#Miki endo being washed away tv

#Miki endo being washed away tv

Known to her fans as Yukko, Okada won a nationwide TV audition in 1983 when only 15. The relics will be placed in the family vault at a Buddhist temple after the first anniversary of her death. Other fans went to the Nagoya home of Okada's parents, who allowed them to bid farewells before the urn which holds her cremated remains. Dozens of fans continued to come each day to pay their respects at a Buddhist altar in the building vestibule. Others kept an all-night vigil at the altar that grew as mourner after mourner heaped flowers, plants, softdrinks, sweets, fruit, cosmetics, posters, records, letters, and other mementoes on the now sacred ground that had claimed their goddess' life.īy the 14th, the pile had grown as high as the head of the Shinto priest who, on this seventh day of grieving, purified the offerings before they were placed in 60 cardboard boxes and taken to a nearby shrine to be burned. Some of Okada's fans fell in tears on the traces of blood, hands and faces rubbing the stains that seemed to remain despite the scouring. TV cameras captured most of the on-site investigation, the body removal, the pavement scrubbing, and the mass hysteria that began when the rope was taken down. Black-and-white prints were carried in some of the local (but none of the national) dailies, and in many weekly (but few monthly) magazines. Photos of the gore were taken only seconds after Okada hit the ground by a newspaper reporter who had come to inquire about rumours of her earlier suicide attempt. In one corner of the cordoned area was a makeshift altar with an incense burner, a candle, and a few bouquets. Local crowds already pressed against a rope that police had placed around the chalked outlines of where Okada's brains had splattered on the pavement. Her voice, too, seemed ordinary, at least to those who have not learned to appreciate its technically good electronic-mix of the bouncy, dreamy, nasal, pouty whimpers, whines and sighs that have long endeared young female idols to the adolescent boys and girls-and middle-aged men with a rorikon (Lolita complex) who commensally feed their fantasies at the breasts of such media icons.Īs news of Okada's suicide spread, hundreds of fans converged on the Tokyo building which houses the offices of Sun Music, the talent agency that managed her career. She was innocent youth itself in the eyes of the millions who loved her face and figure, though neither was really remarkable. Okada was born into this impure world just plain Kayo Sato, but by now she is known among the Buddhas that be as Yugyoin Shakunikaho. In the following weeks, some other young people were dead in her wake-one from the same roof-in a minor suicide epidemic.

Two hours later, still despondent and even more disoriented, Okada jumped to her death from a seven-storey building. She had written a note which implied that things had not gone her way in a real or imagined romance with an actor old enough to be her father. The suicide of Okada Yukiko Japanese youth and the Yukko syndrome By William Wetherallįar Eastern Economic Review, 133(29), 17 July 1986, pages 45-47Īround 10 o'clock on the morning of 8 April, the 18-year-old Japanese singer Yukiko Okada was found with a slashed wrist in her gas-filled Tokyo apartment, crouching in a closet and sobbing.