The AKB48-ification of the American music industry reached its logical conclusion in recent weeks, when Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North Of Richmond” topped the Billboard Hot 100. It did so initially via iTunes digital purchases, a medium largely viewed as outdated in the streaming-first 2020s, which Rolling Stone pointed out days after the very-angry guy made chart history. Yet as they and many others had to acknowledge / grapple with / finally admit, this strategy was nothing new, assisting pop stars around the world to climb up the chart…even if just for a tiny bit before a plunge down.
That’s the power of fandom — passionate, but jamming against and breaking the perceived notion of a ranking like the Billboard Hot 100 being reflective of broader “what’s popular in the country” tastes. AKB48 offered a preview of this global phenomenon long ago. In the mid 2000s, they debuted under the concept of “idols you could meet,” a preposterous idea at a time when pop stars still felt far away from fans — if you met your idol, it was probably through wild circumstances.
Like most pop idols, fans could follow them, watch them mature as performers and support them. Unlike the acts before them, AKB rewarded devotion in new ways, via daily performances a their official theater, goodies available in CD purchases and yearly events where more singles purchased equaled more power in supporting your personal fave. The greater AKB collective also became the best-selling female artist in Japanese history in part due to multiple versions of the same physical release, and fans willing to gobble up multiple copies (sometimes boxes of them) in order to show support. It was a sign of rapid fragmentation in the entertainment industry…but most just brushed it off as “weird Japan” and a country being way behind the times, wrapped up in schoolgirl uniforms (also behind the times).
Today, everything is AKB48. Charts and sales and metrics are dominated by what Luminate refers to as “super fans,” which is a nicer way of saying “wota.” These hardcores buy and stream songs from their faves in excess, whether motivated by a very idol-like feeling of connection to their faves or some kind of ideological brainworm. Artists facilitate this, whether via Taylor Swift releasing multiple “diaries” related to an album or NewJeans putting out 14 different versions of their latest EP. Residencies, whether in hometowns or Las Vegas, offer the ABK48 theater experience in miniature. Your idols are easy to meet online, thanks to social media. It extends to aesthetics too — HYBE and Geffen announced a new reality show (also very AKB) called Dream Academy, with images of assorted teenage girls wearing school uniforms serving as the prominent visual. People used to have online fainting spells about this stuff.
It’s fitting, then, that the peak of AKB’s musical empire celebrated it’s 10th anniversary last week. Yet there’s a twist — that group’s biggest hit is very un-AKB in all elements, and telling of where the global music industry went in other ways.
“Koisuru Fortune Cookie” signaled the high point of the AKB48 empire. Released as a single in late August 2013, it marked the first time Rino Sashihara took the center role falling her triumph in the annual AKB48 election, completing a rebound from a (minor) dating scandal and setting in motion her rise to becoming the project’s most famous performer1. It sold more than a million copies on the day of its release…expected stuff back then from the project, thanks to legions of fans willing to shell out for multiple copies. So far, so familiar…like dozens of other chart-topping AKB hits, it was bound to drop the week after and just become a statistic.
Part of that happened — “Koisuru Fortune Cookie” only held the top spot on the Oricon Singles chart for one week. Yet unlike the “Heart Electrics” and “So Longs!” of the AKB-vesre, “Koisuru” never vanished after that initial chart triumph. It lingered on Oricon for months after its release. It held strong via digital sales…a rarity for a group utilizing handshake tickets and election ballots as a way to spur physical purchases. It became a karaoke staple well after its release, arguably the ultimate sign of staying power. Anecdotally, I heard “Koisuru Fortune Cookie” everywhere in Tokyo in late 2013 / early 2014. I worked as a junior high school teaching assistant, and this single received constant lunchtime PA play…a rarity for any idol group, as the tweens preferred Arashi, Sekai No Owari and One Direction.
Yet there was one space where “Koi Suru Fortune Cookie’s” easy-breezy afternoon disco especially thrived — a space the J-pop industry typically overlooked at the time and was often viewed as one of the places the nation’s entertainment companies were lagging behind on.
Japan…not lagging behind on mascots, ever
“Koisuru Fortune Cookie” signaled the arrival of YouTube as the most important space for music in 2010s Japan…well, at least in retrospect. The song’s virality was connected to a video platform with a user base that “skews towards a tech-savvy male audience in Japan,” as W. David Marx wrote a couple years earlier. Accurate still in 2013 for sure, but as the years have passed and YouTube emerged as the destination for pop discovery and dissemination in the nation, it feels more like this was the first true sign of realities to come. AKB, once again, were on it.
The masterstroke of the song’s rollout came from its central dance — an easy-enough combination of swaying and various hand movements. I will not be as delusional as to give AKB48 credit for being on the frontier of viral dances — pour one out for every office worker forced to do a “Harlem Shake” bit alongside their supervisors months earlier — but I will argue they were ahead of the curve in Japan, and pointed to a truth the often controlling Japanese entertainment industry would eventually embrace with the continued rise of YouTube and now the ubiquity of TikTok. Sometimes, you have to loosen up a little.
What helped “Koisuru Fortune Cookie” stay in the online air and reach a wide set of listeners who might not normally have sought it out was a deluge of videos where assorted people did the dance. This could be taxi company employees2, job-hunting companies, famous cartoon characters, home-shopping-network-like TV hosts, the prefecture of Toyama, and rock artists among so many more. All of these featured on the official AKB48 YouTube channel, though plenty of other entities and individuals would go on to make their own versions3.
Sure, the power of video and easy-to-imitate dance would be the simple “signs of pop to come” signifiers to take from all this, but it goes deeper. The release strategy — drop dozens of videos, in the hopes of one connecting with you — is just AKB48 in digital content form — feature dozens of women, in the hopes one of them connects with you. It was also a sign that it was every bit possible to game online view counts and (eventually) streaming numbers in the style of physical releases, which has become the global norm.
Yet in 2013, when the idea of factoring in YouTube views to a song’s chart ranking was still fledging (and totally unheard of in Japan), none of the cynicism that would become standard in looking at online fandom later in the decade creeps up. People just do this because…they wanted to be part of a goofy dance, whether they were in Thailand or The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Appropriate for a song built to be embraced.
Want to know a person’s true character? Just stare them down and ask “which video better encapsulates what AKB48 was all about — ‘Heavy Rotation,’ or ‘Koisuru Fortune Cookie?’”
These are the two AKB songs bigger than AKB itself, and probably the pair most people can recognize immediately, even if they didn’t follow the idol scene of the early 2010s. Yet despite being their undeniable megahits, each represents a different pole of the outfit…and what a popstar can be. “Heavy Rotation” is all-pistons-firing, light-sticks-blazing idol pop barreling ahead at over 150 BPM. The accompanying clip starts with somebody — us?!?! — peeping on the world of AKB48 through a keyhole. Within we find…a lingerie sleepover? It’s a little secret glance, as the group points towards us to shout “I want you! I need you!” This one’s for the fans.
“Koisuru Fortune Cookie” is the opposite. In a departure for the group, AKB embrace late-afternoon disco sounds4 moving at a groove rather than a gallop, accented by horns and strings — such a departure, in fact, that Sashihara revealed in 2016 that she didn’t like it because it wasn’t idol-y enough. The video plays out in the streets of Fukuoka, steps away from Sashihara’s HKT48 headquarters. Yet this isn’t a closed off door, but a block party open to everyone, with the bulk of the clip finding AKB48’s most star-studded lineup doing their thing alongside…hundreds of people in the street. Members visit various locations and we see a whole mess of folks from all kinds of backgrounds5 dancing to the song. This one’s for everybody.
This is the one moment in AKB’s history where they truly became the most popular musical group in the nation, with no need to dwell on boxes of CDs found discarded on mountains or the sanctity of the Oricon Charts. Everything about it is built to be populist, from the more inviting disco tempo to the dance to the entire video. The secret, to me, though, was the final glimpse of the future found in every element of “Koisuru Fortune Cookie.” It’s…kind of a bummer.
“What's up Japan?! Can you hear me? Is life getting you down? No money, no job, too much bad news? Well there's no reason to be down...it's time to get up!” So goes the intro via a random English-speaking DJ, capturing the generally unenthusiastic air of Japanese life in the early 2010s, with the economy stagnant, politics blah and no shortage of depressive stuff to get your attention6. Yet “Koisuru Fortune Cookie” isn’t pure escapism. I’ll just quote myself from a few years ago:
The lyrics to “Fortune Cookie” unfold at a typical AKB setting -- a school -- and revolves around a familiar topic -- love. But instead of being clogged with dippy metaphors and feeling like a song about being a teenage girl written by a middle-aged man, the language here is more direct. Girl sees boy she likes, but realizes she has no chance with him…and mostly just feels horrible about it. It’s unrequited love made simple and plain. Yet the song carries more than just high-school feelings -- lines like “the future ain’t that bad!” and “not even God knows what will happen next” hint at a more general negativity -- the “that” in the first line especially stings, still acknowledging it will probably suck to some degree -- but AKB ultimately rallies around the idea of not giving into cynicism. “The world is full of love/it makes you forget all the sad things.” Though the edges still let some bad vibes hang around.
I mean…the anxiety of thinking about the future coupled with the determination to not give in to rejecting the world only grows year by year, and both tropes (though especially the prior) become more prevalent in pop year after year. Despite sounding cheery and choosing optimism in the face of everything, I appreciate the “worst day of your life so far” undercurrent throughout. “Life is not so miserable / Amazing miracles may happen” — may happen??? Kind of a prayer there, Akimoto.
But what else are you going to do? “Koisuru Fortune Cookie” reminds me a little bit of “Ue Wo Muite Aruko,” Kyu Sakamoto’s defining 1961 hit about walking forward despite the tears pouring down your face. Thematically, totally different — Sakamoto was sobbing over the futility of student activist movements, not a boy ignoring you in the cafeteria — but really, the central message is the same. Keep trudging along, because that’s all you can do, and there’s beauty in that alone, even if everything goes to hell. Both are artists identifying the tensions of their generations, acknowledging them but also reminding you can’t just stop. The future ain’t that bad!
Well, I mean…maybe it is? Or perhaps that’s just familiar anxieties bubbling up once again, the same ones underpinning this ten-year-old song. Everything is AKB48 in 2023…so I guess it’s right that “Koisuru Fortune Cookie,” their masterpiece, still feels apt a decade on.
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies
Follow the Best of 2023 Spotify Playlist Here!
Most AKB Election wins ever with four, including a three-peat right before she graduated. Idol Jordan.
Wild detail noticed in 2023…at one point, an older drive is grooving alongside a lanky white guy, and the description states that the latter is “a German customer.” Did…did the driver just reach the destination and suddenly ask, “oh hey, I gotta film this viral dance right now, can you help me out?”
Personal favorite find — the one titled '“Fortune Cookie in Love, Detroit!”
A rare moment where AKB aligned with global pop trends — 2013 was a resurgent one for disco, and was the year of Random Access Memories…an album containing zero songs better than “Koisuru Fortune Cookie.”
The wildest thing about watching this video in 2023 is thinking…if this came out today, some Twitter account called “Redpilled Daimyo” or something would point to it as an example of “Western wokeness” poisoning Japan.
It’s worth noting that this comes out two years after 3/11, an event still very much fresh in the country’s mind (and honestly, still is…the Fukushima Radioactive Water Release is just the latest evolution of it!)
A full analysis on AKB48, impressive. Great writing as always Patrick!