Watch the video above before you read further.
Have you watched?
Good.
The band is called AKB48, and they’re selling you some sort of candy.
Did you notice anything strange in the video?
Something odd about one of the girls?
The girl in the middle, maybe?
Her name is Eguchi Aimi, and here’s a still from the ad:
And here’s another:
Anything?
Turns out, she’s not real: she’s a CGI creation made up of bits and pieces of the other girls in the commercial. (The “band” has dozens of members, of which the other girls in the ad are only a few.) Gizmodo has a look at the the controversy around the fake girl, and the Telegraph has a video (not embeddable, sorry) detailing her digital creation. Over at Kotaku is an interesting post from before the news broke about the truth of Eguchi Aimi: it seems many fans were fooled, and believed she was entirely real.
