Is Japan's Plus Size Girl Band Actually Chubby?

The all-girl band from Japan was different from anything Japan usually produces. It's called "Chubbiness" because all ten girls were chosen to be chubby — "marshmallow girls" (puniko), in the Japanese coinage — as a deliberate pushback against the industry's worship of the svelte and slender.

They came out of a summer 2013 open audition held jointly by music giant Avex and fashion magazine CanCam: 3,500 girls auditioned, ten made the cut. The concept was "marshmallow girls making Japan happy," and the members were asked to keep a body mass index between 22 and 24 — squarely in the normal range — to hold the marshmallow-idol image. Their goal, in their own words, was to show that girls could be chubby, cute, and happy.

Look at the girls: does anyone look chubby to you? They look perfectly normal — which is exactly the point the group's fans made. In a country where Japanese women are stereotypically petite and thin, even a normal body reads as "plus-size" to the idol industry. (In the West, most people wouldn't think of any of them as anything other than average.)

The band hadn't released music yet at the time; their debut single, "Manmadeiya!" ("fine as we are"), arrived in October 2014. The group went on to record for five years before disbanding in March 2019 — a decent run for a concept built on a body.

The larger story underneath the novelty is a real one. Body acceptance movements ask women to choose health over the size-zero ideal, to see their bodies as something more than ornaments — as the vehicle for living a full life. Whether a pop group designed by committee advances that cause or just commercializes it is a fair question. But in a culture where "chubby" starts at a BMI of 22, the fact that the conversation happened at all was the real headline.