Tsunku♀ has announced they won’t get their major debut unless they get 10,000 people to send in a photo of themselves with a smiling face…

http://www.helloproject.com/egao/index.html

The form to fill in is here:

http://form.s-mileage.jp/form

• Email Address
• Age
• Gender
• Newsletter y/n

Then you get taken to a page to upload a picture.

SUPPORT THEM!!

After parcelforce admitted to losing my calendars that were sent back in December I had no choice but to re-order them (well the one that was still in stock anyway). And finally it arrived and I have something to put on my wall!

Bigger than last years one, more room to write stuff and actually use it like a calendar, lol. Shame there will be no Shugo Chara one this year though. (I do find it funny that last year’s Shugo Chara calendar had more raunchy NSFW pictures than the desk calendar I got from frontwing at comiket… which has none.)

Oh, and I can’t go without mentioning this; everyone remembers this episode from Haruhi right?

Well, Kadokawa made an iPhone app for the game they were playing, even available in English too:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tdos3-for-iphone/id355488055

I’ve only played it a little bit, but it pretty much matches what I remember from the episode… except slightly more simple. My only complaint with it is that the controls and moving around the map aren’t exactly great, sometimes doesn’t quite click where you wanted it to. But other than that, surely worth £1.19.

Well today has certainly been hilarious, some Morning Musume fans in hysteria proclaiming the end of Hello Project, some AKB fans taking the opportunity to rub it in, and the rest of us just finding the whole thing amusing…

The weekly sales figures for Morning Musume’s single “Onna ga Medatte Naze Ikenai” which was released last week:

http://www.oricon.co.jp/rank/js/w/

The daily sales figures for yesterday for AKB48′s single “Sakura no Shiori” which was released yesterday:

http://www.oricon.co.jp/rank/js/d/

I think the numbers are pretty self explanatory. But just for some perspective:

• That’s more copies sold by AKB48 in a day than the total of all of Hello Project(Morning Musume, Berryz, C-ute, Buono!, S/mileage, Guardians4, and Mano Erina)’s respective acts last singles sold in their entire first week.
• More copies sold in a single day than Morning Musume managed to sell in the entire of 2009.

As for why, well let me write down my thoughts…

First the facts of each song:

AKB48 – Sakura no Shiori:

• Ending theme to a drama airing at midnight, central theme of drama involves school graduations.
• Song is about graduations.
• AKB48 are all over TV.
• PV directed by an award winning well known film director.

Morning Musume – Onna ga Medatte Naze Ikenai:

• Ending theme for February for a news program that airs at around 1.30am.
• Song is about women wearing make-up.
• Promotion of the song was lacklustre at best.
• PV directed by ???

So with it nearly being school graduation time the odds were already stacked against Morning Musume before we even get to actually hearing the song or watching the PV:

AKB48 – Sakura no Shiori:

Morning Musume – Onna ga Medatte Naze Ikenai:

And what observations can be made about that then:

AKB48:

• Nice melodic song (“beautiful” would be an appropriate description) sung by what could be a class of schoolgirls singing. Fit for purpose as a song for graduation.
• And as for the PV well you can certainly tell a decent director has worked on it. Again fits the song perfectly.

Morning Musume:

• As put by tasukidaisuki: over-synthed vocals mixed with mega drive game battle music. What exactly is their target audience with this? What genre does it even fall into?
• Yet again the members singing most of the lines are the same old ones singing most of the lines in all of their other recent songs. Makes you wonder what the point of the rest of the group is.
• And yet again the PV is just some miscellaneous dancing in front of a miscellaneous background with some miscellaneous close up shots scattered haphazardly throughout. If you look at it on it’s own it might not be so bad, but if you look at in comparison to their prior 41 PV’s then this formula is somewhat tiresome. *roll dice, make PV, rinse, repeat*

And I think we can see fairly easily why the sales figures are the way they are.

The only conclusion I have is that tsunku♀ doesn’t really care anymore. It seems as if he’s just making Morning Musume release new singles for the sake of releasing new singles. There is no target, no direction whatsoever. Perhaps all he does want to do is continue selling to the same set of fans over and over again until it comes to the point where it costs more money to release a single than they make back in sales.

I think ambition (or the lack of it) is the real reason for other idol bands (or even certain seiyuu *cough*Nana Mizuki*cough*) overtaking them in sales. I’m sure if tsunku♀ had the desire to make a good single + PV he could…. but I just don’t think he cares anymore.

If I were in charge here would be my possible suggestions (some more drastic than others, lol):

1) Graduate all members and have a year long nationwide TV talent show where the member graduating picks the girl that’s going to replace her in the “next generation”… MorningMusume2.0. And make sure not to make the same mistakes with v2.0 as with v1.0 lol.

2) Don’t graduate anyone or add any new members, re-order the assignment of lines in songs based on singing ability and who harmonises with who…… rather than the current method of assigning lines based on seniority and completely ignoring singing ability. Let Linlin lead a song by herself, she can sing!!

3) Have a PV that doesn’t have them in it at all. Get a decent director, and maybe a vaguely famous actor or something, make it exciting. And get the song onto something popular, be it an advert or a TV show airing at a reasonable time. And then get the entire group all over tv and into the public eye at all times rather than just the few weeks leading up to a single release.

A few days late writing this, but never mind.

So, left work on Friday, got lucky with the train as I managed to get on an earlier one that had been delayed, and was thus speeding to get to London on time. Meant I got into Euston just before rush hour started,  so straight on a tube train and got a seat! Arrived at Angel earlier than I was expecting, and a short phone call/wave later and I slipped into the line. ^_^

Lots of *dodgy* old geezers walking up/down the line trying to sell tickets for £50 each……… so that’s where all the tickets went, lol.

Eventually got inside after a very cold wait, seemed to be about the same size as the place Momoi had her concert at at Ayacon (no seats, all standing etc). Gotta say the staff inside were incomprehensibly stupid though. Mr CDevil had all of his glowsticks confiscated from the nazi bouncers while I was off buying pints of beer… supposedly because he might throw them on stage. So, a small plastic glowstick wristband is against the rules because it might be thrown on stage, but pints of beer or bottles of alcopops are perfectly acceptable because there’s no chance of anyone throwing them on stage? Yeah right. Illogical.

Anyway yes, the first hour and a half or so was just the DJ, DJ Mike Rizzo…… or not. We did all think it was a bit odd that “Mike” appeared to be wearing a pink dress and looking slightly feminine. But we just assumed it was Mike as all the reports we’d heard from America indicated that the DJ wasn’t very good… which this DJ wasn’t (whoever she was). The most entertaining thing was the fact she stood there stonefaced as if she wasn’t enjoying anything while people in the crowd shouted “SMILE!!!!” at her, lol.

Finally the concert started and all was well, the crowd were very loud, and no pushing at all. She sung a range of stuff from all throughout her musical history, and between songs spoke to the crowd about various things, generally responding to everything anyone shouted out etc. Said she wanted to live in London because she likes the grey weather (saying grey skies were like people on a blank canvas or something similarly artsy), but pointed out that she needs a visa. It also turned out that the DJ was not in fact DJ Mike Rizzo, but some random person Hikki met in a bar in Greece, lol.

The crowd was very international, people from all over Europe had come. Japan’s biggest ever selling female artist’s first concert in Europe and all they gave her was a dingy 800 capacity venue in a backstreet of Islington. Easy to see why it sold out so quick.

I’ve gotta say that even if her music isn’t really my favourite sort of music, I can certainly appreciate her singing (hmm… “powerful” I guess would be a good description), and she certainly seemed friendly.

She was up there for 2 hours, now that’s the length a concert should be! I didn’t manage to get any of the balls she threw but that was ok, we’d heard there was going to be some sort of autograph session out back after the show (assuming you knew where to go and stand).

So once the show was over we made a quick dash to the autograph session location and got right to the front of the barriers. Some of her staff were there with cameras filming everyone and talking about what was going to happen (something about them needing more people as if you’re filming over a certain number of people it counts as a “crowd” and you don’t need to make the participants sign release forms). So we’re all waiting there freezing with pens and stuff to sign in our hands, bouncers all around us. Eventually she + her manager drive out in their car, slow down in front of the barriers while waving………………………………………… THEN DROVE OFF!!!!!!!!!! >_< LOL

Suffice to say everyone had been tricked, and they just wanted to get some footage of a bunch of fans screaming/waving at her. One of the cameramen jokingly said “and that’s what she really thinks of you” after she drove off, lol. It was pretty funny really. (though I get the feeling some people were slightly pissed off at the whole thing)

But yeah, pretty good concert overall. It’s not everyday someone of Utada Hikaru’s calibre is performing in your own back yard. Maybe she’ll come back again one day.

So after failing to find the Yumeiro Patissiere recipe book anywhere while in Japan, and then getting home and finding out Amazon.co.jp would take 3-4 weeks to get it in stock…….. it’s finally here!!

(anyone get the feeling the dodgy Chinese factory that made the plastic sweets was colour blind… an almost white strawberry? )

Now of course because of Amazon Japan’s extortionate shipping costs you can’t just get one thing, it’s better to buy lots to justify the cost right? (…yes… keep telling yourself that, lol) So I got the OP/ED theme single for the series; they’re both pretty nice catchy songs actually:

And in addition Shida Mirai’s diary + photobook thingy. Blog in book form. ^_^ Hopefully one day she’ll be in some film that gains huge worldwide popularity and then can come to a UK premiere.