This month's
J-Pop Corner will feature the social phenomenon AKB48. AKB was taken
from Akihabara, the district in Tokyo where they perform in their
theater. This group counts 64 members with an age range from early
teens to mid-twenties. AKB48 is your typical J-Pop group, but with a
lot more members than you're used to. A similar group is Morning
Musume.
Producer
Yasushi Akimoto held auditions for his new idol based group in July
2005. Akimoto's plan was to create a girl group that gives occasional
concerts and would perform in their own theater on a daily basis. He
wanted to give fans the feeling that these girls were idols you can
meet every day. Of the 7924 girls that applied, only 45 got through
the first auditions. Once the final 24 were chosen in November, the
girls got an extensive one month training program. The AKB48 theater
had a grand opening on December 1st, but the first
performance was given on December 8. The 20 girls who performed that
first time would later be known as Team A.
A second
audition was announced and 3 months before the formation of Team K, a
new member was added to Team A. The girl's name was Mariko Shinoda.
Before she joined AKB48 she worked at the café on the same floor as
the theater. Shinoda wanted to audition the first time, but her work
schedule wouldn't allow it. She shared the story with the customers
of the café and when hundreds of them wrote to Akimoto he was
surprised. Since this girl had a pre-prepared fan base, Akimoto
allowed Shinoda to join the group in January 2006.
The second
audition was held in cooperation with Japanese telecom company "NTT
DoCoMo". It was the first audition ever where the applicants had to
send in their audition video with their mobile phones. This time
there were 11892 girls who applied but only 19 of them were able to
join AKB48. In the end 17 of them got to join Team K in April 2006.
April 1st was the day Team K also started performing at
the theater.
In February
2006 AKB48's debut single “Sakura no Hanabiratachi” was released.
It got to #10 on the Oricon charts and sold 22011 copies in the first
week. For an indie group that's a surprisingly high ranking.
August 2006
was the time AKB48 signed a major label contract with DefSTAR
Records, a part of Sony Music Entertainment. Their first single under
DefSTAR Records, “Aitakatta”, was released on October 25, 2006
and reached #12 on the Oricon Chart. In October 2006, yet an other
audition was announced. Thirteen new members would form Team B in
December 2006.
On November
3rd & 4th, 2006, AKB48 performed their first concert AKB48 First
Concert "Aitakatta ~Hashira wa Nai ze!~” at Nippon Seinenkan
in Sendagaya, Shinjuku. On January 31st, 2007, AKB48's fourth single
“Seifuku ga Jama wo Suru” was released and reached #7 on the
Oricon charts. Their next single, “Keibetsu Shiteita Aijou”,
featured a theme of bullying and suicide throughout the lyrics and
PV. To promote the singles, AKB48 went on their second concert tour
which began on March 10, 2007.
On New Years
Day 2008, the first studio album was released. The compilation album
included all of the group's singles up until their sixth single. Team
K member Ohori Megumi (now in SDN48) became the first member to have
a solo cover on one of AKB48's CD releases. She appeared exclusively
on the cover of the Limited Edition of the album and the album
secured the #3 spot on the Orcicon charts.
On October
2008, the group signed with KING RECORDS under the “You, Be Cool!”
sublabel, and released their 10th single featuring Jurina Matsui of
the just newly formed SKE48 on the CD cover. From August 22-23, 2009,
AKB48 and SKE48 performed a concert at the Nippon Budokan. At the end
of the concert a new formation of AKB48 was announced, shuffling
members from all teams. Each team was also assigned a captain.
In 2010
AKB48 expanded their official shops outside of Japan beginning with
Hong Kong. They then expanded their locations to Taiwan (April 2011),
Singapore (May 2011) and Shanghai (July 2011).
There are
even more sub units, sister groups, etc. plus girls who started a
solo project, but naming all of them would take up a lot of space...
If you're really interested and have some time to spare, you can
always take up the challenge to research all of them~
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