>>102573485>>102576390>>102586661NTA, but you are a mega tourist that is speaking out your ass. Not only are love bans legal in Japan, they are still practiced in multiple idol companies. The same thing goes for korean idol groups.
A few years ago, a Tokyo judge ruled that an idol company was wrong to enforce a contract where they demanded compensation for the talent violating their love ban rule when she was caught going to a love hotel with her boyfriend. The judge ruled that it was illegal to force her to pay millions of yen in damages because even though she destroyed her image and thus the investment in her by the company. But he did not rule that firing her was illegal. And she was absolutely fired.
Many idol agencies, even ones like AKB that claim to no longer have a love ban, have defacto love bans. If you are caught dating, you are either expected to graduate by your fans and the other talent or, if you refuse to resign, you become madogiwazoku, which basically means the company won't fire you, but they will reduce promoting you, refrain from including you in events, make it more difficult to accomplish anything, assign you meaningless busy work, increase their demands of you while lowering what they give you, etc. until you finally decide to quit on your own
I don't think Cover operates like this, but it's possible. Many of us who were around back then have always thought it might have been what they did to Coco because of the china shit back in 2020/2021. Cover prevented her from collabing with other members, which Aqua later said directly, they didn't invite her to the New Year's stream, and she wasn't allowed to collab with EN members at all until she announced she would be graduating. Some people said they were only doing that to protect the others from the chinese, but they also inundated Coco with new rules all the time, making her solo streams and projects harder, and I still find it incredibly difficult to believe that the event that made her finally choose to quit, the time a staff member "accidentally" removed all her mods and made her list of banned chinese spammers mods instead was anything other than deliberate. There is no way someone could mess up that bad.
So I think Cover is absolutely capable and willing to force some of the girls out becuase of relationship stuff. Or it could be something like Fauna told them she planned on having children and so she wanted to be exempt from having to travel to Japan and they said that wasn't possible.
