Beat Laments The World

A metal-infused take on Asian music & other stuff

This post is a part of the Ohatsuu feature that has moved to a new site:
Wota in Translation
Please head on over there to comment on this post and to read more posts like this!

Hi and welcome to the first Ohatsuu summary of 2013.

What is Ohatsuu?

First of all: for those of you who do not know, 2ch is a huge, anonymous Japanese discussion board that also has its own section for Hello! Project. Following the H!P board of 2ch can be a tedious task: it’s massive, and it’s notorious for its “anything goes” atmosphere that comes along with the anonymity. It can be a tiring read.

However, because of that anonymity, you can sometimes get really interesting, candid sneak peeks at how the Japanese fans think about things in this fandom we share with them. I think it’d be quite a shame to miss out on that, and luckily there’s a site that can help. Ohayou! Project Tsuushinkyoku (or just Ohatsuu) is a blog that compiles some of the highlights of the 2ch H!P board.

So what I’m doing with this feature is translating select threads presented on Ohatsuu. Only partially, though — don’t expect me to kill myself by translating several hundred comments per each post. Basically, it’ll be just the threads I care about and just the comments I care about (or have enough motivation to translate).

Featured topics

1. Iikubo-san spots a UFO and gets treated like a child by Kudo after telling her about it!!
2. Maa-chan’s declaration: “I’m going to overtake Sayashi-san this year!!“
3. We’re barely into the New Year and there’s already a scandalous picture of Mano-chan
4. High-King revival!!! ﾍ√ﾚｖｖ～(ﾟ∀ﾟ)─ﾍ√ﾚｖｖ～─!!
5. Daaishi Ishida’s birthday cake is…
6. Obvious♪ Obvious♪ Hello! Project♪
7. Someone brings Kudo’s photobook to school — Kudo wants to die
8. Ishida super excited — full of wild ideas during a sleepover with Kudo!!!
9. The 10th and 11th generation members have dinner together!!! Sato Maa-chan reproduces their conversation!
10. The results of the favorite member ranking by the foreign wota of Hello!Online are here!
11. ☆　★☆ Morning Musume major debut 15th anniversary festival ☆★　☆
12. A super first-class manga artist draws Momusu illustrations to celebrate their Oricon no. 1!

Enjoy!

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Good evening to all you sexy readers. Exactly five years ago today I was an 18-year-old Henkka, and knowing me, I was probably drinking a vodka coke or something as I finished writing and clicking “publish” on the very first proper post of this blog.

I’m a really god damn hopeless maker of retrospective speeches and whatnot, so I’ll spare you of that. Please just allow me to say a quick thank you to all past and present co-bloggers, contributors, commenters, readers, friends, lovers and haters. I really appreciate you guys continuing to stick around. Thanks a lot! You’re all awesome.

Now then.

I’m not much for celebrating birthdays to be honest — especially so for a f’ing website — but I was thinking there had to be some little way of commemorating this small achievement. Five years is a sort of a milestone, I suppose. Then it struck me. “Hey, wait a minute… the number five!” Whether the number rings a bell for you or not, I do hope you aren’t too opposed to the idea of bringing back an old feature of this blog… because I think that it’s about damn time for another post of completely pointless, arbitrary ranking and general stupid bullshit.

I do hope you enjoy, my dear friends. Let’s do this. The Top 5 Series.

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This post is a part of the Ohatsuu feature that has moved to a new site:
Wota in Translation
Please head on over there to comment on this post and to read more posts like this!

Before we begin, I’d like to announce that this post is the first (and hopefully not last) in a new feature on this blog. For those of you who do not know, 2ch is a huge, anonymous Japanese discussion board that also has its own section for Hello! Project. With the anonymity also comes the notoriety 2ch has earned — it’s very much an “anything goes” atmosphere that you don’t get much on Western H!P forums. If you’re an avid visitor of the site, you know how it can get a pretty tiring read sometimes. Shit, I wouldn’t want to read that many posts of people name calling little girls even if it was in English. In addition, the H!P board of 2ch is f’ing massive.

However, because of this anonymity, you can sometimes get really interesting, candid sneak peeks at how the Japanese fans think about things in this fandom we share. Sometimes the Japanese fans’ opinions are wildly different from ours and other times more similar than you’d perhaps even guess… but at the end of the day, their opinions vary just as much as it does with us Western fans. In any case, I think it’d be quite a shame to miss all that, and this is where another site steps in to help. Ohayou! Project Tsuushinkyoku (or just Ohatsuu) is a blog that compiles some of the highlights of the board. What I’m going to be doing is translating select threads presented on this blog. Only partly, though — don’t expect me to kill myself by translating several hundred comments per each post. It’ll be just the threads I care about and just the comments I deem interesting enough (or have enough motivation to translate), so keep this in mind.

Now with that out of the way, here’s the post I’m covering today. The title translates to what you can read above. As you know with me being the raging worshipper of Tsunku that I am, this thread naturally perked my interest. Without any further ado, let’s get right to it.

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Good evening to you and yours. Just your usual Friday night. Enjoying a couple of drinks, listening to a fine playlist of music to commemorate the recent Momusu graduation and, most of all, I find myself yet again thinking, “man… idols are some good stuff.“

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I’ll be honest with you.

I’ve been saying this before, but let me put it in post form for once. The more I listen to different idol groups, the more I realize I’m not so much a fan of idol music as I’m just a fan of Tsunku music. You know, I love that man. I really do. Yes, I know, I know, he’s been having his misses lately — hell, he’s always been having his misses when you go back and listen to the Hello! Project of olden times — but dammit when he gets it right, he gets it right good. For me, anyway. And what do I know.

And you know, how would I know even if half the stuff penned under the Tsunku name isn’t actually produced by ghost songwriters? Could as well be, it’s pretty obvious things like that do happen in the field of J-pop. Hell, I’d like to believe that’s not the case… but then, I’d also like to believe that “Seishun Collection” doesn’t actually exist in this universe. But alas, the last time I checked, it still did. It wasn’t just an elaborate nightmare. In any case, I doubt we’ll ever know for sure. But, assuming that really is the case, at least his ghost writers often times know what they’re doing.

What I’m trying to say is, the quality of idol music is too damned lacking for me a lot of the time. And now that I’ve typed that out, I feel like an idiot. That is perhaps the single most obvious sentence ever written down about idols. “Idol music sometimes lacks quality.” You heard it here first, folks.

Man. I’ve been spoiled by too much Tsunku earcandy all these years.