素直な気持ち伝えるのさ

This is a comprehensive list of all of the Johnny's Concerts and events I've been to. Those for which I've written reports have a link to the report underneath. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to write a report for every concert I've been to, but if you have a specific question about any of the shows or events here (for example, for clarification about something you read on Twitter), please don't hesitate to comment, and I'll be happy to help!

I have also written a comprehensive venue guide here. If you have questions about any of the venues here (for example, if you can buy food inside the venue), please check that post first, but if your question isn't covered, again, please feel free to ask me here or on that post in the comments!

I'm happy to help fans going to concerts or venues for the first time, so I hope this can be of use, and please let me know if you have any questions beyond what I've written here!

( 2011 )

( 2012 )

( 2013 )

( 2014 )

( 2015 )

( 2016 )

( 2017 )

( 2018 )

( 2019 )

In an all-time actually not all time (I did this meme on January 13 in 2008) record of lateness, here is my regular New Year's meme! It's always interesting to look back on the year, and to compare to the year previous, so I always enjoy doing this. ♥

In your archive, find the first post for every month of 2015, and copy and paste the first sentence here.

( hey!say!27年 )

Despite that there were ups and downs this year just like any other year, I'm really glad to see that my posts were largely positive. I'm going to try to keep doing my best to make 2016 as positive as possible, too!

I realized it's been a really ling time since I've posted my nails! I do new nails about once a month, give or take… basically, whenever the old ones break, with upcoming events in mind. I try to have nice new nail designs for concerts to match my outfit on the day of the concert, or else in member colours, though of course sometimes it doesn't work out that way. XD; So here are my nails from September 2014 until November 2015~

( Nail designs! )

I know they're not very exciting designs, and definitely not as good as something done by a pro, but I have fun doing them, at any rate. Hopefully I can remember to post them more often. XD;

Today was a really rough day for a lot of reasons, so I'm just going to take this chance to show off my penlight collection, because it's something small and easy to talk about it and I'm happy with it.

( Penlights under here! )

Hopefully tomorrow is a better day. Trying to keep looking forward to this weekend, at the very least…

I'm going to try to get my quick write up of Crea done now before my memory fades! Because 1) the show was extremely short (an hour and 15 minutes, plus two encores, making it about an hour and 30 minutes total), 2) I went alone, so I don't have anyone to help refresh my memory, and 3) I honestly don't have that much to say about it, this is going to be a short bullet-point writeup, rather than full report. As always, the focus is the experience for me, not the setlist or every detail, which you can probably find on twitter. Also, seeing as it's me, it's going to be pretty Reia-focused, because Reia is who I watched. That being said, I included information about other guys, too-- just a warning that I had my Reia goggles on while watching.

( Johnny's Ginza @ Theatre Crea, 2015.5.12 )

Sorry that was sort of short and lame, but it was sort of a short and lame show XD; I hope it was at least somewhat informative and amusing, though.

This is extremely late, but I'm here with a brief report of the Sexy Zone concert when I saw it in Yokohama in March. The tour isn't done; they still have Osaka and Nagoya dates left, so some things might change before then, but I'm not exactly hopeful.

I was honestly somewhat surprised by this concert not because it wasn't in vein with how things are currently, but because I had read so many reports on twitter saying it wasn't as bad as that. However, I'm not sure if we were seeing the same concert, but it was pretty bad to me-- in terms of fairness, first and foremost, of course, but also in terms of being an enjoyable concert, because the guys all looked tired and sad.

In case it isn't clear, consider this your official warning: This report will reflect the opinions of someone who considers Sexy Zone to be 5 members, and who doesn't think that Marius and Sou and their fans (and the fans of all five) should have to settle with "but at least they were included at all!" I will speak negatively of 3-member segments, and of parts where Marius and Sou were treated as Juniors. I will not speak negatively of any group member, because I love all five of them, but I will criticize the way the management is making the group. If you find this offensive or disagreeable, please don't read this report.

Also, as always, this isn't a full setlist report, but rather my impression of the experience.

( Sexy Zone in Yokohama Arena, 2015.3.29 @ 12pm )

And that's it. I'm not attending the Osaka or Nagoya shows, so hopefully they'll be better, but… I don't have my hopes up. At the very least, they all seemed to be trying their very hardest, and there were a lot of times when KFS hugged or supported SouMari, so it seems like no matter what, they're sticking together and five and trying to get through this.

Tomorrow is elementary school graduation and I need to get to sleep because I'm pretty much passing out sitting up, but:

✪ NEWS was a lot of fun! I'm going to try to write up a few amusing things that happened, if I get the time.

✪ JUMP tour was announced for summer! I'm so stupidly excited for this. ♥ It will be my first JUMP concert since my tangae and I'm looking forward to it!

✪ I saw Doctor and Sonic Hunter's costumes at Nagoya Tower Records, which was awesome! I'm hoping to check out the Tokyo and Yokohama ones too, so if I manage that, a compilation post will come later. ^^;

✪ Only a week until Sexy Zone! Concert season has really gotten underway, and while it's tiring, I love it XD

I swear one day I'll get my shit together and make a real post and answer all my comments… but today is not that day =___=;

Because I just want to address this and get it out of the way and out of my life, here's what I was moaning about yesterday:

Nakajima Kento, Kikuchi Fuma, and Sato Shori of Sexy Zone have been announced as the supporters for the 2015 FIVB Volleyball World Cup (source). Yes, that does have the implications that you think it has-- they're apparently in the place of what should have been the new 2015 volleyball debut.

In case this isn't something that's common knowledge, just a little history on the volleyball debut: It's a tradition that started in 1995 with V6 and has happened every four years since then. The FIVB World Cup is a big deal Olympics qualifier volleyball event that happens in Japan every four years, and since 1995, Johnny's has been supplying the popular media "support group" and song for this event. V6 was followed by Arashi (1999), then NEWS (2003), then Hey! Say! JUMP (2007), and finally Sexy Zone (2011).

Up until this year, the FIVB Volleyball World Cup has always happened in November. This means that all the volleyball debuts have been announced in September and their debut single dropped in November. For that reason, we celebrate these groups' anniversary in September even though their debut date is actually in November. I don't really understand this tradition (debut is debut imho), but either way, end of September and mid November are the key time periods in (almost) every volleyball debut. This is something that's gone on for the past 20 years now.

However, this year, for reasons unknown to me, the FIVB Volleyball World Cup has been pushed up to August. That would mean, for a new group to be supporting it, the debut announcement would have to happen at the end of June and their debut would be in August. That's a whole three months earlier than every single volleyball debut for the past 20 years.

But for reasons also unknown to me, instead, the front three members of Sexy Zone have been announced as the supporters of this year's world cup. This breaks with 20 years of Johnny's tradition and is, for a variety of reasons, pretty surprising and alarming to me. First of all, Johnny's tradition is pretty good. I like Johnny's for a reason-- that it's Johnny's. Them changing their formulas and breaking long-standing, important traditions is not something that particularly comforts me or makes me happy. Second, the volleyball debut is a big deal, and an important chance for juniors. Not knowing when it will happen or if it will happen at all is highly concerning. And of course, third, all those Sexy Zone-related issues. But that's another matter for another post that I am almost certainly not going to make.

Still, perhaps it's a personal flaw or perhaps it's because we all want to find some sense of security in the craziness that is Johnny's, but it's all I can do to give a few options of what may happen from here. Note that in the past 20 years, there have been some changes in the pattern of the volleyball debut, so this does not necessarily signify the end of an important tradition.

Therefore, with no further ado, my hypotheses for what might happen:
① A support group may be announced in June at Johnny's West's Kobe shows (for a Julie group) or at a yet-unannounced Sexy Zone, Kis-My-Ft2, or ABC-Z performance in June (for an Iijima group). Having two supporters, one from a previous volleyball unit, is not unheard of; Sakurai Sho was a supporter along with Hey! Say! JUMP in 2007.
↳ ⓐ Therefore, a new group may debut on an expedited timeline of June → August and present along with the Sexy Zone members, perhaps with Sexy Zone's presence to draw interest for the new group.
↳ ⓑ An alternate theory is that, like NEWS, the new group may be a Junior unit, perhaps presented as secondary backers to the Sexy Zone members. NEWS so far is the only volleyball support group that was considered a Junior unit at the time of the FIVB World Cup, but that doesn't necessarily rule out something similar happening again, with a debut following in the year after.
↳ ⓒ A third option is that Sexy Zone's participation may be an out-and-out lie, as with Johnny's strange fake announcement of ABC-xyZ back in 2011.

② The agency may be choosing to keep the new group on the same timeline, September → November, regardless of support opportunities. The FIVB World Cup itself has little to do with the debut besides it being the supposed reason; Johnny's debuts non-volleyball groups with equal frequency, so there's no actual legitimate necessity for the "volleyball debut" to actually be a debut with relation to volleyball. It may still follow the same formula (the timeline, the age gap, the "fresh" members… see my post here, and then the following two here and here for more details) but simply be unrelated to this year's World Cup.

③ The agency may choose to have the group support the 2016 summer Olympics instead, either having them debut in the same September → November time frame, or perhaps pushing back the debut into 2016. This would be odd to me, but I don't necessarily think it's impossible. It might also fall into the same category as option ②, if the group were to debut in November and then just happen to do the support for the Olympics.

④ Perhaps there will be no volleyball debut at all, and Johnny's will, once again, completely thwart my continued attempts to understand it.

Frankly, I don't see how the agency could possibly benefit from breaking with tradition. The volleyball unit is a carefully and very intelligently concocted formula: it creates interest from a wide range of fans with members with a wide age spectrum, it draws the support of Junior fans while still keeping them paying for Junior events as well by splitting up popular Junior units and leaving some popular Juniors behind to continue to head up the Junior fandom, and it captivates fans for a long period of time to watch the completely new group come together, form a bond, and grow. This method has been a great success in the past (considering Arashi is a volleyball unit), and is, in my opinion, an integral part of contemporary Johnny's as a subcategory of popular entertainment. I really can't imagine how not having such a debut at all could be seen as a positive from a marketing or image-branding standpoint.

But at the end of the day, I don't work for Johnny's, and I can't really make any statements with certainty. So for the time being, I'm just going to leave it with this and hope for the best.

I saw this floating around and decided why the hell not. XD Time to do something positive with my life! It was fun and nice to think about something good for the first time in a while! On top of that, the sun was shining, the weather was pretty warm for February, and I my health seems pretty okay! Not to mention the JUMP DVD comes out on Wednesday~ I'm happy! Look at that XD

Choose 5 OTPs without looking at the questions behind the cut first, then tag friends to do the same.

My Five OTPS
1) Jinguji Yuuta x Nakamura Reia (Johnny's Jr.)
2) Yaotome Hikaru x Inoo Kei (Hey! Say! JUMP)
3) Yamada Ryosuke x Chinen Yuri (Hey! Say! JUMP)
4) Matsukura Hokuto x Kikuchi Fuma (Johnny's Jr. / Sexy Zone)
5) Matsumoto Jun x Aiba Masaki (Arashi)

( Meme under here! )

Now off to make more chocolates! All my Valentine's Day stuff this year is super late, oops XD;

Well, I finally did the work I was supposed to do, but I didn't do anything useful in fandom T__T; I spent most of today freaking out that my Puzzle and Dragon strategy up until now isn't good enough from here on out haha |D;;; What a loser, I know.

But I decided I'd just write up a bullet-point list of stuff that was cute at countdown, because I honestly don't really want to write a report of a Matchy concert! Sorry for the informal format, but I just honestly don't have that much to say.

As always, this contains a lot of my opinions and my interpretations of things. If that will offend you, please don't click the cut. In particular, a negative view of Sexy Zone as three members, and a negative view of Matchy are apparent, so please don't read if you don't want to see that.

( Countdown 2014-2015 )

Sorry it's not much, but that's all I have to say about Countdown… And now to get to bed, it got late, sheesh. x___x;