Meddling locals have crushed one man’s dream to create an all-girl idol group based around, of all things, the Fukushima nuclear crisis.
The Japanese pop market is ridiculously competitive. Acts can form, reach the peak of their popularity and fade into irrelevance in a matter of weeks. In a bid to make his new group stand out in the crowd, one businessman from the Chiba prefecture put forward plans for a pop group consisting of girls between 10 and 22, recruited from areas most affected by the radioactive fallout from the Fukushima Daiichi power plant meltdown. He intended to name his collection troupe of glow-in-the-dark performers the “Hot☆Spots.”
No points for taste there.
To be clear, the towns this guy was recruiting from were well outside the 30km exclusion zone around the reactor, but several areas in the prefecture have been labeled “hotspots” due to elevated radiation levels. Naturally, the locals weren’t so keen on a pop-group drawing attention to that fact, and their numerous complaints eventually forced him to scrap the idea.
“I truly wanted to revitalize the area, but I failed to consider the uneasy feelings others had with the plan,” he told the Asahi. “In the end, it was shallow.”
Source: Tokyo Reporter
