Summary 2012

[faded_lace]

This past weekend, yomimashou and I headed into Tokyo to see this year's Summary. We saw last year's show as well, where the main group was Hey! Say! JUMP for the second year, but this year, they switched things up a bit. The main group was different depending on the date of the show; ABC-Z, Sexy Zone, Uchi w/Question (a junior group) and the Bakaleya 6 (another Junior group; the 6 juniors who star in Shiritsu Bakaleya Koko) all had shows, though ABC-Z and Sexy Zone were the main groups while the junior shows were added at a later date. We saw one of the Sexy Zone shows, and... it was a really interesting experience to say the least.

The first thing I noticed was that the show quality was... really different than for Hey! Say! JUMP. Apparently while watching, yomimashou chalked it up to Sexy Zone being far less experienced than Hey! Say! JUMP had been when we saw them both as a group (Hey! Say! JUMP is almost to their 5th year anniversary now) and doing Summary (like I mentioned, last year was Hey! Say! JUMP's second Summary). However, something more than that seemed off to me; the show was relatively disorganized and didn't have a pervasive theme or flow. It almost seemed as if it were treated more like a concert than Summary, which is a sort of... concert-show meld, since there was no "story" (Summary 2010 was about world travel) or theme (last years centered around different elements like water, fire, etc), and there was a talk portion in the middle (I'll get to this later). To me, it felt hard to be absorbed in the show when there were a lot of abrupt changes in mood, who was performing, and performance quality. Both Fuma and Kento had long solo sections that were a lot of singing and dancing, like a concert, and while some aerial tricks were done with the wires and such, there was very little... showy-type things. The juniors didn't get featured as much as they have in past years, either.

And then there as the group themselves. What was particularly interesting to me was to see the dynamic of a group that is less than a year old. Sexy Zone presents a particularly wide range of abilities, experiences, and perspectives, since their members range from 18 to 12 and include a set of friends who have known one another for years as well as a member who has only lived in Japan for a year and seems to stumble over Japanese still. While it's not that they don't seem to like one another, it seems like they have about as little as possible for a group of Johnny's in common, and are at vastly different maturity levels. I hadn't ever really thought about this before, but while the beginning of the show was a little awkward, the uncomfortable feeling that they didn't quite fit together as a group yet was compounded when, during the talk section, Kento and Fuma's teasing caused Marius to cry. It was as if the audience was an intrusion on some private quibble, and while I'm sure the teasing wasn't really a big deal in the long run, the fact that they pushed one of their groupmates to such a level of personal discomfort in front of an audience really shows that they don't know how to read or understand one another very well yet. It reminded me a lot of the early years of Arashi, and I'm interested to see where they go in the future.

Also... there's the fact that Fuma continues to look pained while singing old BI Shadow songs, or do solos that are sad and about breaking up. Poor guy ;;;

In other news... today is pay day, hooray! Because after a weekend in Tokyo, I need it XD;