Eguchi Aimi is your typical Japanese pop star: perfect skin, high-pitched girlish voice, lithe figure, and a team of computer designers, photographers, and other pop stars artificially constructing her every movement.
You read that correctly. Aimi does not exist — at least not in the traditional sense. But this drawback has not stopped the girl, who was announced as the newest member of all-girl supergroup AKB 48 earlier this month, has already graced the cover of Japan’s Weekly Playboy, and is part of a prestigious campaign for Ice no Mi — an ice cream product made by confectionary company Glico. But Aimi has not only infiltrated the uppermost echelons of superstardom in her brief lifetime, she also convinced much of a nation that she was a real girl for several weeks.
