I'm going to make a thread about what happened with the KAITO naming controversy because I don't think Westerners on…

I'm going to make a thread about what happened with the KAITO naming controversy because I don't think Westerners on my timeline realize it, but it actually had massive implications for both the status of Vocaloid as a whole and idol J-Pop's future (thread will get long)

Here's some context: J-Pop idol Takahashi Kaito recently announced that he would start doing solo activities under the name "KAITO", romaji, all caps. Even from pure SEO viewpoint, a Vocaloid fan can easily see the problem: it overlaps with Vocaloid KAITO and is a search nuisance

That's the superficial problem. The real problem is that this wasn't just any idol, it was a Johnny's* idol. As in, one of the most historically prominent and powerful idol agencies in Japan. *Technically Starto, but Johnny's in practice

Furthermore, an interview revealed that he and the agency were fully aware that Vocaloid's KAITO existed, which essentially meant that they were completely fine with potentially squashing an indie community in terms of recognizability and results just because they could.

This led to a fandom war over the Twitter tags because Japanese Vocaloid fandom is extremely reliant on those tags for finding newcomer works (a la Nico Nico Douga tagging), but -- at least at first -- the idol fans couldn't understand it at all and acted like they had the --

-- exclusive rights to the tag because it was based on Takahashi's real name, and furthermore this was just "some stupid otaku anime character nobody had heard of". So at first, it looked like Vocaloid was unilaterally at a disadvantage as an indie community against a huge label

But then, some very strange victories for the Vocaloid community happened. 1) A KAITO user tried to make a statement of "let's calm down!" by using KAITO to sing a song from the idol's group (King & Prince), which sent a huge wave of shock through the more reasonable --

-- idol fans, because "Wait, he's not some vtuber or something? You can just...buy him? And make your own thing? And all of you will treat it as him? There's no official canon, you can do whatever you want?" And the entire Vocaloid community collectively went "Yes!!!!!!!!"

J-Pop idols are "mainstream" while Vocaloid was "2D otaku", so a lot of people had apparently thought Miku and Teto, etc. were VTubers. Cue Vocaloid fans excitedly getting to teach new people about what Vocaloid is en masse, which hadn't been seen as a necessity since ~2012

So as a result of the renewed discussion about what Vocaloid is in the first place "So I can just...do this?" "Yes! Do it do it do it!" even more people got interested in Vocaloid, some even bought KAITO (or other Vocaloids) themselves, and he even sold out on Amazon.

The fact it was KAITO specifically was favorable because he has the kind of origin story that was built on memes about ice cream and being naked with a scarf (and the MEIKO community is closely tied and backed them up), so "you can do *anything*" got through extremely well

2) The tagging issue never got resolved, but it was found that "a historically significant idol agency automatically has power over a no-name indie community" wasn't actually as true as people thought, specifically because of the overseas community.

In particular, the reason the agency and idol had picked the name "KAITO" was for overseas expansion (a lot of people suspect it was sloppy pattern-matching from K-Pop idols doing this too, since the Korean Wave is currently having massive commercial penetration in Japan)

Here's the problem with that: mainstream J-Pop has had virtually no presence outside of Japan for the last 20+ years because ~~~region locks~~~ so it turned out Vocaloid is more popular than most J-Pop idols in pretty much any country outside Japan.

People in countries like Korea and China are affected by the search issue *and* have no reason to care about Japanese idols (region locks!), so they were *livid* And even worse, when they posted his first new single to YouTube, the song name just so happened to --

-- be the same as a BTS song (of! all! things!!!!!!), so of course it got perceived as a massive search nuisance, and their apparent attempt to enter the "overseas market" was basically dead on arrival.

So, here's what this means about the future. First of all, right now, J-Pop is *finally* starting to think about "expanding overseas", but 20+ years of region locks are now biting them in the rear. It's 20 years of zero clout while everyone else was filling the gaps instead.

Most people outside Japan don't even know what Johnny's is, and if they do look into them they'll hear nothing but the scandals (including the infamous mass grooming one!) with absolutely no attachment to whatever they've done for Japan's culture or economy

Furthermore, Johnny's itself is already being perceived as an outdated and grubby agency even in Japan; they're notoriously touchy about image rights for any of their talents, and eventually (especially after the grooming scandal) people got tired of working with them and are --

-- now turning to tokusatsu for recruitment instead (toku didn't bother with Johnny's for a long time because they need image rights for toy manufacturing, but it's a full year of on-site training experience that can substitute for what used to be Johnny's advantage in training)

Secondly, while the initial assumption was that Vocaloid was too "niche", it turned out to not be the case at all because Vocaloid's cultural impact over the past 20 years cannot be cleanly quantified by "entertainment industry" standards.

A lot of it is subtle in ways like "in the last 20 years, Japanese artists who have become popular are disproportionately ones who were involved with vocalsynth community at some point" You can't count those things, and you also can't really beat the sheer scale of how easily --

-- it was able to spread just by being "freely accessible". I still remember 2009, when even American anime otaku had no idea who this twin-tailed girl was. I saw the spread happen in real time. It happened in so many ways that you can't even mentally grasp it.

So now mainstream Japanese pop is trying to break into the overseas market, and they have to face the fact that "Japanese music fans" are overwhelmingly people whose mindsets are shaped by indie-adjacent music and idol anime (or rather, anime "with idols" like Oshi no Ko) --

-- severely distorted their understanding of the industry. They dropped the ball 20+ years ago, they're coming in late into a market that had 20 years to learn only the worst things about them, and it's only going to be an uphill battle for them from here.

Vocaloid is quite unusual in terms of its global spread partially because Crypton was actually unusually globally conscious for a Japanese company at the time (I don't think people realize this, but I noticed this even in 2009) Its community is also very well-connected globally.

But also, partially because we were just able to listen to the music at all. In the end, I think this is a small victory for the Vocaloid side and potentially the future of indie artists, even if it doesn't look that way at first. Keep fighting 💪

By the way, please don't go after the idol himself or attack any of his agency-related stuff! This is a fairly complicated matter that I don't think most Westerners who aren't deeply familiar with idol culture are equipped to handle (Even I've mostly been "communicating the --

-- perspective of a Westerner" rather than getting involved in the fandom tag war because I just don't really have the right to talk as someone who uses a language originally written in romaji, I don't think any of us should be making the chaos worse than it is already)

(sigh) Okay, it seems like there's *one* more thing I may need to clarify since I'm seeing some talk about it: Among KAITO's most famous older songs, there's a really famous one that goes under the title of "しねばいいのに".

The title is easy to mangle in translation, but it basically means "go ahead and die". If you look at the actual song, it's an extremely benign one about having One Of Those Days where everything sucks and you go like "I want everyone to just die" ("everyone" is in the song)

@jen_banashi I think pretty much everyone reasonable involved realized that the issue was fundamentally about a 2D vs. 3D custom difference, so I'm personally not seeing any path to resolution on that specific issue (hence why I'm also withholding a strong opinion on it)