By Anna Novick
Candy and food company Glico is taking no chances.
To boost sales of its new ice cream, the Osaka company better known for its chocolate Pocky sticks has hired the most popular stars in Japan’s inescapable pop sensation, AKB48, to star in TV commercials. With a just-released No. 1 album, TV appearances left right and center and perhaps its best-known face, Atsuko Maeda, set to star in a summer blockbuster movie, it seems a no-brainer that the bite-size fruit ice cream will go down more easily than its name — “Ezaki Guriko Hitokuchi Saizu Aisu no Mi.”
But just to be sure, Glico has gone a step further. Fans of the all-girl-next-door AKB48 – often middle-aged salaryman – reveled in a TV ad that debuted this month featuring not just the best known of the 48-and-counting band members. Out of nowhere, it also introduced a brand new star: A perfectly charming 16-year-old named Aimi Eguchi, who gets the closing frame all to herself.
The catch? She may only exist in computer-generated adland.
In the seamless, always-on-display world of AKB48, hardcore fans – many of them salarymen considerably older than the band members — immediately took to fan forums to demand who exactly this new band member might be? How could she appear in the band’s elite from out of nowhere, without working her way up the band’s well-documented ladder to the top?
And another thing: fully paid up band members let slip in blogs that Ms. Eguchi appeared on TV even before she was formally introduced to the AKB family: On the day following Eguchi’s debut, Ayaka Kikuchi, another AKB member, wrote gleefully about finally getting to see the “intriguing” new girl on television that morning.
While AKB48 management says Ms. Eguchi is “real,” eagle-eyed fans think instead she is a computer-generated composite of other members.
The clues? Her name: Every letter of Aimi Eguchi can be spelled out with a little shuffling of the ice cream’s name (in Japanese). Her favorite sport, as listed in promo materials accompanying the ad: track and field, as practised by the athlete depicted in Glico’s famous corporate logo, a man running into a finishing tape. Her birthday: February 11th, the same date Glico was founded in Osaka in 1922.
Want more? Her self-proclaimed goal is “to become a new idol like never before by taking the best parts of my AKB big sisters,” as posted on Glico’s website (in Japanese).
Prime-time TV shows have gone to town on the conspiracy theory in the meantime, deconstructing the ad and super-imposing facial features of other AKB48 members into a composite that looks, well, suspiciously fake.
Glico’s publicity agent says it’s had far more viewer inquiries than they usually expect for a plain old TV ad. But Glico says it won’t disclose more information about Eguchi until June 20. AKB48’s legions of fans will no doubt stay tuned. And more than likely have some Glico ice cream.
