Sometimes you discover an idol group almost by accident.
The members are young. Their songs are bright, earnest, full of the language that belongs naturally to youth: dreams, first love, tomorrow, friendship, the uncertain distance between who you are and who you hope to become.
And sometimes a song that appears simple at first reaches somewhere unexpectedly deep.
You listen again.
You learn the members' faces. You notice how differently each of them performs. Someone who once seemed nervous becomes more confident. A voice grows stronger. A smile becomes easier. A group that was initially unfamiliar begins to occupy a small but recognizable place in your life.
Then another thought enters the music.
None of this will remain exactly as it is.
The members will grow older.
Their voices will change.
Someone will graduate.
The group itself may someday exist only in photographs and recordings.
Strangely, the realization does not necessarily make the music less joyful.
It can make it more beautiful.
A Name for the Feeling
Japanese aesthetics has an old expression for something close to this feeling: mono no aware — もののあはれ.
It is sometimes translated into English as “the pathos of things,” although that translation can make it sound gloomier than it needs to be.
Mono no aware is not simply sadness about things ending.
It is a sensitivity to the fact that things pass—and to the peculiar tenderness that arises because they do.
A blossom is not beautiful despite the fact that it will fall.
Its briefness is part of the experience of seeing it.
An evening becomes precious partly because evening cannot be kept.
A season returns, but never with exactly the same people, the same circumstances, or the same self who experienced it last year.
Idol culture was not created as an illustration of mono no aware, and it would be too easy to explain everything Japanese through an old aesthetic vocabulary.
Yet the emotional structures can resemble one another remarkably closely.
Idol culture is filled with beginnings, seasons, growth, graduations and memories.
It asks us, again and again, to care about something while it is changing.
Watching Someone Become
One of the most distinctive pleasures of idol culture is that the audience often encounters a performer before everything is finished.
That is not necessarily a defect.
It may be part of the point.
A young performer learns how to inhabit a stage. She becomes more comfortable speaking to an audience. Her dancing becomes more assured. She discovers what kind of expression suits her. Something that looked difficult six months ago becomes effortless.
The audience does not simply encounter the finished result.
It witnesses becoming.
This is different from the ideal of the distant star who appears fully formed before the public. Idol culture can make the process itself visible.
An early performance may therefore acquire a strange value years later.
Perhaps it was not technically perfect. Perhaps somebody looked nervous. Perhaps the venue was tiny.
But you know what came afterward.
The awkwardness becomes evidence of distance travelled.
We normally think of improvement as replacing what came before. Yet memory works differently. Once someone has grown, the earlier self is not erased. It becomes part of the meaning of the person she became.
To remember the beginning is to understand the growth.
Youth Is a Season
This is especially affecting when the performers themselves are young.
Youth has a peculiar visibility in idol culture because it is not only an age. It appears as movement.
Someone is still discovering what she can do.
There are first performances, first costumes, first trips, first large stages, birthdays, school years and moments when the future seems almost impossibly large.
None of them can remain firsts forever.
But appreciating youth does not require wishing that somebody remain young.
Quite the opposite.
If we genuinely care about a young performer, we want her life to continue opening outward. We want her to learn things, acquire confidence, discover new ambitions and eventually choose a future that belongs to her.
And yet we can know, at the same time, that we will miss the person she is now.
There is no contradiction in this.
Perhaps one of the gentlest forms of affection is the ability to say:
I will miss this version of you, and I am glad that you will not have to remain her forever.
To value a season is not to demand that the season never change.
The cherry trees would not be more beautiful if spring lasted eternally.
Youth deserves the same generosity.
Graduation Gives Time a Shape
Idol culture has even created a ritual for this movement through time: graduation.
The word is unusually appropriate.
A graduation is an ending, but it is an ending produced by growth.
Something has been completed precisely because somebody is ready to move beyond it.
For fans, this can hurt.
A familiar lineup will never stand onstage in quite the same way again. An account that once filled the present tense slowly becomes an archive. The announcement that seemed impossible eventually becomes a date, and then the date becomes yesterday.
But graduation does not tell us that everything before it was meaningless because it ended.
It can reveal the opposite.
An ending gives the preceding time a shape.
Before the ending, there were simply days.
Afterward, we can suddenly see that those days formed a period of life.
The last performance therefore contains an emotion that is difficult to reduce to either happiness or sadness.
People celebrate.
People cry.
Someone says thank you.
Someone says good luck.
Nobody has misunderstood the occasion.
Joy and loss are simply occupying the same room.
This, too, feels close to mono no aware: not despair at the passage of time, but tenderness toward what time has allowed us to experience.
The Seasons Return; the Moment Does Not
Japanese idol culture is remarkably seasonal.
Cherry blossoms.
Hydrangeas in the rainy season.
Summer skies and yukata.
Beaches and festivals.
Autumn leaves.
Winter illumination.
New Year's greetings.
These images can look decorative, but their repetition creates a quiet calendar around a performer's life.
A photograph beside hydrangeas tells us more than where somebody was standing.
It says: this June.
A yukata photograph says: this summer.
And if a similar photograph appears the following year, something curious happens.
The flowers may have returned.
The person has changed.
So have we.
Photography seems to resist impermanence because it preserves an instant. Yet every photograph also reminds us that the instant had to end in order to become a photograph we look back upon.
In that sense, photography has an unusually intimate relationship with mono no aware.
It says two things simultaneously:
This happened.
And:
This is no longer happening.
Perhaps that is why photographs become so important in idol culture.
They do not stop time.
They give us something through which to remember that we once stood inside it.
A Song That Does Not Grow Older
Music produces an even stranger relationship with time.
People grow older.
Recordings do not.
A song recorded by a sixteen-year-old performer still contains that sixteen-year-old voice years later.
The person who sang it may have changed completely. She may have graduated, begun another career, developed a different voice, or simply become an adult with a life that no longer resembles the world in which the recording was made.
The song remains where it was.
This creates a beautiful asymmetry.
The singer moves through time. The song waits.
Years later, you press Play.
Nobody literally becomes young again.
The past has not returned.
Perhaps memory does something more interesting than that.
It allows a past moment to become meaningful again from the perspective of the person you are now.
You hear the same melody, but you are no longer the same listener.
What once sounded simply cheerful may now sound tender.
A line about tomorrow can acquire another meaning after tomorrow has already happened.
A song that belonged to the present becomes a container for memory.
And sometimes three minutes of music can hold an entire period of life.
What Time Leaves Behind
There is another Japanese aesthetic idea nearby, though I would not confuse it with mono no aware.
Wabi-sabi — 侘び寂び — is often associated with simplicity, incompleteness, irregularity, age, and the beauty of things that bear traces of time.
It can illuminate another part of idol culture.
An old cheki whose colors are no longer quite new.
A folded flyer kept in a drawer.
A small venue with imperfect lighting.
An inexpensive early costume remembered more fondly than something elaborate that came later.
A performance in which a voice trembled slightly.
These things may acquire value precisely because they have not been polished into abstraction.
They contain evidence that real people were there.
Wabi-sabi does not mean that every imperfection is automatically beautiful. But it raises a useful question: must everything valuable be flawless?
Idol culture frequently answers no.
Sometimes effort is moving because effort can be seen.
Sometimes an imperfect early performance becomes precious because we remember what the performer later learned to do.
Sometimes an old photograph becomes more beautiful because time has begun to touch the object as well as the memory.
The distinction between the two aesthetics is useful.
Mono no aware helps explain why you miss the moment.
Wabi-sabi can help explain why you treasure the imperfect thing the moment left behind.
To Have Been There
The group I once discovered is no longer what it was.
The members have graduated.
Years have passed.
Their lives have continued, as they should.
But I still remember them dearly.
I suspect I always will.
There is something reassuring in realizing that an experience does not have to continue indefinitely in order to remain important.
We often speak as though permanence were the highest proof of value.
A friendship must last forever.
A group must continue.
A place must remain open.
A beautiful moment must somehow be preserved.
But human life does not usually work that way.
Some of the experiences that shape us most profoundly occupy only a few years, a season, an afternoon, sometimes only the duration of a song.
Their ending does not revoke them.
The members of an idol group do not need to remain young for the youth they shared with an audience to have been real.
A graduation does not erase the concerts that came before it.
A group ending does not silence the songs already sung.
And memory does not have to defeat time in order to be meaningful.
Perhaps it only has to carry something forward.
While the Song Is Still Playing
There is a temptation, when we become conscious of impermanence, to become melancholy too quickly.
But mono no aware contains another possibility.
Awareness that something will end can teach us to notice it more carefully while it is here.
Say good morning.
Go to the performance.
Take the photograph.
Listen when someone is still learning how to sing the song.
Notice the nervousness before confidence replaces it.
Celebrate the birthday that will only happen once.
Say thank you before gratitude has to become memory.
This is not an argument for clinging to the present.
It is almost the opposite.
To cherish something is not necessarily to ask it to stay.
Sometimes it is to give it our attention while it is here, to wish it well when it changes, and to remain grateful afterward.
That may be one of the quiet beauties of idol culture.
It makes visible something that is true of everyone.
We are all becoming someone else while other people are learning to love who we are now.
Youth passes.
Groups change.
The stage goes dark.
The song ends.
And sometimes, years later, its melody is still somewhere inside us—no longer asking us to return to the past, but gently reminding us that we were fortunate enough to have been there.
The song does not ask us to stop time.
It asks us to listen while time is passing.