AKBaby

By Adam Miller

If you haven’t heard of AKB48 by now, you must be living under a sound-proof rock, with no access to Japanese TV or radio, located 50miles from any sort of cosmopolitan area and possible a few hundred feet underground. I have only two questions for you poor rejected hermit…where is your rock and is there room for a skinny Brit and his beer belly?

There seems to be a …48 band for every part of the country now, Nagoya alone has two (says local J-Pop expert Rangi), but each band has a couple of unifying features, underage girls, school uniforms, annoying songs, provocative dancing and perverted fans. Hate to sound like a stick in the mud and I appreciate that the girls are popular with their peers and very young audiences (which is cool), but they also attract greasy middle-aged men who still live with their mums (which is certainly not cool) and haven’t learnt to wash themselves properly.

The newest line on the AKB front is definitely aimed at those poor bastards with disposable income and smell like disposable toilets…you know “that” guy, who wears a sweater of AKB even in the summer, or sandals at Christmas, takes up three seats on the subway and hums (double-entendre “hums” means stinks back in Blighty). I am of course talking about, AKB-Baby, a quick and easy little program, which tells anyone what their baby would look like if they were “lucky” enough to impregnate any of the legal members from the band.

It is all very simple; you upload a mugshot, choose your victim and the website will generate an image that represents your spawn. You can try each of the band members to see who comes out the best, but they assume that the beauty is coming from the mother’s side and very rarely generate a baby as ugly as the sofa-bound pervert leering over his laptop (says the hypocrite currently sofa-bound punching away at his laptop…punching away at the keys!).

What strikes me as insane is that they take out the best part! Ask any (sane) man if he would like his wife to instantly pop out a baby, without any conception mind, and you would be greeted with a “no” louder than the Android mascot trying to get into a Steve Jobs tribute concert. Even Joseph had 9 months to get ready, you’ll get nothing, except another photo for your stalkers-scrap-book.

If you are one of “those guys” who learns the dance and buys the official underwear (with no girlfriend to give it to), this is obviously a dream come true. Perhaps this is Japan’s version of the Darwin awards, keep the madmen happy with digital pictures of their “baby” and whittle them out of society. It could also be a very shortsighted cure for the aging population:

“Look, 17,655 babies were born in the last hour, all by the same chick!”

More here: www.akb48.ne.jp

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