... and the sugar turned bitter.

It is 2024 and Goto Maki has a new photobook out. Moreover she looks great, amazing even, she is the old friend you bump into at the supermarket whilst shopping and even though she is just wearing casual clothes, she is so beautiful that you begin to ask yourself if you even belong to the same species.



Where do we even start with Gomaki, how do I sum up the legacy of one of Morning Musume’s most popular members? In many ways, her story is maybe the beginning of the group that most people remember. I don’t like dividing the early Morning Musume singles from those that followed, but it is unarguable that from the moment LOVE Machine debuted, things were different.

The group’s second auditions were held in 1999 with the goal of recruiting at least two more members. Being in the public eye drew a lot of attention at this point, and tsunku’s reputation for perfectionism ensured that it was only 13-year-old Goto Maki who was eventually selected for the group, something that should impress upon you her talent and the absurdity of tsunku as a producer. Wide-eyed and having just performed live on stage at Hirao Music School Music Festival, which she attended, a few months earlier, declaring with enthusiasm that she wanted to be a singer, I cannot even begin to imagine how the world must have been turned upside down for when she passed that audition. Standing shoulder to shoulder with the older girls in LOVE Machine, we had no idea she was only 13, such was her presence, the strength of her voice.

That quality earned her a place in Pucchimoni alongside Yasuda Kei and Ichii Sayaka before the end of the year, a single arriving in November, Chokotto Love, its video a companion piece to LOVE Machine. Before anyone knew it, Gomaki had become one of the most recognisable faces in Hello! Project, her presence—alongside Matsuura Aya, Abe Natsumi, and Fujimoto Miki—shaping Morning Musume in the public’s eye and allowing for the broader success of all the other groups that followed in their wake. This is why it’s crazy that she only in Morning Musume for just over three years! Three years was all it took for her to become so associated with the group that her absence is still felt; that the era in which she was at the forefront of the group is still harkened back to as the definitive moment in their history.

Hyperbolic though such a statement is, if you only know one Morning Musume song, it’s probably a song from this moment, and the line that’s stuck in your head is probably a Gomaki line. Hello! Project was not subtle about the responsibility it was placing on a 13-year-old’s shoulders, and Goto Maki and potentially her mother were not unaware that her popularity and the strength of her voice was what was keeping the group in the Top 10, and the family were quick to push Gomaki’s younger brother, Yuki, into the limelight also, gaining him a place alongside Somim in EE JUMP. There’s a whole story there, as, despite having graduated from Morning Musume, it took Goto Yuki’s behaviour for Hello! Project as a whole to sever ties with her completely—we’ll talk about this again one day.

None of this mattered, however, because she was already too prominently associated with the group, and in the years that followed, regardless of the actions of her brother, despite the attention that fell on her following the death of her mother, the public’s fascination with Goto Maki never wavered. She remained, she remains, one of the most important members of Morning Musume, and even to-day, both her appeal and talent are undeniable.