The Kyote #7: Yukko Syndrome
The News, This Week in Japanese History, & Much More
Happy Orange Day! In Japan, Valentine’s Day is a time for women to give chocolate to men. A month later, on March 14th, is White Day, where men return the favor.
And the 14th of this month is Orange Day, where couples are encouraged to gift each other tangerines and the like. White Day is big business. Orange Day? Not so much. Let’s get on with the newsletter:
The Quiz
A picture question any Japanese person will answer instantly. Can you?
Question: what is she doing?
Answer at the foot of the mail.
The Hashtags
Top trending hashtags on Japanese X/Twitter each day this week:
Monday April 8th: #クラス替え
ENGLISH: “Class reshuffle”
With the first Monday of the new school year comes the annual tradition of students finding out who will be their new classmates. Anecdotes abound, but the best response was this one, where the poster compared their state of lonely befuddlement on class reshuffle day to Japanese PM Kishida at the 2022 G7 summit:
(Kishida has faced criticism from many foreigners who live in Japan this week for inspecting the U.S. military guard at the welcome ceremony on his official visit to the U.S. — a totally inconsequential diplomatic nicety that foreigners — not Japanese people mind you! — portrayed as “bowing to the military who dropped nuclear bombs on your country”.
This outrage-by-proxy just shows how many people have zero idea of what diplomacy is, or international relations.)
Tuesday April 9th: #土砂降り
ENGLISH: “Heavy downpours”
Tokyo and surrounding areas got bullied by rain today. No floods or injuries were reported.
The Kyote lives in Kyoto, in Kansai (western Japan); no tears were shed here.
Wednesday April 10th: #水瀬いのり
ENGLISH: “Inori Minase”
Things that make you feel old:
when every hangover is a hangover of importance;
when constant lumbar-based agony makes you wish you lived in a country that dispenses painkillers by the fistful;
when Internet detectives think they’ve proved voice actress Inori Minase (28) had a sockpuppet X account that routinely trashed her rivals.
The details are juicy! — the investigation searing! — the voice acting world in meltdown!
Thursday April 11th: #サンリオキャラクター大賞
ENGLISH: “Sanrio Character Ranking”
The Kyote can guarantee one reader just lit up like they mashed their private parts into a plug socket during a thunderstorm — because voting just began for the 39th annual Sanrio (Hello Kitty) character popularity rankings!
Rank your favorite 90 (!) cartoon characters, including such luminaries as BONBONRIBBON, Pekkle, Pompompurin, Kirimichan (an anthropomorphized slice of cooked salmon), or the actual best: Gudétama, a perpetually tired, apathetic egg yolk.
The survey is here: https://ranking.sanrio.co.jp/characters/
The Kyote may have voted. We don’t recall.
Friday April 12th: #コナンの映画
ENGLISH: “Conan Movie”
After a long delay to lay the public relations grounds for its release, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer hit Japanese theaters on March 29th this year — and barely exceeded the gross of the 43rd movie in the Doraemon cartoon cat series, then in its 6th week of release.
Anime, in other words, is big business in Japan — and annual installments of popular series are huge. Today the 30th installment in the kid detective Conan franchise (English title: Case Closed) began in theaters, including IMAX screens. The full title is: Detective Conan: The Million-Dollar Pentagram.
(The series has some wonderful titles: see The Fist of Blue Sapphire, Sunflowers of Inferno, Dimensional Sniper, Jolly Roger in the Deep Azure).
Not him, not him, him
Saturday April 13th: #いなば食品のプレスリリース
ENGLISH: “Inaba Foods Press Release”
An honest-to-goodness grade 1 public relations disaster for Inaba Foods, famous for their Churu brand of cat treats, who farted forth the one of the most inept press releases in human history blaming their deceased former vice-president for problems that caused up to 90% of their new intake of employees to quit before even signing their contracts.
As is still customary with some Japanese enterprises, new employees are expected to move into company dorms during their initial working year — except Inaba’s accommodation was on the wrong side of third world, with videos circulating of dripping ceilings, ripped-out air conditioners and spaces where washing machines should be.
So far, so bad, but the real outrage was in the wording of the press release, which got off to a dreadful start with the title “About the Reports of Crappy Housing” (ボロ家報道について), violating the principle of never repeating the allegations you’re facing.
It went on to use more jaw-dropping language while throwing the dead vice-president under the bus and reversing over him, including details of the medical condition he was suffering before his death, and blaming the whole thing on verbal instructions that couldn’t be understood because the guy was on a breathing machine.
It then refers to his passing using the word shibō (死亡) which, in the context of an official press release, is roughly equivalent to saying “he only went and croaked on us”.
Carnaged accommodation wasn’t the only problem the new employees faced though; Yahoo News caught up with an anonymous worker who said that a promised salary of ¥226,000/month actually turned out to be ¥196,450.
For reference, at current exchange rates that means that a major Japanese company is offering college graduates an annual salary of $17,000 a year, then reduced it to $15,000.
Tattoo this behind your eyelids, readers: Japan is now a poor country.
More at Yahoo News here (Japanese)
Today, Sunday April 14th: #第三次世界大戦
ENGLISH: “World War III”
Iran attacks Israel, giving their greatest enemy a gigantic boost of sympathy just when they were facing sustained pressure over their conduct in Gaza.
X is not good, generally, at discussing of this kind of thing; let’s move on.
The History
This week in Japanese history the following event occurred…
Yukko Syndrome
Yukiko Okada, aged 14, already on the child star circuit. Image: Fujishima, Wikipedia
The tradition of women becoming full-time homemakers after marriage has persisted longer in Japan and South Korea than in most other countries — and until relatively recently, even major stars of stage and screen were expected to do the same.
It was Momoe Yamaguchi who ruled the 1970s, a decade in which produced 22 bestselling albums, untold singles and 15 movies, most co-starring future husband Tomokazu Miura, after which, in 1980, they tied the knot. She has never performed or made a single public appearance since, although there is still a market in 2024 for paparazzi shots of her walking her dog in the local park or pottering to the shops.
The new decade, then, was ripe for someone to take over Momoe’s crown, and the person who did so was Seiko Matsuda, variously described as the Madonna / Barbara Streisand / Whitney Houston / Cher of Japan.
In terms of infiltration of the popular imagination plus star power plus relentlessly-documented love life, she was probably the measure of the four of them combined.
The first half of the 1980s was mainly about her music — the songs, the styles, the vocal evolutions, the mammoth tours. 1985 was all about the marriage.
January began with a break-up with singer Hiromi Go, announced at a press conference where Matsuda revealed Go’s parting words, which became one of the quotes of the year: if we were born again, we’d definitely be together (生まれ変わったら絶対一緒に).
Within a month she was engaged to actor Masaki Kanda, 11 years her senior. A career hiatus that most expected would turn permanent followed, along with a legendary wedding reception in June at the Hotel New Otani in Tokyo, which was broadcast live and managed a 34.9% primetime rating.
Thus, in what was literally described as a “Post-Seiko” world, it was again time to find a new entertainment idol to soak up the public’s attention.
Enter Yukiko Okada, arriving on the scene via a nationwide TV audition in 1983 at fifteen years old.
Yukiko Okada, filmed in Switzerland for a video special
Over the next 3 years, Okada (nicknamed Yukko) released 8 singles — one of which hit #1 and was co-written by the semi-retired Seiko Matsuda herself along with Ryuichi Sakamoto — 4 albums, won the 26th Japan Record Awards Best New Artist Award, and starred in her first television drama.
Then, at 18, she committed suicide by jumping from the roof of her record company.
* * *
It’s a fairly obvious point to make, but child stars of any flavor come with a menu of anxieties installed at the factory.
Chief amongst them is a desire for attention — something we’re all prone to to some extent — which, crucially, has been indulged, but only when conforming to the demands of strangers several decades older than you.
In other words, just do good making money for the adults now and you’ll have all the attention you crave.
But making money for the adults requires constant mental vigilance to make sure you’re not queering the hustle by, say, publicly exhibiting natural human emotions.
And this pressure is the root of all the other, subordinate anxieties: your eating disorders, your body dysmorphia, the whole forest of different possible addictions.
That’s why the kryptonite of the record company executive in charge of teen idols is love. Love — the focusing of the idol’s attention to something other than eternal emotional vigilance — is guaranteed to queer the hustle.
* * *
The song Okada performed at her first audition was named MY BOYFRIEND. After signing for Sun Records, her first three singles were First Date, Little Princess, and Dreaming Girl-Love. She shot a video special in Switzerland, which was edited down to make the video for Fickle Teenage Love (気まぐれ Teenage Love).
At 18 years old, at her own insistence, Okada moved out of the house of Sun Record’s CEO into her own apartment. She was living alone for the first time in her life, in Tokyo, far from her parents’ city of Nagoya.
And someone had caught her eye — a co-star in the television drama The Forbidden Mariko (禁じられたマリコ) named Tōru Minegishi, vastly older, a totally inappropriate choice of possible partner, which in Japanese entertainment history usually means they were destined to get married.
It isn’t clear that happened next. Minegishi said he considered Okada a younger sister, as he should have done. Okada thought she was in love with him. Maybe she confessed her love to him; in Japan this is a whole codified process called kokuhaku (告白), which you’ll spot high schoolers performing in your local parks at night.
Essentially, you set a time, pick a public place, gird up your courage and blurt out your feelings then hope for the best. If the other party gives an okay, that’s it, you’re dating and in love. If they say no, God, don’t think about the possibility — you’ve probably told everyone you know that you’ve got the kokuhaku primed and can’t face the humiliation.
However it went down, what we know is this:
On April 8, 1986, residents of the building where Okada lived smelled gas and called the landlord. Breaking into her apartment, they found her with wrists slit and the gas lines opened. She was conscious, and was taken to hospital.
Now we are forced to rely on the later testimony of the executive at Sun Records in charge of Okada’s career. He got a call from his CEO, telling him the news. He hurried to the hospital, where doctors made the blasé call to discharge her immediately. He asked where she wanted to go — back to her apartment, to her parents’ house in Nagoya, or the record company HQ in Yotsuya, Tokyo.
She chose the record company.
He left her in a room at Sun Records while he went to confer with the CEO — NB: probably about how to keep the suicide attempt out of the media — and in the interval Okada went upstairs, took off the hospital slippers she was still wearing, then, leaving them on the staircase, she stepped out onto the roof and leaped to the sidewalk 7 floors below.
End of the executive’s testimony. Back to us:
Death was instantaneous.
We know because reporters, following up on rumors about the initial suicide attempt, witnessed the death leap — then took pictures. Weekly tabloid rags put them on the cover — although, scaling the very heights of tact, they only published in black & white.
(For $65 you can go to Amazon Japan right now and buy a copy of the April 27th 1986 edition of Weekly Yomiuri with Okada’s demolished body on the cover).
The street was cordoned off. Fans started to gather; the body removed and sidewalk hosed of brains. Mourners heaped flowers, fruit, soft drinks, cosmetics, posters, records, letters, and other mementoes head-high. On the 7th day after death a priest blessed the offerings then they were collected in 60 cardboard boxes, taken to the local shrine and burned.
Then the copycat suicides began.
* * *
On the 15th April the first report came in: a girl leapt to her death in Kobe.
This was soon followed by others, including in Suginami and Morioka.
All girls, all around Okada’s age, all from rooftops.
This was followed by more, a half-dozen or so.
The media quickly dubbed the phenomenon Yukko Syndrome, after Okada’s nickname.
Then came the ultimate, the genius of copycats: Masahiro Majima (21) who, with pictures of Okada in his pocket, scaled a neighboring building, then made it to the same rooftop she had jumped from, and copied her suicide.
He landed on the spot where a temporary altar to Okada had stood only days before.
* * *
High-profile suicides in Japan are usually an excuse for people to wheelbarrow out their own pet theories about the “true essence of the Japanese”, and Okada’s death was no exception. Tolerant Buddhist attitudes toward death were cited, and a concurrent lack of Christian taboos about suicide. This theory tend to coexist, strangely, with a canard that Japanese people are tattooed and pierced less than Westerners because they view their bodies as a sacred gift to them from their parents.
But the copycats all had decent enough reasons of their own. The Kobe jumper had quit school in March that year (compulsory education ends with middle school), had no job lined up and few friends.
Masahiro Majima, who went off the Sun Records roof, had wanted to become a doctor his parents, but had failed the entrance exams for medical school. He was unemployed and lived alone.
* * *
In 1995 a book titled “The Complete Manual of Suicide” was released, with the following encouraging blurb:
世紀末を生きる僕たちが最後に頼れるのは、生命保険会社でも、破綻している年金制度でもない。その気になればいつでも死ねるという安心感だ。
“As the century comes to a close, our final recourse is not to a life insurance company or bankrupt pension system, but the security of knowing we can end it all whenever we want.”
Amid a moral panic and talk of a publication ban, the Manual sold a million copies, a very decent ration in a population of 124m.
Those one million readers did not, obviously, end up killing themselves. Lots of copies of the Bible are sold in America. You’ll observe that not everyone follows the Ten Commandments.
(The writer behind the manual, Wataru Tsurumi, is inevitably now posting on X. Here’s a tease of a few of his other works: Personality Modification Manual, Drop Half Your Relationships and Apathy Manufacturing Factory, a lineup that makes you yearn for Dan Brown’s latest, or even better, illiteracy)
Are there occasional outbreaks of suicides, in many cultures? Yes.
Are they sometimes precipitated by the death of a famous person? Yes
Does the profile of the person involved matter? Yes.
Is it a uniquely Japanese phenomenon? No.
Does it require a society to examine itself? Only in print, for cash.
Most people are just trying to get through the day, and suicide by ennui — rather than crushing debt, grinding tragedy or addiction that has left you a busted fuck living in a hovel — is a young person’s thing.
* * *
The Japanese entertainment industry consists of regiments of underpaid, exploited young people hoping to be stars, and middle-aged men intensely interested in maintaining their charges’ virginities.
There are various names for this: exploitative, creepy, sick, immoral.
The actual name for that is this is co-dependency.
Inevitably the child star-handler complains bitterly in private: “you wouldn’t believe what I have to put up with”, “I’m telling you — she is out of control”, and other bullshit they tell themselves to justify their own existence.
Nothing will change until either the exploitation becomes so pornographic that fans turn against the record companies en masse, or young people stop dreaming of being the next big idol.
* * *
Yukiko Okada’s ashes are interred at Jomanji Temple in Aichi Prefecture. Tributes are still left there today, despite the messages asking mourners to take them home.
The gravemarker. It reads “If I could take time off, I’d like to paint a picture… on a canvas of the bright white Swiss mountains I saw when filming my first video… I wanted to be an artist when I was young…”
(The older man Yukiko considered herself in love with, Tōru Minegishi, had a career as a middling actor, including an appearance is the berserk violent fantasy Fudoh: The New Generation, the film which made director Miike Takashi a cult figure and caught the notice of Quentin Tarantino).
Link: Momoe Yamaguchi sings Rock n Roll Widow (4K AI upscanned)
Link: William Wetherall on the aftermath of Yukiko Okada’s suicide
The Answer
Question: what is she doing?
Answer: taping up her eyelids
Why? Beauty standards innit. Many Japanese people have single-fold eyelids. Some want double-folds. Special tape is available to achieve temporary results; surgery is available for people looking for something more permanent.
Until next week,
The Kyote
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The Kyote published every Sunday from Kyoto, Japan at 19:00 JST
“Queer the hustle” 😆 you good