One Group Every Seven Years. 111 Houses in 26 Years.
I went to the Osaka Dome with my second daughter.
Building a house for the first time in three and a half years took two years off my life.
But being moved by how much my favorites have grown, and having a blast, added three years back. (lol)
BABYMONSTER’s first-ever dome concerts.
90,000 people over two days, the 22nd and 23rd. They filled a dome just two years and five months after their debut. The numbers are huge, but what gets me is how fast they got here.
The second it started, goosebumps…. Unreal.
Install the app, sync your light stick with your phone, enter your seat number, and the light stick lights up by itself, exactly as the organizers programmed it.
What an age we live in.
I’m 64. I love the whole group, but my favorite is Rora. She’s a high school senior. (lol)
They say one in three or four Japanese people does oshi-katsu, the Japanese word for devoting yourself to a favorite.
Baseball, soccer, F1, pro wrestling, martial arts, idols, bands. The object can be almost anything.
If you ask me, oshi-katsu is really about enjoying a story.
Watching who they are now is fun, but what hooks you is wondering what happens next.
With BABYMONSTER, the little sisters might end up swallowing BLACKPINK’s legend whole.
I hope I get to keep watching how that story goes on..
I’ve written this before, but if you map K-pop agencies onto the construction industry, it fits almost too well.
HYBE is a big national homebuilder, what Japan calls a house maker.
BTS, SEVENTEEN.
Standardized, mass-produced, with an advertising budget in another league. It runs its label subsidiaries like branch offices and operates as one giant organization.
It produced a monster like NewJeans, and even lost control of it.
SM is a major general contractor.
TVXQ, Girls’ Generation, EXO, aespa.
The old-line firm that wrote the industry’s standard specs. Internal power struggles included. (lol)
JYP is an architecture firm.
TWICE, Stray Kids.
It sells on the name of its principal, J.Y. Park. It competes on a signature style.
And YG is Evohome. (lol)
From 2NE1 to BLACKPINK, and on to BABYMONSTER.
They’ve launched one group every seven years.
They take their time from the trainee stage and build everything out to the last detail. They compete on the work, not on advertising.
So when it clicks, the result is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece no big homebuilder could ever make.
Now, about one of those big homebuilders: Daiwa House.
It has announced that it will review the areas where it builds new detached houses.
I also hear it has set a minimum order price of 50 million yen and started narrowing in on wealthy customers.
When a company that has always competed on volume starts choosing its customers, you can no longer tell what business it’s in.
Chase YG’s customers with HYBE’s methods, and you still won’t become YG.
Because a masterpiece can’t be made just by changing how you sell.
Evohome built 111 houses in 26 years. Three to five a year.
One house at a time, heart and soul. That’s all I ever did, and all I ever could do.
Not how to build a lot of houses, but how to build the one in front of me.
That’s about it..
The open house for that 111th house, the Kalsari House, has wrapped up without a hitch.
It’s Evohome’s last new build.
Admission was 1,000 yen per family.
We collected 34,000 yen. I’m truly grateful.
The full amount will be donated to relief for the Kumamoto earthquake in southern Japan.
The evo in evohome stands for evolution.
After 26 years of building each house with care, the Kalsari House was the final form of that evolution.
YG, one group every seven years. Evohome, 111 houses in 26 years.
The scale doesn’t compare, but I believe we’ve been doing the same thing.
And with that, my life of building new houses is over.
From here on, I’m far from done. I’ll keep doing things my own way.
In my next life, I’m confident I could produce K-pop idols. (lol)
