Recently I ran into a friend who works at a TV station in Tokyo. The conversation turned to Johnny's Jimusho, the most powerful talent agency in Japan, whose stable of male singers has dominated television for almost two decades. When I asked her if she had run into any of Johnny's stars, she said she probably had, but it was difficult to tell. The young men she saw at work all looked alike.

The popularity of the Johnny's brand has led to the ubiquity of the Johnny's look, which is difficult to describe because it is so indistinct. All you have to do is turn on the TV and you'll see it. Even young male stars who don't belong to Johnny's look as if they could, but once you reach that level of understanding, you have to consider the possibility that maybe Johnny's itself is pursuing an ideal that transcends calculation. In the 1980s, Johnny's was the only talent agency that traded exclusively in cute boys. At the time, cute girls were the focus of attention. Now that the attention has shifted to young men, Johnny's gets the credit — or the blame, depending on how you look at it. But in any case this uniform look for male TV personalities — the androgynous features, the deliberately tousled hairstyles, even the relatively short stature — attests to the entertainment industry's pack mentality.

The real question is: Did the entertainment industry foist this image on the public or did it reflect the public's desires? A professor at Kobe Women's University, Tatsuru Uchida, would probably say it's the former. According to an article that appeared several weeks ago in the Asahi Shimbun, Professor Uchida conducts a survey every year among women in their 20s, and since 2003 he has noticed a shift in interest away from anything that respondents believe is media-manufactured. In particular, he finds that they "don't trust" brands anymore.