Songs of Rebellion and Loneliness
I recently watched the documentary Our Lies and Truths about the rise and downfall of the Japanese girl group Keyakizaka46. After all, in recent years Techi and her comrades have been the idols I listened to most. Songs like Silent Majority, Ambivalent, and especially 黒い羊 still play on endless loop for me today, and the accompanying music videos are performative masterworks. Yasushi Akimoto, who has been responsible for acts such as AKB48, Onyanko Club, and Iz*One and also created Keyakizaka46, is not for nothing Japan’s most gifted and at the same time most hated producer. Some people say Yasushi Akimoto destroyed the Japanese music industry, and I agree,
noted Agency for Cultural Affairs Commissioner Shunichi Tokura in cutting words.
The most striking thing about Keyakizaka46, first sister group to Nogizaka46, once slated to debut as Toriizaka46, and already missing two members before its first show, is neither the music nor the choreography, and certainly not the powerful man behind them. It is the force with which their center, Yurina Hirate, seized the group’s inner climate and public face in no time, then year by year slipped toward madness, until, after much back-and-forth, she finally announced her departure in 2020. Soon after, the band renamed itself Sakurazaka46, unable to cope with the hole left by Yurina Techi
Hirate, who had joined at fourteen. The 2020 label-made film Lies and Truths depicts sustained decay – depression, burnout, and total overextension from Techi, and a strange mix of envy, fury, and admiration among her colleagues.
Techi was a prodigy, and no one could handle it – least of all herself. In interviews, former members recall Yurina Hirate’s impact and search for when everything went wrong. No one knows what turned her, hailed as a reborn Momoe Yamaguchi and, at fifteen, among the year’s most attractive idols, from a cheerful girl into someone alone and apathetic in dark corners. Only she does, and she won’t say. Maybe someday, she hinted in a 2020 radio interview. Even in the film she appears in fragments: She dances, sometimes falls, draws gazes, then implodes, sobbing I can’t!
before backstage staff force on a new costume. Keyakizaka46 sang of youth, rebellion, and being different – messages that pierced schoolgirls and traumatized outsiders. What remains is brief brilliance, lingering remnants, and a restless soul seeking happiness elsewhere.