Japanese Elvis Association

"Owpien yo' howt, itz gonna be alwooooiiiit!"

– Crush 40 Japanese Elvis.

"Help me, somebody! Please! I can't handle all the glitter!"

– Rip Taylor.

"Oh, my."

– George Takei.

Introduction

The Japanese Elvis Association (JEA) is an international corporation that profits from hiring Elvis Presley impersonators from metropolitan Tokyo and Kyoto for various public and private dance performances. In spite of the numerous Japanese Elvis impersonators that have been cast in popular music videos, music festivals, and films shot on location in Japan thanks to the JEA, the company filed for bankruptcy in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and has only recently saved itself from a total shutdown through a joint venture in October of 2021. Former CEO Daidon Apate was ousted that November, and his office was taken by controversial American entrepreneur and former Avant-Garde performance artist Jaimie H. Rockford. Apate was last seen on a street corner in rural Tokyo offering to dance to "Always on My Mind" in exchange for free noodles and a foot massage. He was immediately gutted with a higonokami switchblade and died that night in the hospital.

Throughout its relatively short lifespan from 1991 to the present, the JEA has left its mark in pop culture, although its reach barely extends outside the world of music. Most performance services before and after included one-time street performers and local cable television commercial gigs, but the company's first significant pop culture contribution came in 1997, when Johnny Gioeli and Jun Senoue from rock band Crush 40 performed Open Your Heart, the main theme song for the 1998 SEGA Enterprises video game Sonic Adventure, at the Tokyo International Forum with Japanese metal singer Eizo Sakamoto providing the vocals while dressed like Presley. The next major success didn't come until the release of Sam's Town, the 2006 album by the American alternative rock band The Killers, when a Japanese Elvis impersonator made a couple of brief cameos in the official music video filmed in and around Tokyo.