Struggle as value: Exploring the thematic importance of seishun in Japanese idol music

aidoru (idol) music is Japan’s biggest-selling genre of popular music, as well as an important component of Japan’s multi-platform “media mix” on which popular cultural production and distribution hinges. It is also mostly sung by teenagers, who are prominent popular cultural figures in Japan. But why do these stories of youth, performed by adolescents themselves, have such meaning and ubiquity?

This thesis seeks to understand the thematic importance of seishun (youth, adolescence) in Japanese aidoru music to wider contemporary social identities in Japan. Focusing on the lyrics to aidoru songs, it uses a purposefully constructed lyrical corpus to examine the breadth of themes of seishun in lyrics, and in the accounts of lyricists themselves, treating these themes as discourses woven through the genre’s history and the recent sociocultural history of Japan as a whole. Case studies of significant media texts are used to show transmedia linkages between representations of seishun across time.

I argue that Japanese aidoru lyrics represent seishun as a canonical time of idealised, performed struggle to be one’s purest self, anchored through settings of shared experience, especially Japanese schools. seishun is both the story of contemporary Japan’s national struggle to “grow” into what it is today, and a resource for individuals to justify their own struggles in Japanese society. This thesis complicates interpretations of popular music’s relationship with “youth” as a concept, as well as providing vital context for understanding the prominence of the figure of the teenager in Japanese popular culture.