The Charts Nobody Here Follows But Me

The Japanese charts column is back, one week in, and I’m already aware that the audience for this particular obsession is essentially myself and a small number of people politely indulging it. The gap between episodes means some artists have slid in the rankings since last time without ever appearing here—the kind of continuity problem that only matters if you’re keeping score, and I am, quietly, keeping score.

Atsuko Maeda graduated from AKB48 in 2012 after years as the group’s undisputed center—the face that appeared on every magazine cover, the one the cameras found first during any performance. Her solo career since then has been a more complicated thing: less machinery behind it, more room for actual expression, and an audience still figuring out who she is outside the group. Post-idol careers in Japan tend to reveal whether there was anything underneath the management strategy, and with Maeda there clearly is.

Dempagumi.inc occupy a completely different register—loud, chaotic, aggressively denpa, the kind of idol group that makes no concessions toward a mainstream audience and somehow builds a devoted one anyway. Their performances operate at a frequency that’s either immediately your thing or completely alien, and I’ve been on their side of that divide for a while.

MONGOL800 are something else entirely: a punk trio from Okinawa who’ve been making melodic rock since the late nineties, beloved for an emotional directness that cuts through whatever slicker production surrounds them in any given chart. Their 2001 album What a Wonderful World!! keeps surfacing in Japanese collective memory—thirty seconds of a TV drama, a montage in some YouTube video—the kind of presence a band earns not by staying famous but by becoming part of the furniture.