice in the years before of Korean acts changing their sound or style to fit the market better.

They really didn’t need to worry about this…by the start of YGEX, listeners wanted that sound, and soon enough new Japanese groups would chase it too.

Given how Japanese and South Korean entertainment moved between the two nations in the preceding decade, I’m sure an upstart J-pop group at some level saw what a young Wonder Girls or Girls’ Generation were up to, and tried to mimic it. FAKY, though, signaled an effort from a major Japanese music company at trying to make K-pop work for them…one that had already played a central role in helping South Korean acts bloom on their turf. FAKY rejected the idol of AKB48³ in favor of embracing the YG-tinted manifestation, particularly personified by 2NE1. The “Better Without You” video makes it clear through fashion, while the group’s early sound is more club oriented than Akihabara dreaming, with rap sprinkled in as needed (the most telling cut being album number “What R You Waiting For,” featuring prominent Auto-tune smudges recalling and lyrical concerns practically referencing 2NE1’s first mini-album).

Most tellingly, FAKY faced outward. They did things in Japan, of course, but compared to other acts, they made a much more pronounced effort to do English interviews. In the same way K-pop groups of this era took shape with a global plan in place from the beginning, FAKY was trying something rare within J-pop. Rather than wait to push abroad after making it at home, they’d seemingly try both at once. And on the international side, they were at least attracting attention from foreign fans. Check the comments of any of FAKY’s YouTube videos, and you’ll find a surprisingly high number of them written in English.

2014 Comment From The “Better Without You” Video…This Was All J-pop Discourse Back Then, Truly We Are Living In A Peaceful Era Today

The reason FAKY didn’t work out is quite straightforward. They went on hiatus about a year after debuting, and didn’t come back until over a year later. Two members split during this break, with one new face joining. For a project that had just started, this was a sudden slam on the brakes. Whatever momentum they had was lost, and they were practically starting over. Factor in the times too. The avex of 2015 had a lot less shine to it then the avex that created YGEX, and it was only going to get duller⁴. K-pop, meanwhile, was changing too, with the era FAKY took inspiration from closing as another — TWICE, BLACKPINK, Red Velvet, heck throw BTS in there — redefined what the industry was about.

I also think FAKY illustrated a classic trap Japanese music companies fall into. It’s funny to look back on all this from the perspective of today, but for decades trying to make it outside of Japan was an either/or proposition for artists. FAKY and its team took cues from K-pop, but that industry is totally different — I’m not breaking any news in saying the global focus comes from the Korean market being tiny, and moving outwards is necessary. Japan can sustain you, meanwhile, and at least offer a safety net if you do decide to try shipping out. FAKY weren’t the first having to choose to emphasize one or the other⁵…but since they took inspiration from K-pop, it’s safe to say they thought they could follow a K-pop path. Except in the end, they were a product of J-pop, which makes things much harder.

Well, in theory. By 2014 though, J-pop was having bursts of global popularity, and the idea that you had to choose a side was becoming a hoax, at least to those paying attention. FAKY wanted an old-school kind of global popularity, the same that K-pop was striving for (and eventually would get), but artists offering something unique and all their own were succeeding. See BABYMETAL taking off in early 2014 and, perhaps to the surprise of the YouTube commenter above, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu thriving during the first part of the decade. Neither of them targeted specific audiences or overthought how to connect. They just made something interesting, and the world came to them.

FAKY’s influence, though, would become clear nearly a decade later.

Think of FAKY as a prototype for the generation of groups that emerged several years later, taking cues from South Korea and Japan (and beyond) to create units billed as “global groups” but really attempting to balance all sides at once. The obvious evolution to point to is XG, avex’s latest attempt at pulling a FAKY…but one that’s doing well (despite FAKY-ish gaps in the time between releases early on). Yet you can see similar efforts working through projects like ME:I and NiziU. Drop gender barriers and its true of JO1, INI and other J-K-pop hybrids. Everything has been fine-tuned for the social media age, and Korean companies have more of a say, bringing actual industry know-how to these pop attempts.

I’m not sure FAKY were ahead of the curve⁶ as much as they were pushed out way too soon, like those rockets they try to launch before a storm hits but it just slams into a hill. Yet they highlighted a change in strategy that, a decade on, is working primarily in Japan with a little bit of momentum outside of the country⁷. You can’t have success without a bunch of failures, and FAKY was an early J-pop experiment which would, eventually, feel important to the country’s pop landscape.

One more catch though…FAKY didn’t metaphorically crash into a mountain so that XG could one day enter orbit. In what is either true commitment from avex or an example of sunk-cost fallacy that should be taught in schools, FAKY just kept on going, until this summer. Members changed — including Sawai — but they didn’t stop putting out singles and doing small tie-ups and trying to make it happen. The group’s initial mistakes haunted them from a business angle — international listeners were into them, but that only bubbled up in YouTube comments which mean…nothing really? The failure to build a strong domestic base meant FAKY could play shows across Japan, but at smaller venues. When they appeared at a festival like Summer Sonic, they served as a midday opener on the too-hot Beach Stage, far from the spotlight positions.

Given time to just exist, though, FAKY produced a fair share of really good pop. The project constantly tinkered with its sound up until its disbandment in 2024, and to go through its catalog is to be presented with great releases (the 2017 EP Unwrapped) and less than stellar stuff (this is not a ballad group). They have some genuinely clever and ahead-of-the-times ideas too…the project’s return single “Afterglow” (above) dips into DJ Mustard-style trap, and comes with a video exploring…obsessive fandom for pop acts, focused on how it can destroy your life? That was a ridiculous idea for FAKY in 2015…but, well, maybe the world could use more “this is your life on stanning” materials.

It’s inevitable that FAKY is going to become “that thing Anna Sawai was in,” but that’s not fair. Yet it’s also not totally right to reduce them to a history lesson, even if it’s better than being future trivia night fodder. It was a pop group, with great songs, plenty of so-so ones and some stinkers. It lasted about a decade, which is wild, but also means they have a fuller catalog than most. FAKY was part of what J-pop was in the 2010s…and, for me, that includes one transcendent song.

Who am I to argue with the people who give out Emmys, but I’m confident in saying Shogun isn’t the best piece of art Sawai has ever been involved in because “circle” exists. Think of this as avex’s island of misjudged pop toys — FAKY joins once-YouTube-embraced “mannequin pop” duo FEMM and singer Yup'in to become FAMM’IN. How do they introduce themselves? Less a song than a trap meditation inspired heavily by Japanese imperial court music, with the usual lyrical concerns all artists usually fixated on (men not meeting their standards and having fun) swapped out for electronic-kissed sing-speak focusing on…the transience of life as captured through poetic imagery.

It’s the most audacious single a Japanese pop company put out in the 2010s, and is something I’ve never heard replicated since. Not from J-pop, K-pop, American pop…this is a true one of a kind, could have only happened once work. It’s one of my favorite songs of that decade, and remains a spellbinding listen today. “circle” is a piece I want to share with everyone with even a smidgen of interest in Japanese music.

It’s also what I imagine the best-case scenario for FAKY’s legacy could be moving forward. Rather than view it as this curio almost derailing the career of an emerging actor…what if we see it as just another period in that actor’s story to explore? For me it’s “circle,” but perhaps there’s a different FAKY song that grabs someone coming to it from Shogun. Sawai has all right to move ahead from this era…but others could still be charmed by what she did while in this group. They shouldn’t be a footnote of any sort, but rather part of her whole arc, in the past but not lost or relegated to meaninglessness.

Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies

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1. There’s also the important detail…which I do think is noteworthy given where this is all going…that it was avex who helped a pre-FAKY Sawai get her first movie role, in 2009 feature Ninja Assassin. A film, I might add, starring K-pop’s Rain, and one that looks like extreme garbage.

2. Like that W interview comes off to me as her realizing she’s ascended to A-class status and she can swing at avex if she wants to…and she does!

3. Sawai even mentions this during the Awards Chatter podcast, noting how they were meant to not be like the cutesy girl groups of the time.

4. While I don’t think I’d ever push back against someone saying “I don’t want my hypothetical kids to get into J-pop,” I do kind of see Sawai’s situation and think “this seems like an avex problem.”

5. In a series of wild coincidences, another avex group debuting at roughly the same time as FAKY and providing a similar “not like AKB” package faced this dilemma…and chose Japan. That would be E-Girls, perpetually oiled-up male group EXILE’s effort at creating a girl project, leaning into a K-pop-adjacent sound (and at times directly working with producers who made Girls’ Generation songs) and more mature image. That group was a huge success at home, albeit with very little efforts to go further beyond its borders.

6. There is a way-too-long sidebar, though, about how FAKY were trying to do a “neo Y2K” thing like eight years before that became trendy, but ehhhhhh let’s save that.

7. Again though, it is the very J-pop stuff that’s really powering this, and you could still hit a lot of these contemporary groups with a “how global do you really want to be?”