
Japanese are supposedly now more interested in the AKB general election than their own parliamentary general election, with 68% more concerned over which idol finds herself “elected” to than which bunch of incompetents will be running the country next.
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AKB48 “super-carnivore” Rino Sashihara has apparently managing to secure 9108 votes (worth some 14 million yen), thanks to a new cohort of creepy Chinese otaku as flush with funds as their Japanese counterparts.
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The latest triumph of AKBnomics arrives in the form of an AKB otaku who proudly shows off the stack of 4,000 votes (at a cost of some 6.4 million yen) he is casting on young Anna Iriyama.
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The bizarre otaku-driven economics of Japan’s best-selling “music” group AKB48 are again turning heads, with a vast torrent of unwanted CDs flooding the second-hand market at landfill prices even as the voting tickets they accompanied command top-dollar.
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AKB48 is now apparently Japan’s best selling female group ever, after Sayonara Crawl’s release took them to nearly 22 million singles sold.
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AKB48 idol Haruka Shimazaki‘s efforts to emulate the virtual beauty of holographic princess Hatsune Miku with some rather unflattering makeup and cosplay have been less than well received by Miku fans, so much so that some have been given to wonder if it is not a deliberate ploy…
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The latest scandal to surface around “national idol” group AKB48 may be the most damaging yet – it has emerged that the group’s founders apparently enjoyed close relations with the yakuza, leading to the profoundly unsavoury conclusion that the Japanese government has been using public funds to subsidise a yakuza-connected idol group in order to promote Japan’s image overseas…
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AKB48’s latest “general election” sees sex scandal idol Rino Sashihara leading the pack even as the group’s creepy otaku fans have succeeded in driving their sales to record levels.
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- Author: Artefact
- Categories: Japan, News
- Date: Apr 12, 2013 00:47 JST
- Tags: AKB48, Crime, Dating, Fraud, Idol, Internet, Marketing, Otaku, Prostitution

A fake dating site offering desperate AKB48 fans the chance for an encounter with the object of their obsession has been busted, though not before managing to persuade 2100 such otaku that the emails they had their employees cobble together from blog posts were worth spending hundreds of millions of yen on.
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AKB48 starlet Minami Takahashi is back in the news again – this time after her off-duty ensemble was outed on Twitter and swiftly became the butt of innumerable jokes.
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AKB48’s general producer Yasushi Akimoto has denied there is any rule against his girls getting all the action they want, and says those girls who end up being sacked, demoted, relocated to distant islands or shaving their heads in shame all do so for quite unrelated reasons.
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The latest survey of which male pastimes Japanese womenfolk find utterly unacceptable yields few surprises – idols and figures continue to be rated worse than compulsive gambling and such profoundly suspect pastimes as knitting.
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