The World’s Biggest Girl Group
It’s Japan’s AKB48, a group of 92 mostly teenage girls, armed with sugar-sweet pop tunes and sometimes-suggestive lyrics (‘My school uniform is getting in the way’) that has saturated the country’s popular and commercial culture. They are so popular that their last three singles each sold a million copies in the first day of release. (Not even Lady Gaga has done that.) The Japanese school girl is not just a style icon in her native country: remember the kick-ass fight scene between one of them and Uma Thurman in “Kill Bill”?
