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Some fans are “Monster-Parents”? Aki-P’s ‘Radical’ comment to aggressive fans

  April 7, 2012
秋元康 – 10:57 
AKB is like a all-girl group. (though we have many super-seniors lol)
I’m a principle, and each class has a teacher (chief manager).
In addition we have school staffs (manager).

It’s impossible for me to talk all student in person,

I receive reports from all managers at general meetings.
When there’s an emergency, I get e-mails or phone-calls directly.

This school has a sign board (G+), and we can have opinion and feedback from students and fans.

I too sometimes write on this board, or leave replies for comments.

But since I can’t read all of those, I only do it for some I happen to  catch in my eyes.
It is so hard to deal with ‘Monster-Parent’, who leave comments like this…
“Why you don’t read my daughters comments (and reply to her)? She is writing a pretty decent comments.”
We take care of mental and physical conditions of all students with the cooperation of staffs and medical staffs. But it makes us worry that some students push themselves too far out of a fear that “If I take a rest now, my grades goes down!!”

Now our team of a female doctor, mental health counselor, and school counselor takes enough care of them, so there’s no need to worry about it.

My answer to the question “Principal, do you really take care of all of your students??” is…
“I try to, but it’s impossible to take care of all.
But my tens of staffs supplement things where I fall in short of.”
Principle is responsible for a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean he knows everything.
There’re a lot of things that I can learn from students’ or your comments.
Please give as useful feedback.


Let’s make our school the best in Japanese entertainment industry together.

What made Japanese fans upset is his use of he word “Monster-Parent” as a metaphor for complaining fans. “Moster-Parent” is a Japanese English word to describe parents of school kids who fiercely complain that the shcool treat their kids unfairly and ask them fair treatments (for the school, their claims sound like asking unfair favor for their children).
The bottom line is, since his business model is based on intensifying fans devotion to particular members with events like elections or shake-hand events, it is a natural consequence that fans want to complain when they find their favorite members are relatively not treated well partly because AkiP’s preference is not to favor her. But no matter how rude fans are actually (maybe there’re so much rude deleted comments, I guess), his use of the word, which has a very insulting tone, was clearly unacceptable, and I feel a bit disappointed…

By the way, he obviously wrote this for his defense for Jurina’s falling down, and basically he says this is because she insisted that she want to work even though people worried about her health, but now his team has medical staffs taking close care of members, so it’s alright now.
And probably for Atsuko Maeda’s graduation, he stated that we wants this “school” No.1 in Japanese entertainment industry, which means he want to nurture the talents who can survive alone in this tough industry from AKB48 and their sister “schools”.

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