Music in Dramas

Similar to American dramas, popular music is often used in Japanese dramas, and the music often has a special link to the popular male drama actors: it is often them singing.

Johnny’s Entertainment is the powerhouse behind the popular music market in Japan. Started by Johnny Kitagawa in 1963, it has spent the last four decades churning out boyband after boyband after boyband. While it doesn’t work with female singers at all, the bands produced by Johnny’s consistently top the charts of single and album releases as well as musical DVD sales. It is very nearly impossible to step outside your house in Japan or watch more than a few minutes of T.V. without seeing one of the idols, for they are in stage plays and dramas, hosting or guesting on variety shows, posing in ads and commercials for random products, promoting their music or dramas, or being talked about on celebrity gossip programs virtually all hours of the day and night. Thousands and thousands of girls and women of all ages flock to their plays and concerts and drop money left and right in stores that sell official pictures or paparazzi pictures and goods which bear the faces of their favorite idols. The idols are literally everywhere.

The success of a popular drama often hinges upon the actors in it. While there are very well-liked actors not in Johnny’s Entertainment (JE for short), such as Matsuda Shota and Oguri Shun, many of the most popular dramas have members of JE in lead roles. Oftentimes, the script for a drama is written with a specific singer/actor in mind. The lead actors are most often from the debuted groups of the company (NEWS, KAT-TUN, Kanjani8, Tackey & Tsubasa, Arashi, SMAP, V6, TOKIO, KinKi Kids, Golf & Mike, Shounentai, and the brand new Hey! Say! JUMP), but there are many more Juniors (un-debuted members) who also continue their long climb to fame by taking smaller roles in dramas. Kimura Takuya of SMAP is perhaps the idol most renowned for his acting, having appeared in 28 dramas and a handful of movies.

If there is a member of JE in a drama, there is a pretty good chance that one of their songs will be a theme song for a drama. Sometimes there will be a song during the opening sequence and sponsor list. More commonly, the song will be either an insert song, usually played in the latter half of each episode when there is something dramatic going on, or the closing song. Hana Yori Dango is a good example. One of the most popular dramas in recent years, the lead character is played by Matsumoto Jun of the JE band Arashi. Spanning two seasons, unusual for a Japanese drama, Arashi sings the theme song for each season, with insert songs done by Otsuka Ai and Utada Hikaru, two popular female pop stars.

If a group sings a song for a drama, it often coincides with the release of a new single. As opposed to the American idea of a single which is a single song from an album, a Japanese single is more like an EP, usually containing 2-3 songs and karaoke versions of one or two of them. The trend is that the song will be featured in a commercial for the new drama, then the drama will begin, and a couple of weeks after that, the group’s single will go on sale across the nation.

As mentioned above, the popularity of the idols and the popularity of the dramas go hand in hand. The dramas act as sale-boosting promotional vehicles for the idols; the idols draw in the legions of Japanese fangirls who loyally sit down in front of the T.V. and give the ratings. One excellent example of this is the JE unit Shuuji to Akira. A temporary unit formed to promote the drama Nobuta wo Produce, it was composed of two of the top idols in JE: Kamenashi Kazuya of KAT-TUN, who plays the character Kiritani Shuuji, and Yamashita Tomohisa of NEWS, who plays Kusano Akira. The two idols recorded and single containing three tracks, the theme songs for Nobuta wo Produce, Gokusen, and Dragon Zakura. It sold over a million copies in less than four weeks and became the best selling single of 2005 and the third best selling single of 2006. It was also released in Sweden and entered the Swedish singles chart at #41.

This does not mean that if a member of JE is in a drama, his group automatically does the theme song; still, it happens often, and the male pop star world and the drama world are inextricably linked.