2012-07-23 Konya mo Usachan peace highlights

For their latest single 1 2 3, Morning Musume did a lot of campaigning that involved walking around in Shibuya and Odaiba (We saw a lot of this covered on TV). For Sayu, she says this was a first in Morning Musume’s history. It was a brand new experience for her. She said it was interesting to walk around the city in full make up and outfit like that. A lot of people said “Hey that’s Morning Musume!” which made her happy to hear, but quite a few people also said “Who is that? Who are you?” Sayu responded to those people by saying “We are Morning Musume, please support us” That was also a first for her.

When it came to learning the dance for 1 2 3, it was really intimidating at first. After watching the dance teacher show off the choreography for the first time, Sayu thought it was really difficult and was worried she would not be able to get it all down. However, it turns out that it wasn’t that bad in the end. She says that Renai Hunter and Naichau Kamo were much harder. When she saw Only You’s choreography for the first time she thought that one would be really easy to learn. It turned out to be pretty hard for her though. The main moves are pretty easy but she said moving your hands and feet together makes it a lot harder than it looks.

Sayu moves on to read a bunch of emails wishing her a happy birthday. She gets a question about birthday presents and says for a period of time she was really into “playing doctor” as a kid. She had this little toy where you had a fake syringe filled with water and a doll. When you inject the water into the doll’s arm the doll would cry. You then had to comfort it and then it would stop crying. She played with that toy a lot by herself.

Also on the topic of birthdays she talks about her recent birthday tshirt design. She said she started thinking about it 6 months ago. She was at a handshake and saw that some people who used to wear her birthday shirt last year had now become Rihoriho fans. She felt like “Well I guess that’s okay, at least he’s still a fan within the group” but then she also was feeling “You are welcome to switch back again, I won’t hold this against you”. That was the basis for this year’s tshirt design.

2012-07-28 Morning Musume Gakuin ~ Houkago Meeting ~ highlights

Host: Iikubo
Guests: Kudu, Daishi

The girls start talking about the traveling they have done since joining Morning Musume. When the 10th gen first joined, one of the first events they did involved them traveling up to Hokkaido. As you know, Maachan is from Hokkaido and obviously she has been to the airport before. However, when they were at the airport, Iikubo saw the weirdest thing from Maachan. They were going up to the metal detector and Maachan logically deduced that if you run full speed through the detector it would be too fast for the device and thus the alarm wouldn’t go off. So she tried and no it did not go off. Iikubo said Maachan looked so relieved. She then said “I’m so glad it didn’t go off”

They move on to the topic about self introductions. Daishi says everyone always seems to have a catch phrase to say but she can never think of anything. For example, Iikubo has her Jojo thing. Daishi says she doesn’t have much to say other than she really likes watermelon. Iikubo suggests that she do something similar to Rihoriho, who loves cider. Since cider => shuwa shuwa pon (a fizzy, bubbly onomatopoeia), Daishi wonders what would be the equivalent for watermelon? Iikubo comes up with “shaki shaki pu” (an onomatopoeia for crunchy, crispy). Kudu says that is not cute at all. Daishi says no way she’s using that.

Lastly, they talk about the recording session for their new song. Iikubo says this story will most likely make everyone feel sad lol. So Iikubo got the time schedule sheet for her recording and it originally gave her a 1 hour block to get it done. On the day of, her manager came up to her and said “Hey could you do it in 20 minutes, thanks” Iikubo said “What, that’s impossible!”. Even the director said “Yeah that’s not happening for Iikubo”. For reference, Iikubo says 20 minutes is like Tanaka level skill so no way she was going to be able to do that. However, after she did the recording she found out it only took her 30 minutes! The director came to her and said “You sang miraculously! You hit the right pitches no one else could, what a miracle! All all miraculously in 30 minutes!” He really emphasized that everything was a “miracle” over and over. Iikubo should have been proud of that moment, but instead she felt really sad lol. Iikubo adds at the end “By the way, Daishi took an hour”