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This post is a follow up to yesterday’s post, and it was triggered by a comment Irea posted in which she raised the issue of authenticity, not only in the case of Ryutaro‘s dream but in generally everything the Jimusho is offering us. I thought about that a lot, and it left me more or less sleepless last night (thanks, Irea! *shakes fist*), so I decided to make a blog post about the whole issue today.

First, Ryutaro’s dream. He dreamed he was green tea in a bottle. I have to admit that I have a hard time imagining what it would be like or how it would feel to turn into an object, even in a dream. I’ve had many strange dreams in my life, dreams in which I could fly or had other amazing abilities, but in all my dreams I have always been a living being. In most cases I was a human I guess, but I cannot rule out the possibility that in some of my dreams I have been an animal without even realizing it. But I have never been an object or a liquid or something like that, and it’s almost impossible for me to imagine what such a dream would feel like. However, just because I’ve never been an object in one of my dreams it doesn’t mean that neither have other people, although I have never heard of such a dream before until now, and even googling for half an hour didn’t produce any feasible results. But as I said, just because I haven’t heard of it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. What struck me as odd though is that in that same Shonen Club segment Daiki reported that in one of his dreams he turned into a steamed bun. Hm. I have never had any dreams related to objectomorphosis, and I can’t find any evidence of people who have, yet within Hey!Say!JUMP there’s two people who turned into objects in their dreams. What are the odds?

So where does that leave us in respect of the realness of ジャニーズ Well, first of all we have to understand that it’s entertainment, and that, by definition, entertainment should be entertaining. Reality very often is entertaining. Very often, however, it is not, and that’s why in the entertainment industry many things are scripted. Does that bother me? Should it even bother me? Yes and no.

Yes, it bothers me because scripting kills spontaneity. Spontaneity is one of the biggest assets teenage boys have, and if you think your script writers can do better than that then you will also need boys that are such awesome actors that they can deliver scripted lines as if they’re their own and make them look spontaneous. But that is certainly not always the case. In one of her comments Irea wrote “… JE doesn’t rely on the boys spontaneity. I think that’s what ruined the Ya-Ya-yah show: the fact that TV Tokyo didn’t rely enough in Ya-Ya-yah’s capacity of being the true protagonists of their show“, and I tend to agree with her.

On the other hand, no, it doesn’t bother me because I know what I’m getting into when I turn on the TV. It’s entertainment. It’s an industry. It’s not real, and it isn’t even supposed to be. There’s one thing about television that far too few people seem to realize. It’s not real. At least 98% of it isn’t, and the rest is the evening news (even though that also is fabricated more often than it should be, but that’s an entirely different story). Films, TV dramas and sitcoms are all made up, I don’t need to tell you that. But talkshows and so-called reality shows are also not a reflection of reality. They’re all scripted. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as becomes evident these days during the Hollywood writers’ strike. Both Jay Leno and Jon Stewart are extremely gifted, funny, spontaneous and entertaining characters, but look at their unscripted shows during the strike. They’re lightyears away from their usual quality, which goes to show that scripted shows can indeed feel natural and spontaneous, if you got the right people delivering the right lines. Leno and Stewart are professionals that can pull it off. 12- to 18-year old boys, no matter how talented they may be, are not. They’re kids, and by definition their job is to learn and nothing else.

Johnny’s Jr. is, in a way, a neverending version of American Japanese Idol, with constantly ongoing auditions and, as sad as it may be, people constantly being voted off. Johnny’s Jr. is all about learning. Shonen Club may seem like a finished product. It is not. Shonen Club is the making-of of whoever will debut next. At least that’s how it was up until last year. The arrival of Hey!Say!JUMP changed the whole system. Up until 2007 debuting also meant graduation from Shonen Club and from the Juniors. Hey!Say!JUMP however are still appearing on Shonen Club, and they still have all the Juniors around them, even when they play their own concerts. And that’s good because even though technically they’re now seniors, they still have so many things to learn. One of these things is how to deliver scripted lines in a spontaneous natural way (although they’re already quite good at it. The longer I think about it the more I’m willing to believe that Ryutaro‘s green tea dream was indeed scripted, but not because of the way it was presented but because it was poorly scripted. Not even Jay Leno can make a lame joke funny.)

But hey, all work and no play makes Ryutaro a dull boy. And all the others too. They’re kids. They need to play and they need to be themselves. I love Shonen Club, but I usually only watch it once or twice, then I burn it off on DVD and wait for the next one. The making-of DVDs of Hey!Say! and Ultra Music Power, however, I have watched dozens of times and I’ll watch them dozens of times again, because it’s about as close as we’ll ever get to the realness of these boys. The way they fool around on the set in between shoots, you can’t script that. I’m dying to get a HSJ DVD, not because of the performances on stage but because of the behind-the-scenes footage.

Again, these are kids, not professionals. And as much as I’m willing to watch them practice and become better at being professional performers, what I really want to see is them being themselves. And that’s why I think Hey!Say!JUMP need their own TV show, a show like Ya-Ya-yah used to have (and I mean Ya-Ya-yah in 2003, not Ya-Ya-yah in 2007). A show where they can fool around and play games and just have fun. And I think maybe, just maybe, we can have such a show very soon.

Johnny’s contracts with TV Tokyo run on a yearly basis, from April to April. That’s why in the past we have seen makeovers of the show always happening in April. I don’t think anyone in TV Tokyo is happy with the way Hi!Hey!Say! is doing. I don’t think Johnny is happy with it either. From April this year Hi!Hey!Say! will be a completely different show. The only thing left will be the title because I’m sure Johnny thinks it’s ingenious, but the show will be all new, and if they have learned anything from their past mistakes they will put more kids on the show and let them do more fun stuff, fun stuff that hopefully will be no more scripted than the 2003 Ya-Ya-yah shows were.

So, to answer the question in the headline, how real is Johnny’s, I think behind the scenes Johnny’s is very real. On stage very often it’s not, so as long as these kids aren’t perfect at faking a reality that doesn’t exist (which I don’t expect them to be at that age), they should at least to a certain extent be allowed to be spontaneous and portray a form of reality that does exist, which is boys being boys. Funny, silly, ludicrous and puerile.

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