This article, the first in English to utilize a full range of Japanese sources, looks at the impact of the Ventures. However, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the Ventures, an electric guitar-based instrumental American group who still tour Japan, were in fact more influential than the Beatles in shaping the initial direction of Japanese pop and rock music. of the era seems to confirm this assumption. A superficial look at the so-called Group Sounds" bands. Perhaps for this reason, popular music commentators and historians assume that the group played a major role in changing the popular music culture of Japan in the mid-and late-1960s. The Beatles have a unique status in Japanese popular culture and their music and image can be found in almost every area of commercial life and entertainment. Indeed for most young Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese youth today, the very idea of a popular group who cannot dance or act is at best a quaint one. The songs are presented, not by musical artists, but rather by youth “entertainers” who neither write nor play their own music. A look at the pop charts in Japan-and indeed much of East Asia-shows that “pop music” IS now essentially synthesized dance music executed by dancer-singers. Fifty years on, the dance idol model he created with his first boys group, “The Johnnies” has become not just ubiquitous across the Japanese popular music world, but has made most rival approaches to musical entertainment for those under 25 increasingly irrelevant. a boys teenage pop group whose dance moves rather than vocal or musical talent would be their sales point, his contemporaries must have thought it the delusional notion of an outsider. After all, in April 1962 when, this returnee to Japan first came with up with the idea of forming. On the 50th anniversary of his all-powerful talent agency, “Janizu” or Johnny’s & Associates (J&A), 81-year old Johnny (Hiromu) Kitagawa, the mysterious and reclusive boss of the most successful idol-producing agency in pop music history can afford a smile from his ten million dollar Shibuya mansion. Through a detailed exploration of his early experiences, placed firmly in their historical context, it attempts to give insight into how this complex and controversial returnee to Japan reshaped a major segment of the Japanese entertainment business and arguably much of the East Asian music business now dominated by multi million-selling K-Pop artists. The article goes on to examine his activities following a return to Japan as a U.S embassy employee, focusing on his management of Japan’s first singing-dancing boy bands in the 1960s and 1970s. It was here where in July 1950, he met and acted as a guide for the touring Japanese child star, Hibari Misora, a pivotal moment in his early life. This article explores Kitagawa’s life beginning with his early years as a wartime evacuee in Wakayama and teenage years in the post-war Nisei. The death of Kitagawa, Johnny, the long-time president of Johnny’s & Associates, in July 2019, led to an outpouring of media commentary on the achievements of the enigmatic boss of perhaps the most successful idol-producing agency in pop music history. These groups and highly controlled entertainment structure he put into place in the early 2000s together with his sister Mary, would pave the way for the advent of the world-conquering phenomena that is K-pop in the 2020s. It concludes with some comments on how his comparative failure in the early 1970s and the traumatic loss of his most important solo artist Go Hiromi, helped open up a path to his eventual success in the 1990s with a host of boybands including Hikaru Genji, SMAP, Arashi and many others. It then looks at his first two decades in Japan and his largely unsuccessful effort to penetrate the generationally and culturally polarized and divided Japanese music industry in the years of Group Sounds and folk-influenced rock and "new music," 1967-74. The presentation uses his early years as a wartime evacuee in Wakayama and his teenage years in the post-war Nisei community of Los Angeles as a basis for understanding the trajectory of his career. This presentation uses a largely visual approach to explore Kitagawa’s early efforts to penetrate the Japanese Music industry in the mid-1960s and early 1970s through an ahead-of-its-time boyband-based template. The death of Johnny Kitagawa the long-time president of Johnny’s & Associates, in July 2019, led to an outpouring of media commentary on the achievements of this enigmatic, reclusive closeted gay boss of perhaps the most successful idol-producing agency in pop music history.
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