To HikaruGENJI by Kita Koji (1988) [Preface and introduction]
The following is the preface and first two sections of Kita Koji’s 1988 book 「光GENJIへ」(To HikaruGENJI). Mr. Kita was a member of the idol group Four Leaves from 1968 to 1978. While the book is now mostly remembered in fan lore (if at all) for the passages detailing Mr. Kita’s sexual abuse by the late Johnny’s & Associates president Johnny Kitagawa, To HikaruGENJI was actually a more general warning written to young idols coming up from a former idol who had reached middle age (Mr. Kita was about 40 at this time). Damaged emotionally, yes, but he’d made it.
American readers might think of Corey Feldman, for an idea of the type of celebrity that Mr. Kita was in 1988. He was a former teen star who had had some trouble with the law, trouble with women, and was facing extreme money problems. And, like Corey Feldman, Mr. Kita’s troubled personal life was used as an excuse to discount the charges of abuse in his book in certain corners. Personally, as someone who has amassed a collection of these types of memoirs of former teen stars (I own and have read Coreography (2013), among others) even if I can’t be sure of the literal truth of every word of his narrative, I think the trauma Mr. Kita suffered was very real. It’s also worth mentioning that the late Mr. Kitagawa ultimately lost his libel suit against the publisher of a magazine making similar charges.
To HikaruGENJI quickly became notorious when it was originally published in 1988 and it is credited by some to have directly caused a decline in sales for Johnny’s talents and, perhaps, even indirectly paving the way to the Idol Ice Age of the early 1990s.
Mr. Kita eventually reconciled with the Johnny’s & Associates talent agency and in 2002 Four Leaves reformed and remained active as a four member group until the passing of Aoyama Takashi in 2009. Mr. Kita passed away from liver cancer in 2012.
This was Mr. Kita’s second book after 1975’s 「256ページの絶叫」(The 256 page Scream), a book even more difficult to track down than this one.
This was sourced from my own personal copy of the book and, as always, this is for entertainment purposes and personal use only. I am not a professional translator and do this purely for fun and language practice. Do not republish.
Linked here is a video of vintage Four Leaves performances if you’d like an idea of what they looked like on stage. Truly, Four Leaves are at the root of most male idol performance styles today. They were a remarkable group.
Below is Kita Koji peforming his self-composed song “ただひたすら” (Tadahitasura, “Unwavering determination”) on NHK which should give you an idea of the intensity of the stage performances he describes in his book.
PREFACE
I consider this my second book as an author. It’s a record of a life lived in show business. The era when Four Leaves was gaining popularity as an idol group, then the agonizing days after the group broke up. A record of the cri de’coeur of a single man in the rarified world of show business.
Four Leaves, who had been extremely popular with teenagers, were part of the now-flourishing agency Johnny’s & Associates. Today, Johnny’s & Associates, who houses many extremely popular idols like HikaruGENJI, Shonentai, Otokogumi, Tahara Toshihiko, and Kondo Masahiko, isn’t only influential in show business but has come to hold a massive sway over the mainstream media.
I was loved by Mr. Johnny Kitagawa, representative figure of that Johnny’s & Associates talent agency, and he orchestrated my debut into show business. And now having parted from Johnny’s & Associates talent agency in anger, I am raising my voice. There’s nothing I remember fondly from the Four Leaves era; there were only hardships I endured.
I don’t know when my second coming will appear among the shining idols of Johnny’s & Associates currently in the limelight. Take this as the end result of the “that’s just how it is” behavior within the unique world of Johnny’s & Associates. The secrets of Johnny’s & Associates that were taboo to speak about until now, the things that occurred during the Four Leaves era, the scandals associated with Kita Koji, everything has been written down in this book.
Hopefully you’ll be able to understand through this book how vulgar the world of show business is. Read carefully the story of a single man who came to walk through the wasteland. A chronicle of a former idol beginning to ask questions of society that were forbidden to speak about for half a lifetime.
- Kita Koji
PROLOGUE
HIKARU-GENJI, I SAW THEM!
The Sweet Voices of Girls
The fans of my era were even more hysterical than the fans of today. In our heyday, we were always completely surrounded, with women chasing after us.
The bare chested boys are leaping around on the stage. From the screen on which the boys appear, shrill voices of the girls packing the venue cry out incessantly. I recognize this scene. Long ago, identical scenes spread out before me night after night. Just like the boys known as HikaruGENJI.
Sweat glistening on naked torsos. At every backflip, shrieks and cheers would rise up. The boys, proud of their dancing, continue on. The stadium lights* shine down as they work, bodies dancing, tan and lean.
That’s right. I also stood on that stage, singing and dancing.
This could have been any day, I suppose. Watching tapes of them smothered by the girls’ screams, I’m dragged into my distant past. Just like on those tapes, the screams rained down incessantly on us too. We were also a part of their agency, Johnny’s & Associates.
The fans of my era were even more hysterical than the fans of today. In our heyday, we were always completely surrounded, with women chasing after us. There were even girls who did something close to prostitution in order to earn money for concert tickets. We would take the train in order to do performances outside of Tokyo and when the train arrived at the station, I don’t know how they knew, but throngs of uninvited fans would be packed on the platform and even the train would have to stop. “An idol group won’t last two years.” We had this jeer heaped on us from magazine reporters and show business hangers-on but whether it was good luck or bad, the Four Leaves continued on for a decade.
It’s often said that show business is a world of extreme highs and lows but, in particular, for the performers we call idols, it’s an even more extreme world of highs and lows. For idols who debut as teenagers, the biggest enemy is the passage of time. Even those idols who are riding around in Porches and building themselves mansions** before they even hit 20 years old, cannot stop the passage of time. Money and luck, good or bad, varies by person. Only time comes for us all equally. Idols may think they are special enough to do it but there is no way to bring time to a standstill.
As they get older, even for idols who want the cheers of women to continue to rain down on them, idols will need to manage an image change to a more adult image. It’s a heart-breaking time and there’s no guarantee that an idol will be able to pull it off. There are people who change tracks to become singers or actors, who will try their hand at variety shows, or who end up in pornography. There are people who will cleanly wash their hands of the world of show business and make the change to the world of sex work……*** The awaited ordeal for idols becomes a thick, hard wall. It was so in the past and remains so today.
* カクテル光線 here literally “Cocktail lights” which I was unable to find an exact English equivalent to but refers to a certain type of lighting used for things like night games in baseball.
** 白亜の豪邸 here which literally means “white walled luxury home” which would be an evocative image of Showa era decadence for Mr. Kita’s original readers.
*** In the Japanese, this is 水商売 or the “water trade.” The idiom of “washing your hands of” to quit something is 足を洗う or to “wash the feet” making a fun little bit of evocative word play—washing the feet of show business and diving into the water trade.
Four Leaves Disbands
On the day we disbanded I worked myself to death. I was performing a runthrough of harakiri.*
“You were really top idols for 10 years.”
That’s the praise Four Leaves, the group of which I was leader, received from entertainment journalists when we disbanded.
Showa 53 [1978], the year Four Leaves disbanded, was also the year that Candies disbanded. With both a popular male and female idol group breaking up, the mass media doubled down on the bombastic news coverage.
On August 31, at our curtain closing disbandment concert at Shinjuku Kosei Nenkin Kaikan,** including the standing room only fans, we packed the house with 28oo people.
“I hate the word disband. This is a graduation ceremony!”
We sang and danced as if we were shaking ourselves free of everything from the past ten years. Before we reached this place, we’d been on a nationwide good-bye tour and every tour stop resounded with the fans’ cries of “Don’t quit!”
The high pitched voices of girls constantly surrounded the four of us during the ten years we were Four Leaves. When we appeared on television music shows, we could see that the male singers who were performing with us seemed jealous. Bouquets of flowers, stuffed animals, screams, and applause, that was our normal life, day after day.
Wasn’t the intensity of the cheering over those long months and years, the unceasing applause, a rare achievement in the world of Japanese show business?
I suppose if you look at it from the perspective of an average man, we appeared to be kings of our own fantasyland, always surrounded by cheering women. Certainly, middle school me who had always wanted to be a star, might have become a resident of fantasyland. However, behind the glamorous facade, I was succumbing to a death wish.
So, on the day we disbanded, I was truly working myself to death. During the national good-bye concert tour, I would always perform on a stage sticky with blood. Chanting a sutra, a pure white band of cotton was wrapped around my stomach. Then I pierced my stomach with a knife, performing a runthrough of harakiri.
Holding a string a prayer beads I chanted, “I want to die; I want to sleep.” Right after that song, I scream. “I’ll fulfill a certain promise,” words that implied something.
When the concert was over, when I left the green room, hordes of fan girls packed the area. “Ko-chan!”
I was violently jealous of those screaming girls. The girls were enjoying life to the fullest extent. Looking at them I would sigh and mutter to myself, “Must be nice.”
Word of my eccentricities gradually made its way out to the fans and a rumor spread that Kita Koji was going to die during the final performance.
*Ritual suicide by disembowlment. Mr. Kita uses 割腹自殺 (kappuku jisatsu) but also know as seppuku. I used the more familiar term in English here. It would have only have been a few years since novelist Mishima Yukio shocked the country with his dramatic, public, death by harakiri.
** 新宿厚生年金会館 closed in 2010 and was a well known concert hall.