Some fans are so obsessed with all things Reiko that they have found ways to access the Web -- not an easy thing for a teenage girl to do in Tokyo. In fact, the degree of obsession required for a Shibuya seventeen year old female to secure the special kind of Internet account needed to access the web in Japan in 1994 might herald an emerging cultural phenomenon: interactive virtual fandom.
Fans who find their way to Reiko's WWW "home page" can hear Reiko's voice and look at photographs of her wardrobe within a setting hand-drawn by Reiko with a digital paint program. Fans can fill out send messages to Reiko, or respond to her questions. Reiko displayed Reiko's Room on a big screen at the auditorium of the Asahi Shinbun, the second largest newspaper in Japan. Forward-looking technology reporters wanted to introduce their old guard to the new media. Asahi Shinbun executives, managers from Dentsu, the largest advertising agency in the world, multimedia aficionados, watched Reiko describe her plan to become a totally electronic, highly profitable, virtual persona. "My fans voted on which outfit I should wear today," Reiko said to a culture-shocked audience of 1000 Japanese info-industry execs.
In Japan, magazines are based on idols, fashion manufacturers follow the idols' wardrobe, retail shops in Harajuku and Shibuya distribute the latest idol trend gear, television and radio kick in with constant electronic reiteration of the idol's persona, creating detailed public personae for millions of adolescent girls -- the economic hamsters in the ever-spinning cage of the media-fashion-entertainment complex. Until now, this has been a top-down phenomenon, fine-tuned by the vending industries -- the "star-making machinery" that originated in Hollywood and was perfected in Tokyo. Reiko is moving to her own orbit, the do-it-yourself realm that has driven the computer revolution since the ARPA days, the PARC days, the early Apple. Check with Reiko next year, and you might find out the way the virtual world is going.
I sense a strange historical inflection emanating from the moment a savvy idol singer figured out that she could live in cyberspace. The medium invented by engineers who are now in their fifties and sixties, developed by programmers now in their thirties and forties, populated by undergraduates and technology jocks in their twenties, is about to undergo another transformation. Here comes a teenage girl from Tokyo who is going to show the world how to create a cult without leaving her room, and make jillions in the process. She'll probably reveal something unexpected about what kind of medium the global multimedia communication network wants to become.
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Here comes a teenage girl from Tokyo who is going to show the world how to create a cult without leaving her room, and make jillions in the process.
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