Meet the Jakarta Pop Idols Turning Punks Into Diehard J-Pop Fans

There are few things less punk than J-Pop. If you were to take some kind of magical music-making supercomputer, feed it albums by the likes of the Germs, Black Flag, and Discharge, and then ask it to construct the polar opposite, something resembling a Japanese idol group would probably come out the other end. J-Pop is the definition of commercial music. It's a genre wholly created by corporations with the sole interest of making money through an endlessly diversifiable revenue stream of concerts, album sales, TV licensing deals, and in-person meet-and-greets. Its capacity for turning hits into cash is so great that even licensing deal pros with Vitamin Water deals and headphone companies have to be a bit jealous. And if you want to see this ethos taken to the extreme, look no further than the school girl supergroup AKB48.

AKB48 is an industry unto itself. The girl group, a massive team of some 140 Japanese school girls, began in the famous Otaku neighborhood of Akihabara, an electronics, games, manga, and porno district in Tokyo. The girl group quickly attracted a fanatical fan base—of mostly middle aged men—and spread across Japan and abroad with franchises in cities like Taipei, Shanghai, and Mumbai. But the first international "sister group" is our own JKT48—which began hosting nightly concerts at its own venue in Jakarta's FX mall.

It's a venue Muhammad Omar Azis has been well over 140 times. Azis is a diehard JKT48 fan, a man in his late 20s who collects zines and photos of his favorite JKT48 idol and spends a small fortune on expensive meet-and-greet events, called hand-shaking events, that cost Rp 40,000 ($3 USD) for every ten seconds of conversation. But he's also a member of a smaller subgroup within the JKT48 diehards—the fans who came out of Indonesia's punk scene.

So what's drawing fans of punk, itself a diverse genre that favors a certain do-it-yourself ethos, to one of the most-commercial musics on Earth? Can something be so not punk that it comes back around and ends up punk as fuck? Azis thinks so.

“There’s a similarity of narrative in the punk scene and in JKT48, which is that of an underdog who works their way to success,” Azis explained.

Azis told VICE about a time when the girls of JKT48 were forced to perform without their typical backing track. The idols usually lip-sync at their concerts, so even through Azis had been to dozens of concerts by this point, it was still his first time hearing their real voices. Instead of getting annoyed with paying for a poor performance, Azis felt closer to the girls, like he was sharing a moment that, in its imperfection, was far more intimate and real than what the fans usually saw.

It was at that moment that Azis realized these teenage girls, all of them typically polished performers on stage, were still learning. Sure, they were all still stars, but stars with a lowercase "s."

"I feel connected to JKT48," he told VICE.

Watch: The J-Pop Princesses of Punk

But even this kind of honesty is, in a way, manufactured. AKB48 and its offshoots were created as "idols you can meet." They aren't supposed to be untouchable, unknowable stars, and this lack of barriers—or at least the facade of openness—is part of the reason why so many of their fans are middle aged men with a level of devotion that borders of creepy.

Azis is younger than most, but even he admitted that there is a creepiness to the whole thing. He too has a favorite idol, a teenaged girl named Thalia Elizabeth Ivanka, or Vanka to her fans, but he told VICE that he saw the relationship as more of a big brother-younger sister thing, albeit a totally one-sided one. Azis collects photocopied DIY zines and trading card-style photos of Vanka and attends hand-shaking events whenever he can, paying a few hundred thousand rupiah for a chance to chat face-to-face.

"Physically and emotionally, we can only meet them during handshake events," Azis told me. "And we could only keep up with their lives through social media and their performances."

Idol fans call their favorite girls "oshi," short for "oshimen,"—a portmanteau of oshi, or "support," and menba, or "member." Oshimen culture is more than just having a favorite musician, it's a fanatical sort of fandom, one that demands a near-endless supply of support and money to keep the whole machine going.

But this kind of access can also create its own problems. Sometimes a fan in Indonesia will fork over enough cash to buy up all an idol's entire time at a handshake event. "That way they can just hang out at their idol's booth, but then the other fans that day can't meet her."

And sometimes offering this kind of access has darker consequences. Two members of AKB48 were slashed with a saw at one of their hand-shaking events in Japan's Takizawa City in 2015 by an unemployed man angered over his lack of job offers.

There's also nothing to stop some men from taking their fandom to a possessive level of devotion. There are rules barring all the idols in the greater AKB48 family from having a boyfriend, because it makes them seem less "attainable" to their male fans. When Minami Minegishi, one of the most-popular members of ABK48 was seen leaving a young man's apartment, it set off a scandal in the J-Pop world. Minami eventually shaved her head and offered a tearful apology to her fans in a video posted online. Two other idols in one of AKB48's Japanese sister groups were fired for having boyfriends. And, here in Indonesia, JKT48 idol Ratu Vienny Fitrilya, or Viny, had to apologize to her fans after someone accused her of having a boyfriend.

"Some fans believe that since they have invested so much time and money in their idols, that they’re entitled to tell them what to do with their lives,” Azis told VICE. “For example, when Viny was allegedly found having a boyfriend, a lot of her fans called her names.

"[But later] when Viny apologized to her fans, I was really sad. Partly because I believe she’s innocent, but also because some fans use this incident to call her names. In a way, they’re angry not because she ‘violated’ an agreement but because she’s not dating them. I was planning to say that on my MVP 200. But I’d rather say it here, on the record."

Azis is also an active member of Jakarta's punk scene, singing in the pop-punk act Failing Forward and attending regular shows at DIY spots and dive bars in the capital. For Azis, there's some lessons to be learned in the idol scene. If fans are so eager to spend money that ends up in some massive corporate bank account, why not spend more money on local independent musicians as well?

“JKT48 fans, like any other idol fandom in Korea and Japan, are militant when it comes to spending money to support their idol,” he told VICE. “This makes me feel OK about spending money for the punk scene. If I can support a big corporation, why not my peers in the indie scene?”

But for others, the veneer of saccharine idol J-Pop eventually loses its luster. Try Budi, a former fan of JKT48 (Viny was his oshi), gave up on JKT48 after failing to find anything deeper. Budi is also a fan of extreme metal bands like Darkthrone, Sargeist, and Judas Iscariot, but there was always something about J-Pop that had him hooked. Budi told VICE that he wasn't the kind of JKT48 fan to attend hundreds of concerts at their home theater—the idols were just too manufactured there.

Budi instead went to concerts outside JKT48's home base, looking for a more "real," version of the girls. “If I went to the theater, I could only see one show,” Budi said. “And then that’s it.” But even then, it all seemed too fake to be real life and too amateur to be so fake.

“I’m disappointed, but JKT48 really doesn't even have one original single!” he said.

Budi has since shelved his JKT48 photo packs and images of of J-Pop idols for a newer pop import—Korean Wave. His walls are now adorned with images of Binnie, of Oh My Girl, and Hani, of EXID. In the end, it's the dark side of J-Pop that turned him away.

"The way I see it, Japanese idol groups have this negative side, which is the 'gravure culture,'" Budi said. "K-Pop has none of that."