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INTEREST: Man Charged with Illegally Dumping 585 AKB48 CDs

toxicity that idol culture generates

Nothing brings out the Japan bashers like good old Idol news.

A fan wants his favorite idol to win, so he buys their CD's to increase his voting chances. It is not illegal, it is not morally wrong, or even ethically wrong.

Cry and wail over Japanese Idols if you want too, but don't forget about the 'two by four' in your own eyes also, like Hollywood and the Music Industry.

TarsTarkas wrote:

Cry and wail over Japanese Idols if you want too, but don't forget about the 'two by four' in your own eyes also, like Hollywood and the Music Industry.

No, there is a difference. Hollywood and the American music industry are all kinds of screwed up themselves, but the idol industry is screwed up to a much greater degree.

By most people's morality and ethics, if there's an election of any kind going on, one person gets one vote, and people spending money to have more say than others is not okay.

No, there is a difference. Hollywood and the American music industry are all kinds of screwed up themselves, but the idol industry is screwed up to a much greater degree.

I used to live in Japan, and Japan takes garbage seriously. If you put it where it's not supposed to be, you can get heavily fined, like this guy probably is going to.

Honestly, you can throw away CDs in the trash in Japan. You just have to sort it properly based on your locality's rules, and those rules are not easy. You'd have to put the jewel case in plastic recycling, the paper bits in paper recycling, any staples from the booklet in metal recycling, and the CD itself would go in burnable garbage. Imagine doing that for 500+ CDs. But those things *are* all picked up either at your door or very nearby (apartment buildings, for example, tend to have a central place where all of that building's tenants put the trash) , so it's not like you'd have to go walk up a mountain to dump it.

But that's how things go in Japan. Being an island nation and a large percentage of the land is mountainous on top of that, they don't have room for dumps like the US does. They recycle as much parts as they possibly can out of necessity.

This guy could have saved himself from all that needless effort by offering up those excess CDs up for sale at a recycling center (unless they're hard to come by?).

That practice has to cease for the environment's sake, or better yet offer a disposal and recycling service for the CDs in which said practice can coexist with our environment.

Chrono1000 wrote:

Stories like this though remind me of how the idol industry can be so big in Japan.

Which is to say, not actually as big as sales figures would suggest, if its grossly obsessive fanbase is pulling stunts like this.

I've made this comment of other things, but it's every bit as apt here: these are symptoms of a very sick society.

is it a bad thing that the first thing that I tought was "what else was he supossed to do with them?"

That practice has to cease for the environment's sake, or better yet offer a disposal and recycling service for the CDs in which said practice can coexist with our environment.

Recycling exists, but you'd really look like a fool with hundreds of the same CD.

By most people's morality and ethics, if there's an election of any kind going on, one person gets one vote, and people spending money to have more say than others is not okay.

Sakagami Tomoyo wrote:

By most people's morality and ethics, if there's an election of any kind going on, one person gets one vote, and people spending money to have more say than others is not okay.

Witness American fans of American Idol.......
Taylor Swift started at 16. Selena Gomez and Miley Cyrus both started even younger than that. We haven't had a 50 member group, but we have our own "idol" system over here.

TarsTarkas wrote:

Nothing brings out the Japan bashers like good old Idol news.

Calling out issues surrounding a particular fandom/industry is not the same thing as Japan bashing.

TarsTarkas wrote:

A fan wants his favorite idol to win, so he buys their CD's to increase his voting chances. It is not illegal, it is not morally wrong, or even ethically wrong.

By most people's morality and ethics, if there's an election of any kind going on, one person gets one vote, and people spending money to have more say than others is not okay.

TarsTarkas wrote:

Cry and wail over Japanese Idols if you want too, but don't forget about the 'two by four' in your own eyes also, like Hollywood and the Music Industry.

No, there is a difference. Hollywood and the American music industry are all kinds of screwed up themselves, but the idol industry is screwed up to a much greater degree.

Its funny you actually believe that, while Hollywood is melting down over the Harvey Weinstein scandal. And the list of his victims are ever growing.

If something like the last Hollywood scandal happened in Japan, the consequences would be different.

-The producer would be fired and prosecuted.
-The idol agency would be closed and any people evolved in that agency would never again get a job in the industry.
-All individual idols and idol groups from that agency would be removed from the idol industry because they maybe be not "pure" anymore.

Sakagami Tomoyo wrote:

Calling out issues surrounding a particular fandom/industry is not the same thing as Japan bashing.

It is when you pretend we are better than them.

Sakagami Tomoyo wrote:

By most people's morality and ethics, if there's an election of any kind going on, one person gets one vote, and people spending money to have more say than others is not okay.

It is not that kind of an election. As someone else mentioned, it is more of a promotion.

Sakagami Tomoyo wrote:

No, there is a difference. Hollywood and the American music industry are all kinds of screwed up themselves, but the idol industry is screwed up to a much greater degree.

Its funny you actually believe that, while Hollywood is melting down over the Harvey Weinstein scandal. And the list of his victims are ever growing.

How so? It is extremely common for large numbers of the same product to be recycled or thrown away all at once. It happens all the time in the business world: people end up with overstock of product they cannot sell. Products get produced that ended up being unsalable because of some kind of error. A friend of mine used to work for a company which made marketing products like pens, keychains, bottle openers, etc, that had company logos on them. They would often have a situation where the products were made in the wrong color, or the wrong or crooked logo, a spelling mistake, etc. Those goods were scrapped en masse. Nobody thinks anything of it.

I have little doubt that there's a bunch of Japanese Harvey Weinstein-likes; it's just that the idol industry has managed to keep a tighter lid on it so far. Hollywood at least doesn't have the obsession with purity requiring all their talent to forgo love lives.