Honmono

Dream Girls Season 3.

It had something that set it apart from Seasons 1 and 2.

The fact that it was a Korea-Japan collaboration.

That alone made it a massive issue from the program's opening days.

And of course they were. Japan. The country you could call the ancestral home of the "idol."

K-pop's noisy rise was a recent thing. Before that, Japan had been the famous one.

Watashi sakuranbo~♪

The anticipation was more than justified. No Korean alive has ever been uncurious about the original.

Nine times out of ten, disappointment followed. Viewers sat there looking thoroughly bewildered.

<<…….>>

The judges too. Every last one of them was a household name in the entertainment industry, people with at least a decade of broadcast work behind them. Even they had no idea what to say.

"These are friends currently active as idols in Japan, right?"

"Hai!"

"What were you selected for?"

It ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠wasn't the kind of needling they'd given the existing contestants. It wasn't even a line for the cameras. It was pure, genuine confusion.

There was bound to be a difference, after all. Korea and Japan were different countries.

"You must have had something going for you in Japan to get selected and start working."

"Hai."

"I just can't tell what that something was."

"Hai?"

These were not people you could placate with that kind of talk. The judges were former and current stars in their own right, with rich careers of global stages and collaborations under their belts — top-class professionals in the industry.

"Looks like the Japanese kids don't practice much."

"You can kind of see the lack of rehearsal."

"Do they not consider razor-sharp choreography important?"

They had an objective eye — one that held up not only in Korea but anywhere in the world. And the honest feeling in those judges' hearts was not even harsh criticism. It was that the level simply wasn't there.

The communities going nuclear was only natural. People had gotten their hopes up because Japanese idols were coming on.

A level that defied belief. At first people had thought, surely not — individual differences existed, after all. The further the broadcast went, the clearer it became. This was neither ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠individual variance nor a string of mistakes.

Otsuka Ai, AK47, and the rest had been famous in Korea too. There had been a time when J-pop's popularity was global. The reality that it no longer was — that was the reason Japanese idols had been doomed to decline.

"More than dancing well, cuteness! That is what matters to a Japanese idol!"

A Japanese contestant's own remark made it clear. From the dictionary definition of "idol" onward, the two countries had never been talking about the same thing.

They weren't on the level of the Big Three agencies. Japanese idols delivered a cultural shock of an entirely different kind. The fantasy people had been carrying around shattered.

Some viewers were disappointed by the broadcast. Others, though, loved it.

It was an instinct carved into Korean and Japanese DNA since time immemorial. A Korea-Japan matchup was both countries' premier content. Win a head-to-head, and for some reason your chest swelled with grandeur.

And there were people making money off it. Word that this was a gold mine had already crossed the sea and reached Vietnam.

So backlash could build from this.

If you were an investor, you had to look reality in the face — even when that reality pointed in a cringeworthy direction.

"Korean idols are top-tier on the global stage with nobody left to compare them to."

"That much?"

"I knew they were popular, but……"

"Way more than you guys think."

Roughly multiply whatever number you have in your head by ten or a hundred. I hadn't called entertainment stocks a honey sector for nothing.

And the catalyst for that is Dream Girls itself.

Dream Girls Season 3. It was an event massive enough to draw a line through entertainment history — on the Japanese side, that is, not Korea's.

Something roughly like that.

To Japanese audiences who'd been watching school-festival rhythm exercises, Korean idols were pure shock.

You don't have to go looking far for an isekai story.

Of course there had been exchanges before. Conservative Japanese society simply hadn't been willing to accept it — pride, if nothing else. But once the two countries' idols were put side by side on a broadcast like this—

"It really does hit different."

"So this is something our country is actually good at."

"Yeah, even if you don't care about idols, you can kind of feel it."

—a massive wave rolled through Japan. This was exactly the period when the national idol group AK47 became obsolete overnight.

It was the great incident that rewrote the entire ecosystem of the Japanese entertainment industry.

In Korean terms, it was as if the Big Three agencies had all gone under. An event of that scale, and yet it barely registered here. The difference between countries. You could tell yourself the internet existed, that you could just search for things, that none of it mattered — but the wall of a national border was high.

"I don't know, man, is this the Truman Show?"

"Why are you asking me."

Sora had every right to look baffled. The freefall of Japanese idols was a windfall for somebody else.

It was a development you could have fully anticipated — if you'd known the actual skill level of Japanese idols.

This is what I mean by insufficient market research.

Value investing. Plenty of people wanted to do it like Warren Buffett. Almost nobody wanted to suffer like Warren Buffett. If you truly wanted to understand a stock, you had to put your feet on the ground. That was the point I'd been trying to teach.

"At this rate I'm actually gonna end up being an idol, sob."

"Use the chance to make your seed money and come back."

"Hey."

Become a Hallyu superstar and then some. She'd make seed capital and get all the market research she could ever want.

Celebrities make absurd amounts of money.

There was a reason people said not to worry about entertainers. They racked up billions in debt! A few years later, it was all paid off. A profession where, if you set your mind to it, you could make money.

"If Sora ends up becoming a celebrity……"

"Hm?"

"Does that mean we make bank?"

"Where do we go long? What stocks do we buy?"

A benefactor who was making money for me and the club members alike. Thanks to her, the past few weeks had been thoroughly entertaining. If Sora kept feeding us information, it was possible. You could make a killing in the entertainment industry.

But that was a story for later. What our fund was aiming for was a short-term hit-and-run.

Market research mattered. But not getting too far ahead of yourself mattered too.

What good is knowing it alone? The public doesn't see the value yet.

A short-term peak. Investors' attention and greed had piled on top of each other until the charts stamped out double tops. On a technical basis — especially in Korea — you had to be careful. It was a pattern the institutions loved to manufacture.

"I want to do it too……"

"I'll cut you a generous incentive."

"It's not about the money, I just want to~!"

"Sex?"

"Ugh."

Sora was starting to want to come back too. Looking at the way the program was heading, that was how it would go.

In the end, only one team survives.

Dozens of contestants. Making it all the way to the final debut lineup was not easy. Even the flying, crawling trainees from the Big Three agencies struggled with it. Landing inside that group was realistically hard — structurally hard, too.

It lingered somewhere in the back of my mind. The fact that Dream Girls itself had been one giant con.

"If I actually get selected, I'm going to cause a broadcast incident."

"It's fine. That won't happen."

"How would you know that."

"Because things like that exist."

Stocks and reality were the same. Enormous capital distorted the market.