Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in madara_blog's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, March 25th, 2012
6:36 pm	Seiko Matsuda: Happy 50th Birthday Earlier this year, when watching Seiko Matsuda’s appearance on Kohaku Uta Gassen 2011, I’d made note of the fact that the J-pop diva, whose peak period of popularity lasted from 1980 to the early ’90s, would be turning 50 on March 10 of this year and I resolved to do a blog entry to commemorate that fact. Well, I clean forgot until this past week, when I picked up two items of hers, an album, “Love: Seiko Matsuda 20th Anniversary Best Selection,” and a concert DVD, “Concert Tour 2006: Bless You.” So, I’m doing a 50th birthday tribute to her a couple of weeks late. ( Read More ) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 6th, 2012
10:16 pm	C-ute’s Latest Album: A Short Review I have such a backlog of stuff to listen to, watch, and review. I have some Hello! Project Blu-rays, including the Summer 2011 concert and the Berryz/C-ute “Collabo” concert from last fall. Plus the latest Buono concert and lots of albums from singers I was turned onto by the FNS Music Festival and Kohaku Uta Gassen, including Hiromi Iwasaki, Mai Kuraki, Ayaka Hirahara, and Nanase Aikawa. (See my entries from December 31, 2011 to January 22, 2012). I’ve moved the latest Berryz and C-ute albums, “Ai no Album 8” and “Dai Nana Sho ‘Utsukushikutte Gomenne,’” to the top of the list, simply because I’ve paid closer attention to them and listened to them repeatedly over the past few days. I’ll start with the C-ute album because I think it deserves its own entry. ( Read More ) (Comment on this)
Monday, February 20th, 2012
7:58 am	"The Izu Dancer" - Two more versions Following up on the February 7th blog entry on “The Izu Dancer,” I managed to acquire and view two additional film versions of this story, both titled “Izu no Odoriko,” one made in 1963 with the actress Sayuri Yoshinaga in the role, and one made in 1974 with 1970s pop star Momoe Yamaguchi. As with the “Shinshun! Love Stories” DVD from 2002, both of these were in Japanese with no subtitles. Both were about a half-hour longer than the “Izu Dancer” segment of “Shinshun!” so they had even more expanded dialogue scenes that weren’t in the story or the animated version that I discussed last time. Still, I knew enough about what was going on to be able to follow the gist of it. ( Read More ) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 7th, 2012
8:02 pm	"The Izu Dancer" - Two versions of a Japanese classic, one with Maki Goto I found a DVD in Book Off with pictures of all the members of Morning Musume, ca. 2002, on the case and the English title, “Love Stories” under a title in Japanese letters. Intrigued, I bought it and took it home and learned that it was a collection of three dramas shown on Japanese television (TBS) on January 2, 2002 (ten years ago) under the title “Shinshun! Love Stories.” It contains adaptations of the classic story, “The Izu Dancer”; the popular manga, “Smart-san”; and “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time,” a story I’d previously seen in both animated and live-action movie versions. Morning Musume had 13 members at the time and they’re divided up so that three of them are in the first story, seven in the second and three in the third. As expected, the whole thing was in Japanese with no subtitles, so I got out my copy of “The Izu Dancer and Other Stories” and read the story by Yasunari Kawabata in preparation for watching the version of that story on the new DVD. ( Read More ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 22nd, 2012
6:18 am	Kohaku Uta Gassen: Highlights, Part 2 Part 2 opens with a number by Arashi, the five-member boy band that’s acting as co-hosts with Mako Inoue. This song is not listed on the tracklist I found on the Tokyograph website, but it seems to be called “Furusato” (Hometown), or so the announcer seems to say. ( Read More ) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, January 16th, 2012
10:49 pm	Kohaku Uta Gassen: Highlights, Part 1 Now for the second big end-of-year music festival from Japan. This one ran on NHK on December 31, 2011, a four-and-a-half-hour spectacle that ended with the New Year’s countdown. There are fewer acts in this one than in FNS (covered in the two previous blog entries), chiefly because there’s only one stage here. Also, even though there are no commercials here, there are more MC segments, plus assorted remote and documentary segments related to the relief efforts after the earthquake/tsunami last March, all of which take up even more time than commercials. One chief difference between the two shows is the emphasis on production value in Kohaku. The bigger stage lent itself to bigger backgrounds, more elaborate lighting effects and greater numbers of back-up singers and dancers on stage. ( Read More ) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 10th, 2012
10:29 pm	FNS Music Festival: Highlights, Part 2 Lots to cover, too little time. I still haven’t finished my piece on Petit Best 12, but I got so caught up in FNS Music Festival that I had to put it aside. And now I’ve got Kohaku Uta Gassen to cover as well, the four-and-a-half-hour New Year’s Eve music special, which features many of the same acts that were in FNS. Plus, I bought 12 CDs by artists I first heard in FNS. Plus, my Blu-ray editions of the Hello! Project Summer 2011 concert and the Morning Musume Fall concert (with Ai’s graduation) have arrived. So first, let me finish FNS Music Festival. Picking up where I left off after Dream Morning Musume, the next big highlight for me was a duet by Ken Hirai and Hiroko Yakushimaru. I know Hirai is very popular, but this festival is the first time I’ve heard him. I may not rush to buy his CDs, but I found him quite a pleasant entertainer. The real thrill here was the chance to finally hear Ms. Yakushimaru. ( Read More ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 31st, 2011
11:55 pm	FNS Music Festival: Highlights, Pt. 1 I’ve become totally obsessed with this 2-disc four-hour end-of-year music festival from Japan’s Fuji Network, featuring an all-star lineup, from past, present and future, of a wide spectrum of Japanese popular music. It was broadcast live on December 7 and was strongly recommended to me by Kitaoji from MM-BBS. I was able to get a copy from a Japanese video store and I’ve watched it multiple times since and still have to take detailed notes of the second half to get everything I want from it. I’m going to cover it in installments, since it’s taking me so long to go through it and there’s so much I want to cover in it. ( Read More ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 25th, 2011
8:48 pm	Merry Christmas! While waiting for Christmas dinner to begin at my brother's house, I managed to get control of the computer in order to play various Christmas-themed Hello! Project songs and videos, including Buono's "Winter Story" and C-ute's "Aitai Lonely Christmas," all with the goal of livening things up, although with the predictable result of achieving the exact opposite, i.e. the wholesale alienation of assorted nephews, cousins, in-laws, etc. No surprises there. In any event, after going through the usual repertoire, I discovered this delightful dance number of Morning Musume doing Christmas songs with various Disney characters at Tokyo Disneyland from Christmas 2000, a few months after 4th Gen joined up. In the spirit of the holidays, I thought I'd share it with you: Merry Christmas! (Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 21st, 2011
7:40 am	Petit Best 12: Some nice surprises, Pt. 1 I bought both the CD and DVD of Petit Best 12, the annual compilation of singles/music videos from Hello! Project. I’ve covered previous volumes on this blog. It’s a helpful way of assessing the state of H!P every year and recalling the best (and worst) of the year. I listened to the CD first and determined that I didn’t like many of the songs. I was ready to call it the worst Petit Best collection ever. But then I watched the DVD, which I should have done first. Turns out I enjoy WATCHING the videos way more than listening to the songs. Most of them are fairly well shot and filled with gorgeous closeups of the girls and nice dance shots. (In fact, I wish the Dance Shot versions were included on the DVD. I hate having to buy the single, Limited Edition A, for every song just to get the Dance Shot Version.) The PVs are all pretty upbeat and exuberant, with none of the ponderous solo numbers I used to chapter-skip when re-watching earlier Petit Best volumes. (Yes, Maki, Nacchi, Aya, et al, I loved your songs, but long, endless shots of sitting and staring out the window don’t make for the most exciting PVs.) ( Read More ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, December 5th, 2011
10:09 pm	14th Pokémon movie shows up in theaters I’m a big fan of the Pokémon movies and have followed them closely since the very first one in 1999 (POKÉMON: THE FIRST MOVIE). The 14th Pokémon movie, POKÉMON THE MOVIE WHITE: VICTINI AND ZEKROM, premiered on Sat.-Sun. Dec. 3-4 at selected theaters around the country, including several in Manhattan and the Bronx, one showing each morning and that was it. So there I was at the 10:35 AM showing this past Saturday morning. There were about 30 other people in the theater, a mix of parents and kids. ( Read More ) (Comment on this)
Monday, November 14th, 2011
7:18 am	Dream Morning Musume Concert: A dream come true... The “Dream Morning Musume Concert Tour 2011 Haru no Mai ~Sotsugyousei De Saikessei~” is just what the doctor ordered for weary Hello! Project fans. It’s the closest we’re going to get to an Elder Club reunion—and probably even better!—and it’s the next best thing to a classic Morning Musume concert from the group’s peak period, 2000-2004. For this concert, they managed to round up ten former MM members—Yuko, Kaori, Nacchi, Kei, Mari, Rika, Yossi, Makoto, Miki and Koharu—and give them a lineup of 19 classic MM songs that are perfectly suited to them. ( Read More ) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 25th, 2011
11:20 pm	New discovery: 1952 Japanese film with Hibari Misora and an American star Back on Dec. 2, 2009, I did a blog entry on a Japanese film called “Janken Musume” (1955), a color musical which starred a singing trio known as “Sannin Musume,” the lead star of which was Hibari Misora, who was the reigning recording star in Japan in the postwar era and who made quite a number of films in the 1950s. In researching Misora’s movie career, I found one film that really intrigued me because it co-starred an American actress who was well-known at the time and who was the same age as Misora. When I learned this film was available on DVD from CDJapan, I immediately ordered it and watched it when it arrived. The film is called “Futari no Hitomi” (official English title: “Girls Hand in Hand”) and it was made in 1952 and co-starred Misora and Margaret O’Brien. ( Read More ) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 17th, 2011
10:43 pm	New York Comic Con 2011, Part 2: Pictures at an Exhibition Following are some random pictures I took on the two days I was there. The line to get in: ( Read More ) (Comment on this)
Sunday, October 16th, 2011
3:13 pm	New York Comic Con 2011 In 2009 and 2010 my activities at New York Comic Con (merged with the New York Anime Festival) centered around J-pop performers. In 2009 it was AKB48 and in 2010, it was Rika Ishikawa. In earlier years, my focus was usually anime. This year, I attended the convention on Fri. October 14 and Sat. October 15 and my focus was on comic books, the first time in nearly 20 years I’ve made that my focus at a comic convention! There were many comic-related events and panels and a notable array of comic book and book publishers in the dealers room. From my perception, comic books dominated and other media—anime, film, television—had a much lower profile. This struck me as quite a change from recent years. ( Read More ) (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 10th, 2011
4:36 pm	C-ute and S/mileage joint concert – light but fun I tend to prefer S/mileage in small doses—two numbers at the H!P winter concerts, back-up at Erina Mano concerts. There’s more than a small dose of them in the "Cute & S/mileage Premium Live 2011 Spring C&S Collaboration Daisakusen” concert, but C-ute manages to bring out the best in their sister group, making me happy to see S/mileage finally come out from under Mano’s shadow. (They probably did that a long time ago, but I haven’t really been following S/mileage that closely this year.) ( Read More ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, October 2nd, 2011
9:22 pm	Farewell, Ai-chan! It’s been a decade of joy Man, I’m having a hard time processing Ai Takahashi’s graduation from Morning Musume and the induction of 10th Gen—four new members on top of the four 9th Gen members added just nine months ago. It’s a bit too much to take in at one time. Just to center myself, I watched some of Morning Musume’s Best of Japan Spring 2004 concert last night, to remind myself why I signed on to all this in the first place. Back when Kaori, Mari, and all of 4th Gen, 5th Gen and 6th Gen were still in the group. Nacchi was gone, but the group was still at its peak. And what a great concert that was. It would all start to end when Aibon and Nono graduated at the Summer 2004 H!P concert a few months later, leaving the group with 12 members. And here we are back again at a 12-member MM, with eight of them recruited this year alone. We’ll see what changes are in store for the group. But now I want to pay tribute to Ai Takahashi, who’d been in the group since 2001. ( Read More ) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 28th, 2011
9:54 pm	Yukio Mishima meets Janken Musume In Paul Schrader’s movie, MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS (1985), a drama about Japanese author and public figure Yukio Mishima, there are dramatizations of scenes from three of Mishima’s novels. At the 38:40 mark, we see the first shot from “Kyoko’s House” and, after a short scene in a theater, the film cuts to a woman sitting in her empty diner watching TV when her son, Osamu, the novel’s protagonist, walks in. At 39:39, we see on the woman’s portable black-and-white TV set a scene from a movie which I immediately recognized as JANKEN MUSUME (1955), the color musical starring postwar teen recording star Hibari Misora that I wrote about here on Dec. 2, 2009. (L-R: Hibari Misora, Izumi Yukimura, Chiemi Eri) ( Read More ) (Comment on this)
Friday, September 23rd, 2011
10:44 am	Video Message of Support for Aibon Usako and SacredCultivator from MM-BBS put together this collection of messages of love for Ai Kago. Usako, Josh, and I, the ones who followed Aibon on each of her visits to the New York area, shot some video of each other (and new friend Lawrence) in Kinokuniya Books and around Times Square on Mon. Sept. 12 and it's all in there, along with messages sent in by fans around the world. Now let's hope Aibon gets to see it. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 14th, 2011
5:44 am	Kago-chan, Come Back to New York! Needless to say, we were devastated by the news of Ai Kago’s attempted suicide over the weekend. I learned about it from an e-mail when I went into work on Monday and then went on MM-BBS and read the thread on it. I then sat in my office alone with the door closed all day. (Luckily, my officemate was on vacation and other key personnel were out, so I was able to get away with it.) That evening, I got together with Josh (the “Mozenator”), Holly (Usako on MM-BBS), my companions on past encounters with Aibon during her visits here, and a new friend, Lawrence (whom Josh and Holly met in Seattle at the Berryz Kobo event and who just happened to be visiting the area), and we taped some video messages of support and love for Aibon. I'm not going to try to psychoanalyze Kago or try to explore the source of her difficulties, nor am I going to speculate on the reasons for her actions. Nor am I even going to launch into a rant about the brutal practices of the Japanese pop music industry, no matter how justified such a rant might turn out to be. Instead I want to simply post some of the pictures from Kago’s visits to New Jersey and New York, just to remind her (and us) what a good time she had and how she smiled so much when she was here. ( Read More ) (3 Comments |Comment on this)