WACK's Last Audition Camp Opened With an English Test

On March 22, 2026, the first day of WACK’s last audition camp, Junnosuke Watanabe sat down for an interview with one of his own idols. ナ前ナ以 of ASP had been with WACK for five years by her own count. ASP was one of five WACK groups set to disband before the end of 2026. Watanabe had opened the camp on Iki, an island off Nagasaki, to members of all five who wanted to stay with the company. She was the only one who signed up. Two days before it opened he had told her she might be better off not coming. That afternoon she sat a 30-minute English test. In the interview he pressed her on the score and asked whether she had come to dig her own grave.

Then he asked her a question in the past tense. “You loved WACK, didn’t you?” She told him yes. “I love it.” She was the only candidate cut on day one. Her own read on it afterward: “I don’t think I spent five years not trying. I really think I tried the wrong way.”

Give Up on Giving Up

Watanabe built his reputation on idol groups that sold themselves on what they couldn’t do. As manager of BiS he took the group to Yokohama Arena on July 8, 2014 for a breakup show billed as BiS’s own Budokan and played it straight through⊕ . WACK grew out of that split. BiSH arrived in 2015 billed as the punk band without instruments, a tag Japanese outlets still use. Watanabe quoted the group’s line again in 2025: “We can’t dance and we can’t sing but we’re aiming for the top.”

It worked for a long time. BiSH made NHK’s New Year’s Eve show Kohaku Uta Gassen in 2021 and ended at Tokyo Dome on June 29, 2023 in front of about 50,000 people⊕ , the group’s first and only show there.

WACK found the next ones through its audition camps. From at least 2017 the company ran auditions as week-long camps streamed live on Niconico, with dawn marathons, rice doused in death sauce and eliminations announced on the stream. Over all of it hung Watanabe’s slogan, 諦めることを諦めろ: give up on giving up.

The Declaration

Watanabe stepped down as WACK’s representative director in July 2024 and moved to London to study entrepreneurship at Goldsmiths, University of London. On November 30, 2025 Natalie published the first of three columns he wrote from there under the title “Junnosuke Watanabe’s Declaration of Defeat.” “This is my declaration of defeat, as of now,” he wrote. He retracted the slogan in the same column. “I, who told everyone not to give up, am giving up.”

The second column, published the next day, listed what had gone wrong. WACK’s people had been Twitter natives who “completely missed the Instagram era and the TikTok era.” He admitted they had skipped TikTok because they thought it was lame. K-pop had become the standard for Asian pop and “our way was simply outdated.” The giant-killing magic that carried BiS and BiSH had “completely lost its effect.” Making fans buy the same CD over and over would never travel outside Japan. Under all of it sat one sentence about his own company: “WACK only survived thanks to BiSH.” When BiSH ended, turnout across WACK dropped sharply. He described groups now playing rooms that held 200 to 300 people.

“It’s all my strategic loss,” he wrote. “My negligence.” GANG PARADE, KiSS KiSS, ExWHYZ, ASP and BiTE A SHOCK would all disband within 2026.

Further down the same column, Watanabe described what came next. Six members picked from the current groups were already training apart from them in dance, singing and English. Eight trainees had passed an audition WACK held in secret that year. None of the fourteen would attend the March camp, he wrote, because he wanted them tied directly to a new project.

Six Out of Twenty-Two

Twenty-two candidates arrived on Iki on March 22. Watanabe opened by thanking them for applying to “this turbulent, completely washed-up WACK.” The first task was writing down concrete goals and explaining them to the others. The English test came that afternoon. Then each candidate drew one of 11 WACK songs at random and had to sing it a cappella from the first verse through the chorus with no preparation. Six of the 22 got through it.⊕

The marathon and the death sauce were still on the schedule. StoryWriter’s report noted that neither was compulsory. Watanabe’s take on skipping the run: “Not running the marathon might not be the reason you get cut. But it can be.”

Three candidates went home at noon on day two and nine more that night. Eight more went on day three, leaving one candidate from the original field. Watanabe brought three more onto the island through emergency interviews. On day six he called off a run-through of the group number “FiNAL DANCE” because he didn’t want to see it in the state it was in. After the evening review he told the remaining candidates he had nothing to say. “I’ve lost my motivation.”

On March 28 he gave the result. “This time… unfortunately, there were no passers.” He told them to set concrete goals and admitted he hadn’t had clear ones himself during BiSH. “I don’t think there’s success for anyone who won’t push past their limits.” Then he signed off to the Niconico audience: “With this, the camp audition I’ve kept running all these years comes to an end.”

Optional Death Sauce

The last camp kept everything that made a WACK camp recognizable: the island, the stream, the cuts on camera and the founder in the room. The grading had changed. Every candidate sat the English test and the a cappella draw, while the marathon and the death sauce were optional. The skills BiSH once sold itself on lacking had become the bar. The six members best trained to clear it had been kept off the island on purpose.

Six weeks after the camp, on May 12, WACK announced a new open audition to form a new group. Applicants emailed their name, age, height, weight and two photos.⊕ Anyone who passed the paper screen got an interview, in person or remote. The announcement mentioned no camp and no stream. Watanabe’s note to applicants: “It’s mostly painful, but occasionally super happy.”

Too Lame to Use

PMs get told to build taste and then defend it. Watanabe defended his for more than a decade, long enough to carry a punk band without instruments to Kohaku and Tokyo Dome. The three columns read like a sort of that taste. Twitter, multi-buy CD sales and the giant-killing story land on one pile, the things he says stopped working. The ambition stays on the other pile with the O2 Arena, BBC Radio and Damon Albarn.

Strategy postmortems usually blame a market shift. Watanabe wrote down the actual call: the team thought TikTok was lame and didn’t use it. Most product teams keep a list like that without ever writing it down, from the mobile app the power users supposedly didn’t need to the self-serve tier that felt beneath an enterprise brand. Each item was decided on feel at a particular moment. Few teams go back to check whether that moment has passed.

“WACK only survived thanks to BiSH” describes a flagship carrying the numbers for years while everything launched after it underperformed. WACK found out when the flagship stopped. A PM can find out sooner by grading every launch since the hit with the hit left out of the total.

Watanabe ran the new test inside the old ritual, let it return zero and replaced the ritual six weeks later. A PM who inherits a planning process the team loves can borrow that order: change what the process scores, read the new scores, then decide whether the format survives. The format question goes last because nobody can judge a ritual until they know what it is supposed to find.

The cost lands on whoever mastered the old bar. The six selected members were training in dance, singing and English before Watanabe’s December column made the new direction public. ナ前ナ以 met the same bar on her first afternoon on Iki, in a 30-minute English test, after five years of training for the old one.

KiSS YOU GOODBYE

GANG PARADE played their last one-man show at Zepp Haneda on October 29. KiSS KiSS, the last of the groups carrying Watanabe’s stamp, play KiSS YOU GOODBYE on November 30 and then disband. Mameshiba no Taigun carry on under separate management. The group from the May audition was due to start work in Tokyo in August.

In the third column Watanabe wrote about his English lessons in London. A teacher told him that because he was Japanese he thought he couldn’t speak unless it came out perfect. “That’s right,” Watanabe wrote. “I get scared of making mistakes and go quiet.” Less than four months later his candidates sat an English test on their first afternoon on Iki.