Seiko Matsuda, Akina Nakamori, Kyoko Koizumi… Legends in abundance! The golden age of idols has arrived!

Hiroko Yakushimaru, Tomoyo Harada, Noriko Watanabe… The “Three Kadokawa Girls

Another trend of popular female idols in the early 1980s was the world of Kadokawa movies.

The lineage began with Hiroko Yakushimaru, who made her debut as an actress in the film “Proof of the Wild” and then made her debut as a singer with the theme song of the same title for the film “Sailor Suit and Machine Gun,” followed by Tomoyo Harada and Noriko Watanabe, who went on to star in Kadokawa films and gain popularity, and the three were also known as the “Three Kadokawa Girls. The Kadokawa films, theme songs, and novels, which were developed as part of the media mix, were seen as an evolution of the film star development system that had once been the mainstay of entertainment.

As the ’80s approached the middle of the decade, the popularity of the ’80s and ’82 groups as idols had indeed passed its peak. In the world of male idols, the Checkers group appeared on the scene, and Koji Kikkawa also gained popularity as an idol.

Kyoko Koizumi, who debuted with a Seiko cut and whose debut song “My 16-Sai” and second song “Suteki na Lovely Boy” were both covers of idols from the 1970s, was forced to follow the conventional image of idols, but she abandoned the Seiko cut and focused on her individuality to become a star among the crowd. In “Nantetto Idol” released in 1985, Akimoto Yasushi’s “Nantetto Idol” was a meta-idealistic song that cut out the fictional idol itself. In 1985, the group released “What an Idol,” a meta-photograph by Yasushi Akimoto that depicted the idol as a fictional idol.

In 1985, Seiko Matsuda got married. The marriage of an idol of an idol who greatly led the early 80s. Unlike Momoe Yamaguchi, however, Seiko returned to work after the birth of her first daughter without losing her idol status, and even coined the term “mama-doll,” meaning “idol even if you are a mother,” and pioneered a new image of idols that continues to this day.

The transition to idols with artist-like qualities and Seiko’s marriage…… led to the birth of a group that would shake the Golden Age of Idols from its very foundations, which had begun to become chaotic.