Nostalgia vs. New Ideas vs. No Ideas.

By: The Incredible He-Hulk


Today, in a bit of shocking news, pandering teen network The-N revealed that the cast of Degrassi would play the roles of Saved By The Bell’s iconic characters in a remake of the hit series Beverly Hills 90210...
In other less shocking (but slightly realer) news, H!P has recently announced the release of Chanpuru 1~Happy Marriage Song Cover Shuu~, a new album that features their current idol groups pantomiming the roles of slightly older and more iconic H!P groups while they sing cover versions of even older non-H!P J-pop songs.

Now, I’m all for nostalgia. Who doesn’t love Mini Moni, Pucchimoni, Decamoni, Insta-moni, and Vodka Moni On The Rocks? Nobody, that’s who. H!P has a fantastic past that is worth exploring and remembering. But, I have to wonder just who this album is supposed to be for...
Is this album to acquaint newer fans with H!P's past that weren’t around during these older groups’s heyday? If so, why have them sing covers of song’s that these groups never sang in the first place? Or, is the album for current fans who have been fans long enough that they fondly remember H!P’s glory days? If that’s the case, why not just have the girls sing songs from the groups that they are actually reforming?

If this was simply a one-time deal, then I don’t think anyone would mind a cover album. Cover albums can be fun. But what we’ve seen over the last year is H!P releasing cover after cover after cover. It’s as if H!P has their own "Hits from the 70's, 80's and 90's!" radio station now.
Cover You, Pepper Keibu, Dschinghis Khan, Edo no Temari Uta II, Shochū Omimai Mōshiagemasu; the list of covers done in the last calendar year is long and not so distinguished, Ice Man. Couple those tracks with this newest release and H!P artists doing covers has become a habitual trend.

Now, having old ideas that worked before shoved in our faces in place of new ideas is nothing new. That’s Transformers the movie; that’s Rocky VI. But, what H!P is doing with Chanpuru 1~Happy is twice as garish and twice as lazy. They’re taking their old ideas that worked once and then merging them with old ideas somebody else had that worked once. And, what’s worse, through this process they’re telling us they don’t have any new ideas of their own. They’re telling us they don’t want to pay anyone else enough money to come up with new ideas, either. And, most importantly, they’re telling us that they know we’re too dedicated to these girls to even care. They know we're caught in the catch-22 of the idol fan. Do you buy a crappy, boring CD to support the idols you enjoy so much? Or, do you refuse to buy terrible products and in doing so hurt the idols you want so badly to see succeed?

Like Pavlov’s dogs, the bell rings and we are fed. It matters not the food. We will always be hungry again when the bell tolls anew...

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Ichigo ichie 6/18 pt 2 - Kusumi guest appearance

By: Zabel


I often get asked where one can go to listen to Ichigo ichie. The show is up for 24 hours every thursday-friday on the official fan club site, but you need to be a member in order to access the page. For the rest of us, a kind person, usually H!O member lovemusic, uploads the show in mp3 format weekly. You can get it by regularly checking the Takahashi thread at H!O, or the H!P's TV appearances, radio shows, magazine thread at Jpopmusic might be easier.

Ichigo ichie 6/18 continued

With the year half over, Aichan lists her "Best 3":

#3. Ojigi de shape up!
#2. The Platinum 9 disk spring tour
#1. Anime Expo

They talk about the upcoming 11.5 hour flight to Los Angeles, about eating, sleeping, talking, and watching movies on planes.

And here's Koharu's "Best 3":

#3. She learned how to make sweets.
#2. She grew in height.
#1. She grew inside.

According to Koharu, she noticed that she had grown in height today lol. Not because she measured herself or anything, but when she looked in the mirror that day her clothes seemed smaller. This could be because her clothes shrunk, thinks Aichan. Koharu blames that on her mom who washes her clothes. XD She calls her mom 'baka' (idiot) over this, but Aichan chides her that if she did her own laundry she would realize how easy it is to get items mixed up.

Aichan gives Koha an even harder time about that claim about growing inside.

Aichan: "You lie! That's your #1 lie."
Koharu: "What? You can see for yourself."
Aichan: "I can't tell at all."
Koharu: "Really? Haven't I become more like an adult?"
Aichan: "Wait until after you've had a few more birthdays to say that."
Koharu: "I'm already 17."
Aichan: (pronouncing '17' in english) "17. You think that's okay?"
Koharu: "Totally! Inside I feel like I'm 20."
Aichan: "You lie!"

But Aichan admits that Koharu acts like an adult when they go out to eat together. Koha insists that she is always an adult but Aichan isn't buying it. Koharu wants to be 18 so she can drive. She wants to drive with passengers.

It's time for the Tettekete advice corner. "Oh, is that what 'tettekete' means?", asks Koharu. A listener with a friend going to study abroad in Australia wants to give a gift to help him remember Japan. Aichan suggests soy sauce (in English). Koharu spaces out here, asking to have the question repeated to her, and more than once muttering New Zealand instead of Australia as she brainstorms. She tries to think of what she would like to have if she were going overseas, and among the ideas she comes up with are hamburgers, dried plums, seaweed, cuttlefish, clothing, her big sister, a blanket, a futon. She could go on forever. Aichan does her best to wrap up the segment.

Ichigo ichie has a new sticker that Aichan will be signing and giving away to each person whose mail she reads on the show, as well as to one person randomly selected. Just when I was about to give up trying to get my message read. And, next week she will announce Morning Musume's new single.

Lastly, Aichan always signs off saying, "This has been Takahashi Ai who wants to ___." and has her guests do likewise. How does Koharu sign off? "This has been Kusumi Koharu who wants to run a marathon!"

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Ichigo ichie 6/18 pt 1 - Kusumi guest appearance

By: Zabel


Ichigo went for over 48 minutes this week. That's more than twice the usual length! I suppose since it is broadcast on the web rather than the radio, they can record for as long as they darn well please. Anyway, I'm gonna seize the excuse to break this up into two segments.

Ojigi de shape up! has concluded, and we can expect to hear talk about this topic and others from Aichan and guest Kusumi Koharu.

Ichigo ichie 6/18

Aichan plays a recording of backstage on the last day of Ojigi. There's a Sayumi impersonator in their midst XD We hear a low voice say, "I'm Michishigerogero Sayumi" ('gerogero' means 'disgusting') All in good fun. Aichan goes around asking everyone to name something they discovered through doing Ojigi, and this cast member, who they call 'Acchan', responds that she didn't know Morning Musume were such good people. Kamei discovered that "Morning Musume is the best". XD Especially the leader and her acting, she adds.

Continuing with the recording, Aichan finds Sayumi to ask her the same question, also telling her about the "Michishigerogero" joke that Acchan made. Sayumi says that she never met such a mean person before in her life XD Acchan is in the room with them and some banter commences. The two of them make a good comedic pair. Aichan says that they are actually friends. In this Ojigi blog post, Sayumi wrote about putting a pink ribbon on Acchan.

The recording ends. From there Aichan is about to talk about her experience acting in the play when it becomes apparent that there is another person in the studio lol. So it's time to introduce noisy Koharu-chan. In fact, we learned from the Kamei guest appearance that there are five or so people in the room with Aichan while Ichigo is recorded, which was embarrassing for Aichan until she got used to it. Koharu tells us that there are several cameras in the room. Cameras? Hmm.

Aichan and the crew performed Ojigi de shape up! 15 times. Koharu sat up in the front beside Gaki-san when she watched, and she found the play funny. It made her want to participate herself. She watched while wondering who came up with all them names. She didn't get a chance to see Ojigi 30 do because she had a cold at the time.

This time around Aichan was required to cry as part of the script! Well, we wouldn't expect such a thing to be hard for our lovely crybaby, but it was trickier than one might think to play the role correctly. At first in rehearsals she was crying too early, whereas the character she plays, Karin, is the strong type who wouldn't cry so quickly. The play couldn't proceed unless Aichan cried at the right time, so she was under pressure. It seems that the director Ota said, "It doesn't matter what it's about, but I wanted to have Takahashi Ai cry." Gosh I can't wait to watch the video when it is released!

Aichan asks Koharu to do one of her better imitations. Koharu hasn't been feeling confident about her imitations lately, but she does the Mario jump sound for us. Hehe cute. They address a listener mail asking how to keep a bubble bath going.

Then the "Ainote irete kudasai" segment (合の手入れてください). Aichan recommends the children's fantasy movie The Spiderwick Chronicles, and Koharu recommends Crayon Shin-chan, which she has been bicycling to the rental store to get lately. Aichan's mom likes it too.

To be continued.

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Ichigo ichie 6/11 - Aichan's next challenge

By: Zabel


Yo! Zabel here. Ever since Takahashi Ai began hosting her web talk show Ichigo ichie in April, I've been writing about it at my blog Lovelitude. Beginning today you'll be able to find these summaries here every weekend. Note that they are not intended to be comprehensive, and I try to keep them reasonably short.

Ichigo ichie 6/11

Lovely opens with a little fukui speak for us, "ほやさけ～" which is equivalent to だから ("That's why...").

Today a girl from Brazil sent in a letter saying that she studies Japanese on her Nintendo DS and does Aichan study English on her DS? (this made me a little mad for not having thought of asking the question myself grrrr) Well, Aichan has the software, but hasn't been using it. She praises the listener's Japanese...and then goes on to recommend Final Fantasy to her XD It's sort of the same topic I guess.

Aichan saw Across the Universe, a movie featuring a lot of Beatles music, together with Mako soon after Mako returned from New Zealand. She wanted to see it because Bono was in it, and ended up liking it. (I wonder what movies Aichan doesn't like?) Well there were strawberry fields in the movie, so I suppose she had no choice.

The TV drama Aichan starred in earlier this year, Q.E.D. Shoumei Shuuryou, will come to DVD on June 24th. It seems that the box set includes extra 'making of' content. If Aichan has the chance, she would like to play the role of a mother next time. This because her own mother had her at age 21, and because she watched Ueto Aya playing such a role. She would also like try more action scenes. We wouldn't mind her getting them, would we?

The topics in the 'Tettekette' advice corner were unusually light today. The first listener can't decide whether to go with straight hair or to get a perm. In junior high where it was against the rules, Aichan wanted a wave perm but got a straight perm thinking that she wouldn't get found out, but was found out anyway.

A second listener gets leg cramps while sleeping. Aichan, too, has her toes cramp when in bed. She suggests doing stretches, but will go ask Sayumi, who also gets frequent cramps.

Kusumi Koharu will be a guest next week.

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Berryz Koubou Alo-Hello! Preview Subtitle Release

By: The Incredible He-Hulk

To those who are eagerly anticipating this (I am!), we thought it would be fun to subtitle H!P’s little preview for you. It does a great job dropping a few teasers, building anticipation, but still not spoiling anything for anyone.
If you aren’t drooling in anticipation after watching this, you might be an inhuman monster incapable of drooling…

Anyhow, this preview also serves as notice that ICU-Subs are going to subtitle this Berryz Alo-Hello. The H!P Kids are, after all, ICU-Subs’ domaine d'expertise. We will begin working on it the day it comes out. We have most of the crew working on it, instead of just one or two people per project, as per usual. So, hopefully we should have this out lickity-split.

Look forward to it.

click here to grab the preview.

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Berryz Koubou Fan no Tsudoi 2008 Subtitle Release

By: The Incredible He-Hulk



The Berryz Koubou Fan no Tsudoi is the millionaire’s club of Berryz events. Only for loyal fan club members, it’s half-theater, half-farce, half-performance piece, half-fan interactive.

The premise is simple: The event is a stage play in which Berryz Koubou’s super-hero alter-ego’s, The Berryz Kamen (think Power Rangers minus the power), hold a meeting to discuss their TV show’s (Yes, they have a TV show) sagging ratings compared to C-utie Ranger (Yes, that’s also a fake TV show), their generally horrible performance as heroes, and how they can possibly turn it all around. But, in a deliciously avant-garde twist, the Berryz frequently break character, talk to the audience, make snide comments about each other’s acting, and generally screw around a bunch, much to the delight of the fans in attendance. Basically, the 4th wall doesn’t just get broken, it gets obliterated. They even somehow find the time to sneak in a few musical numbers, and then end things with a shocking, hair-raising…not the least bit surprising if you’re a Berryz fan… cliff-hanger of a surprise ending. Truthfully, if you know your Berryz, you’ll realize that it just couldn’t have possibly ended any other way, and since the 2009 Fan no Tsudoi is a direct sequel to this event, you’ll get plenty more madness soon enough…

And now, for the 3 people who care, some methodology...
When, taking on a release like this you often have to go with what works, even if you don't really want to. Case in point: I don't like having each girl's subtitled text color-coded based on her merchandise color. Generally it's an annoyance, and everyone's subtitle being the same color is preferable. But, with the Tsudoi there was simply just way too much off-screen dialogue and too much of the girl's talking over one another to do anything else but color-code the girl's dialogue. So, in order to have a bit of fun with it, we decided to color-code it based, not on their merchandise colors, but on their Berryz Kamen colors. Thus, you'll see Maasa's dialogue as red & yellow, and Risako's as blue & green, etc. Overall, I think it worked rather well, and it adds a bit of flair to the proceedings.

Another consideration was the tongue-twister segment as there simply never appeared to be a great way to subtitle it. The nature of a tongue-twister is that it only really makes sense in the actual language it is being spoken in and so translation into English sort of diminishes how it sounds and it's difficulty. Eventually, we decided to translate it into Romaji while it was on screen, so people could get a look at the actual phonetic nature of the tongue-twister first, then we literally translated it into English when Maasa demoed the tongue-twister for the girls. After that, each girl attempted the twister themselves, and we decided to simply leave it untranslated on subsequent girls' attempts, as you already knew what they were saying and the point of the segment is how badly they stumble over the words, something that constantly repeating the same translation over and over didn't accentuate and simply obscured. Overall, I think we handled this difficult section rather well.

Anyway, click here to grab it.

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Idol Chatter

By: The Incredible He-Hulk

“You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.”
- Robert Walton in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein.

A journal is a record of ones personal thoughts; ones own, sometimes brutish, many times biased, opinions. Quite often, a blog is little more than that, despite the fact that it is for all to see, that it has been given over to the world for consumption. But, much like a gift is wrapped before it’s given to others, should one not burnish ones own opinions before presenting them to the world? Too often, it seems, a blog is created just for the owner and the owner alone, which makes on question the point of publishing it in the first place.

This is the question that occupies me when I view most H!P idol blogs. They are so often a disparate jumble of posts. All over the map ideas that aren’t really about much of anything:

“This just in: Ai’s so pretty.”

“Breaking news: Look at my new t-shirt and glow sticks I bought!”

“…PICSPAM!!!”

As far as Ai goes, truer words have never been uttered, but posts like these are really just so much doggerel.

These musings are the fires in which Idol Chatter was born. Idol Chatter is a blog that attempts to codify idol chat. To provide a standard for discussion that helps make “idolitry” even more fun and compelling by making H!P more interesting to talk about.

Truthfully, that’s a lot of pressure to put on just one man, and if it were up to me alone this site would quickly fall into desuetude. Luckily, one is never alone on this earth, or in his enjoyment of idols, and I’m getting more than a little help from my friends.

Because of all this help, Idol Chatter will become a swiftly flowing stream of idol information. Not only will get you get compelling discussion from a wide range of people, but you’ll get compelling information, too, and not simply information on new H!P releases, or appearance, dates and other things you can get anywhere. You’ll get translations of articles, interviews and radio shows that help you get closer look at your favorite idols. You’ll get an inside look at concerts, appearances and events from the very people who attend them to help you get closer to the actual idol culture. And, you’ll get analysis of H!P releases, what these releases say about H!P’s intentions for their idols and what the releases say about H!P’s past and the future.

So, it is with these assurances that I offer to you this blog. An amalgamation of so many; a walking, talking Frankenstein of idol opinion.

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