Kinki Kids

KinKi Kids stand out as a premier achievement of the Johnny & Associates agency, the major Japanese entertainment conglomerate known for manufacturing male pop idols. Management selected the pair, trained them through the Johnny's system, and launched them first as actors before transitioning them into pop singers whose melodic releases captured legions of teenage female followers and secured a Guinness World Records entry for their consistent chart dominance. The duo consists of Koichi Domoto and Tsuyoshi Domoto, unrelated yet both hailing from Japan's Kinki region, which supplied the group's name. Born in 1979, they made their entertainment bow in 1991 by performing as stage dancers during a Hikaru Genji production. Magazine features and film appearances followed soon after, leading to their 1993 debut under the name W Domoto (also called Double Domoto, later rebranded Kansai Boya before settling on KinKi Kids in 1996). Although they headlined Budokan as early as 1994, the pair was initially positioned as actors whose drama roles attracted major advertising deals, beginning with Panasonic and later extending to Nissan, Coca-Cola, and All Nippon Airways. From 1996 to 2001 they also hosted their own variety program, Love Love Aishiteru.

These activities served merely as groundwork for their recording career, which commenced in earnest with the 1997 single "Glass No Shounen" and the album A. Every subsequent studio album bore a successive letter of the alphabet, running from A through I and appearing between 1997 and 2006 with a one-year gap in 2004. Each release reached the top of the Oricon charts; A proved their strongest seller with more than 1,000,000 units moved, while the others each achieved between 280,000 and 860,000 copies. In 1998 the Domotos joined the charity supergroup J-Friends alongside members of V6 and Tokio; the collective worked with Elton John and Michael Jackson before disbanding in 2003 after issuing five albums. Alongside their steady album output and J-Friends commitments, Koichi and Tsuyoshi maintained television activity, contributing a theme to the 2000 drama Summer Snow in which Tsuyoshi appeared and launching Domoto Kyoudai in 2001 to replace their prior show, featuring acoustic performances with invited guests. That same year KinKi Kids issued the compilation KinKi Single Selection, which moved 1,200,000 copies, and made their songwriting debut with the single "Sukini Natteku Aishiteku." In 2001 they entered the Guinness records by displacing Westlife with their twelfth straight number-one single, "Jounetsu."

The Domotos ventured into solo projects in 2003, with Tsuyoshi supplying the song "Machi" for the drama Yume No California, mounting a solo tour in 2004, and co-starring in the 2005 film Fantastipo alongside Kokubun Taichi of Tokio, while Koichi headlined the musical Shock (later retitled Endless Shock) and released the 2006 album Deep in Your Heart/+Million But _ Love. KinKi Kids nevertheless persisted, extending their alphabetic album sequence, issuing two additional compilations—KinKi Single Selection 2 in 2004 and 39 in 2007—and shifting to Greek lettering for their tenth album, Phi, which also topped the charts. Their annual December 31 concert at Tokyo Dome in 2007 marked the tenth consecutive year they had performed there, after which they relocated the 2008 New Year show to Osaka to accommodate the newer Johnny & Associates act News. Their singles streak remained unbroken when "Yakusoku" reached number one in 2009, becoming their twenty-eighth consecutive chart-topper.