Dentsu, the ad agency that coordinated the conferenc,e made a web page featuring
Reiko. She was excited by this and the response on the Net was amazing. After the
conference, Reiko asked me how hard it was to write html and whether it was
possible to have her own web page.
A week later, she was over at our office with a bunch of photos, her CD,
some artwork and a head full of ideas. She sat in front of the computer
as we walked her though the basics of html. She began keying in the html,
scanning her photos, digitizing her music ftp'ing the the pages onto our web
site. At 5 am she was finished. In one sitting she had mastered html and created
a site which within a week became the hottest pages on our site.
At about the same time she was learning how to use the Internet, she began
to question the future of her career as an Idol. She began to work with
Ikeda-san, developing an educational CD-ROM title, and she made frequent
visits to our office to update her page.
She came up with the idea of a "Digital Reiko" that could answer questions
for her and be a talent in her place. As her CD-ROM idea and her sense of
self-empowerment through the Internet increased, so did her frustration with
working within the constraints of a talent management company as teenage
idol. She had a conference area in NiftyServe where she communicated
with her fans. The talks that she gave during her public appearances
began to focus more and more on the Internet. She soon found that her fans
had a hard time keeping up with her change and the gap between her career
as an idol and what she really wanted to be began to reach a critical point.
In July 1995, she closed her conference on Nifty Serve, hired a lawye,r
and quit her managment company. The industry was shocked. The Nikkei announced
her retirement. Japan could not understand why a 20 year old teenage idol at
the height of her career would just quit. But the New Breed of digital Tokyo
got the joke. Reiko finished her CD-ROM and published it with a company
called Momoderas where her manager gone to to become a programmer after Reiko
quit her management company. In addition to joining Momodera's as an employee,
she joined Digital Garage, a new company that I set up to be a producer of
Internet related events and content.
|
Reiko, contrary to what some experts had predicted, made an elegant shift
from teenage idol to a role model for young women in Japan. Although some
of her Pink Ranger fans feel a bit betrayed, her popularity continues to
increase and she is gaining wide support from young women. She is heading
the formation of a computer network for young women called "Tokyo Girls
Net." Recently she published a book about her experience of creating
a home page in the form of a how-to book on web page production. She is
in the process of writing a book about relationships and love in cyberspace.
Reiko has become a symbol of the New Breed as well as a voice of representing
the youth in the multimedia industry otherwise populated by bureaucrats
and marketing men. Reiko is the first of her kind, but not the last if she
has anything to do with it. She is the living symbol of the unstoppable force
of young people in Japan empowering themselves to shake loose from the
hierarchical, factory-style system of post-war Japan.
