WACK’s final audition camp ends with no winners. Welcome to Chapter 2

Today, I woke up to a post from WACK’s official X account stating:

“There are no successful candidates for the WACK Joint Training Camp Audition 2026”.

For any other agency, this would be a blunder beyond recovery, an embarrassment for a company that once produced one of the industry’s biggest acts. For WACK, it might be exactly what they intended.

WACK is a Tokyo idol agency founded by Junnosuke Watanabe in 2014 during the alternative idol boom, built on a reputation for anti-establishment stunts and acts that prized drive over polish. Its peak came with BiSH, the punk-influenced group who disbanded with a sold-out Tokyo Dome show in June 2023.

In recent years, Watanabe has outwardly suggested that the shock antics that worked in his early years aren’t viable in this day and age. He studied in London, picked apart the current landscape, and came to the conclusion that if nothing changes, WACK will never be what it used to be. What followed was the announcement that GANG PARADE, KiSS KiSS, ExWHYZ, ASP, and BiTE A SHOCK would all disband within 2026 to make way for the next generation of WACK, what Watanabe has been calling “Chapter 2”.

And while that’s a sad reality for fans of the agency’s remaining acts, it’s plain to see. From the low streaming numbers to the dwindling visibility on the wider music scene, WACK acts have had it rough trying to stay in the public eye. Even the WACK-ier stunts the agency pulled didn’t have the same draw they once did. Gone are the days where you could get your idols running across prefectures to a show or dancing around naked in a music video and capture the attention of a general public genuinely drawn to the shake-up of the industry.

Today, March 28th, saw the end of WACK’s final Joint Audition, the agency’s first in three years and its last ever audition camp. Starting on March 22nd on Iki Island in Nagasaki, the camp invited a new wave of potential talent to sign up, alongside all current WACK idols who wanted to secure a place in the agency’s next phase. Only one active WACK idol signed up. On day one, she was out.

Streamed daily via NicoNico, with regular coverage from Japanese media outlets natalie and StoryWriter, fans were able to follow the audition every step of the way, for better or for worse.

Seven days of reckoning

The camp opened on March 22nd on Iki Island, a small archipelago in the Tsushima Strait off the coast of Nagasaki, with twenty-two candidates; twenty-one of whom had adopted audition names that were deliberate parodies of existing WACK members. Standing before them, Watanabe described the scene as “the reality of WACK right now”. Of the seeded slots open to current and former members, only one person showed up. The other two had gone AWOL. “I guess WACK really is washed up now”, he added, without apparent irony.

That sole roster participant was ASP’s NAMELESS. She failed to complete her assigned song in a surprise a cappella check, performed poorly in the English test, and was eliminated at the end of day one after a confrontation in which Watanabe turned her own words against her. In 2023, she had said that WACK was being looked down on by audition candidates. Three years later, he told her she was the one doing the looking down.

The day one elimination set the tone for what became something altogether different from WACK’s chaotic, anything-goes auditions of the past. Watanabe arrived with a point to prove, and the criteria he set — English ability, vocal preparation, concrete personal goals, professionalism — were pitched as the minimum standard for the world he wants WACK to compete in. The benchmark he kept pointing to was K-pop. The gap, by his own admission, is not small.

The days quickly fell into a punishing rhythm of morning marathons, English evaluations, goal-setting interviews, and sudden performance checks, with Watanabe repeatedly demanding specifics from candidates who spoke in broad slogans about moving people or reaching the world. He was contemptuous of what he called the “underground idol” mindset, vague ambition, small-circle self-satisfaction, and the comfort of being praised by the same thirty people at every show.

By the end of day two, the field had collapsed from twenty-one candidates to nine, in part because Watanabe secretly posted a midnight deadline for interview sign-ups and many simply did not act in time. By the end of day three, only one candidate remained: Tate Mae, whose goal-setting interview was the first to satisfy him, with Watanabe saying he felt there were no lies in what she told him. With the camp on the verge of implosion, WACK put out an emergency call for new or returning participants to travel to Iki Island the following day.

The audition that followed had its moments. Coco Partin Coco of GANG PARADE arrived on day four at Watanabe’s request, brought in less as a candidate and more as a working example of what he was looking for. RYUUSEiKO, eliminated on day three after being told she could stay only if she performed BiS’s single ‘LOVE’ 101 times, returned on day four having privately done it 80 times over five hours, which Watanabe decided was enough to show she meant it. There were cooking contests using local yellowtail, peer critique sessions, revival gimmicks, and late-night performance evaluations that stretched into the early hours. Even by WACK standards, the format felt closer to cult recruitment than talent development, designed to break people down rather than draw anything meaningful out of them.

But by day six, the mood had shifted again. Watanabe cancelled the planned group performance of BiS’s ‘FiNAL DANCE’ just thirty minutes before it was due to begin, telling the remaining candidates they had never truly committed to it and had spent the week drifting between group and solo practice without doing either properly. After the solo performances that followed, he told them he’d lost motivation and found the whole thing boring.

Tate Mae and RYUUSEiKO were eliminated, leaving Genjitsu Yua and HANANOANA. When the four tried to speak with Watanabe, he was nowhere to be found, forcing them to search through the lodge room by room. He was, in fact, hiding.

They eventually located him during his JJ Time livestream — a late-night broadcast where he speaks directly to viewers — after realising he was in the interview room, then confronted him on-stream to push for another chance. He ultimately agreed to let all four perform ‘FiNAL DANCE’ on the final morning.

The four were up before dawn, rehearsing from before 5am. At 10am, they finally performed, followed by closing speeches that, whatever you make of the week that preceded them, were hard to dismiss.

Genjitsu Yua spoke about confronting her own weaknesses instead of running from them. Tate Mae reflected on learning she could not do everything alone. RYUUSEiKO talked about being given a second chance after once saying she could not. HANANOANA described repeatedly running away, making mistakes, and only gradually finding a way to move forward.

Then Watanabe announced the result. Nobody passed.

The fallout

The announcement landed with the dull thud of something fans had been slowly bracing for, and the response was exactly what you would expect from a fanbase emotionally wrung out over the past week.

For some, it felt like the most mentally devastating ending possible, softened only by the familiar WACK logic that chaos and a nothing-to-lose starting point is often where their success stories begin. Others were less generous, dismissing the entire week as little more than a platform for Watanabe to lecture hopefuls off the back of one successful act.

The handling of NAMELESS’ elimination on day one in particular struck a nerve, raising questions about how much value WACK now places on the loyalty of its current members. Given that ASP were arguably WACK’s most internationally focused act, as the only group to sign with a UK label and a key presence in every WACK in the UK showcase, their sole representative being eliminated within a day after a surprise vocal test left a bitter taste.

Criticism was also levelled at the choice of audition songs, almost all produced and composed by Matsukuma Kenta, the man behind the sound of virtually every WACK act for over a decade before his departure in early 2023. One commenter put it plainly, “when talented people leave and the quality of applicants drops with them, it simply means the company has lost its appeal”. If WACK is building something new, what it actually sounds like without him is a question that remains stubbornly unanswered.

“Thanks everyone. That was fun”

Junnosuke Watanabe’s response to the results? A breezy “Thanks everyone. That was fun ^_^”, followed by hours of back-and-forth with critics, fans, and journalists via his followers-only X account.

Somewhere in the middle of reposts of months-old negative comments he’d been accumulating, and at least one instance of him telling a fan not to come to WACK events anymore, Watanabe dropped two lines that are actually worth reading; “Chapter 2 is starting” and “The only people I look down on are those who casually deny other people’s potential”.

Both lines fit the most coherent version of what WACK in 2026 is trying to be. But they landed alongside claims that he doesn’t care about acting as a company representative, and a sustained pile-on of a single critic’s old posts, which makes it harder to read the whole thing as the calm, considered reset of a returning CEO who studied in London and came back with a plan.

Masterplan, or a company unravelling?

WACK being WACK, the audition might never have intended to be a genuine recruitment drive, and the no-pass result could have been their way of letting the fanbase know that the old way was no longer going to cut it. Back in December, Watanabe had already confirmed that six current members and eight trainees from an undisclosed earlier audition were training ahead of Chapter 2.

But the benefit of the doubt has a finite shelf life. The agency’s international ambitions, the English-language media platform DiG YOUR OWN IDOLS, and the UK showcases have so far failed to reach beyond the committed fan base that already exists. At some point, “trust the process” requires a process that visibly works.

To complicate things, in Watanabe’s closing speech after delivering the final result, he admitted that even before BiSH’s disbandment he had started to become complacent, telling himself things were fine as they were. The consequences of that, he said, had now caught up with him.

He described the camp taking the shape it did partly because he himself was searching for the same thing he was demanding from the candidates. In a normal audition camp, performance practice begins on day one. This time, he spent the week in goal-setting interviews alongside them, because he too had lost sight of what he was working towards.

To illustrate what a single clear goal can do, he went back to the start of his career, a young Watanabe, working part-time with no authority, telling Matsukuma Kenta to wait for him because one day he would be in a position to spread his music across Japan. He didn’t have a plan. He just had that one aim. It took three years after joining a record label before he could make good on it, but he got there. The goal, not the roadmap, was what drove him. He told the candidates he wanted them to find something like that for themselves.

It’s the most honest thing he said all week, but after seven days of endurance tests, public criticism, psychological pressure, and shifting rules, the search for clarity came at the candidates’ expense. Whether his closing comments are those of a genuine reckoning or simply a deflection for everything that came before it is a question only Chapter 2 will answer.

Right now, more and more fans are putting the state of the agency down to something simpler, incompetence dressed up as intention. That might be too harsh. It also might be exactly right. The honest answer is that nobody knows yet, possibly including Watanabe himself.

What’s certain is that Chapter 1 is over. Seven days, zero passes, capped off with a sponsored post for beef from a local supermarket. Chapter 2 had better be worth it.