... and the sugar turned bitter.

In light of recent issues surrounding Hanada Mei and her dismissal, seventeenth gen posting will continue until moral improves, and to-day, that means we're talking about Masai Mayuu!



Having said that, I still worry that there's only so much I can say about this generation that you don't already now know. Along with her peers, Yamazaki Sora, Sato Airi, Hirata Yuki, Hashimoto Eriko, Ota Yuki, Hatakeyama Nozomi, and Hotei Moka, Mayuchan debuted in early May of 2022, and by June, she was appearing as part of the warm up act for Team B's revival of Idol no Yoake. In September of that year, the kenkyuusei of the seventeenth and eighteenth generations got their own stage, a revival of Tadaima Renaichuu, Team A's fourth stage, in which Mayuchan appeared during two numbers, 7ji 12fun No Hatsukoi and Junai no Crescendo, later covered by No Sleeves. A small aside: Genius Akimoto's age and experience shows significantly on Junai no Crescendo; this song, written and released in 2007, is a perfect slice of that '80s feeling we have since reduced to labels like "city pop" and "yacht rock." When I talk about idol music, this is really the kind of song that I am talking about.

In 2023, during the revival of Team K's fifth stage, Saka Agari, under Taguchi Manaka, Mayuchan got to make another appearance as the warm up act in November alongside Ota Yuki.

It goes without saying that our first overseas introduction to Mayuchan was Wonderful Love on the B side of Hisashiburi no Lip Gloss. So far, we have not seen her in the senbatsu, and after the issues relating to Hanada Mei, I don't want to make a statement like "oh, that will definitely happen soon!" because we now know how quickly things can change. However, with the seventeenth generation, it feels it's a safer bet as, in the background, they have become the new bedrock of the group. Being a real life older sister, Mayuchan already has a reputation for this role in the group, somewhat fitting as her parents' wish for her was apparently that she show kindness to others, hence the kanji in her name.

Trained in rhythmic gymnastics for over eleven years, for those keeping track of the overlap between sports and idols, I hope that one day sooner rather than later, Mayuchan gets to achieve her dream of performing Heavy Rotation—admit that you just heard the numbers "1, 2, 3, 4!" in your head upon reading those two words!—and 365nichi no Kamihikouki live one day soon!

Like this, our Wednesday posts have become exclusively seventeenth generation posts! With Yamazaki Sora, Sato Airi, Hirata Yuki, Hashimoto Eriko, and Ota Yuki, 2022 gave us the debut of Saitama's Hatakeyama Nozomi!



I haven't thought about Saitama in years because it's kind of uncool, but now we have Kamiina Botan, Yoeru Sugata wa Yuri no Hana continually whispering in our ears about the beauty of what I have, for ages, dismissed as "Japanese Hertfordshire," so maybe it's time to give Saitama its due and another thing the prefecture has given us is Nonchan!

The youngest member of the seventeenth generation, born in 2008, if you can believe it, her résumé may not look that exciting at first glance, still awaiting her turn in the senbatsu, but in the background, alongside other members of her generation, Nonchan has been working away, her time spent as a member of AKB already over four years! Like the rest of her generation, our first introduction to her as an international audience was Wonderful Love on the B side of Hisashiburi no Lip Gloss. Ever since, she's been a familiar face, turning up on Ishi no Taiboku with Hiyuka, Yumemite Gomen with Arai Sae and Suzuki Kurumi, and Ano Natsu no Bohatei with Kubo Hinano, amongst others! On AKB's cover album, Nantettatte AKB48, along with Chanhina again, she was a part of their cover of Nogizaka46's Kimi no Na wa Kibou, and I'm bringing this up specifically because we have a full house of member profiles when it comes to the senbatsu of this song—Nonchan, Chanhina, Yukitan, Nagatomo Ayami, Omori Maho, Sako Yumemi, and Chiba Erii.

Although she might not be the face of the group just yet, little by little, girls like Hatakeyama Nozomi have absolutely become the bedrock of AKB!

As hinted at by Tanaka Kohei, the composer of the series, there was a new announcement regarding Sakura Wars recently and it's a new stage play based on 2019's Playstation 4 game, Shin Sakura Wars, a game that Sega refused to port to Switch because they hate me. I'm really excited about it! Not only is former Team 8 member Oda Erina and 22/7's Kawase Uta in the cast, but it also features Chitose Machi, who previously played Glotta in Kamen Rider Gavv and continues to prove that her target audience is middle-aged women. I don't have as much attachment to the new game due to having only bought a copy immediately as my PS4 decided to die, but I do have a love of Sakura Wars that goes back years. Hiroi Oji, the creator of the original story, is again involved in the production, alongside Tanaka, and that gives me a lot of hope, and if you're curious about what it takes to put a Sega Saturn game on the stage, then again I want to recommend the fifth Sakura Wars musical, Kaijin Bessou, subbed by taisho_fansubs, and OSK Revue's The Sea God's Villa, subbed by nightless_castle as good places to start! Both were written by Hiroi, both explore the myth of Urashima Taro, and both are wonderful productions, enough to make you fall in love, I dare say!

I thought I should make an effort, having already written this month's Project R.O.S.E. entry, to start reading the plays of Taisho era writer, Izumi Kyouka, whose work of the same name originally inspired Hiroi's Kajin Bessou adaptations. I will keep you posted, friends, as I currently have more things to read than I have hours in the day to read them.

As I've been thinking about retreating into stories from a certain period of time or a formative period of life, I read about a new release via LINE of Higurashi that allows you to create your own character within the story. This fascinates me and horrifies me and makes me think of those time-travel narratives where there is a tourist industry that allows you to drop into the past. Higurashi is such a complex story and the balance of that story rests on such delicate moments that could so easily be disrupted that it feels like dropping in a new character—yourself, as you are now, or a character of your invention—could cause untold havoc to the narrative which... as a premise is a very Higurashi flavoured one. I think it would be interesting to make people feel a new kind of misery, people who, like me, have come to care for these characters so much that they want to spend all their time in game interacting with them at the expensive of the narrative whilst, all the while, the clock is ticking and said reader is forced to engage with the visceral horror in an entirely new and entirely novel fashion. I also think it's interesting to intrude on the story, I think that the large picture of Higurashi is absolutely built to accommodate that kind of descent into a small village near Gifu Prefecture in 1983 from places unknown. In an interview recently, the Butcher, Urobuchi Gen, mentioned that he felt "audiences nowadays aren’t looking for ‘poison.’ They’re probably craving an ‘antidote’ within fiction", but I think there is some comfort in the poison of Higurashi—certainly I've mentioned more than once that I feel there is a sort of nostalgia for works of horror.

I don't want to say I've given into nostalgia completely, but I recognise there are very specific "cut off points" in media for me—like watching older episodes from the Orange Islands arc of Pokémon and getting misty eyed whilst doing my level best to ignore everything about the franchise as it is now. Part of this is maybe because I mostly use youtube kids as my main viewing platform and that is the place where companies shovel any show older than 20 years in the hopes of generating ad revenue from people watching on the normal app or without ad blockers or views from children, so, in a way, the modern world has built this little bubble for me. Yester-day, based on what I was watching, I might as well have been tuned into Toonami in the early '00s.

I'm ten episodes or so into revisiting Gundam Wing—I'm allowed to! It's an anniversary year-ish!—and I'm obsessing over Relena's school friends from the early part of the show. Needless to say, the school setting part of Gundam Wing really captured my imagination when I first saw this show, and, apparently continues to do so.

There's a new adaptation of Mallory Towers happening this summer and it's exactly during the dates I will be away!

The sixteenth generation's Muto Orin! The younger sister of Muto Tomu, who graduated in 2023, Orin had previously auditioned for both Keyakizaka46 and for Nogizaka46’s third generation before she arrived in AKB in 2016 alongside her big sister.



I think that at first glance, it's really obvious whose sister she is! Debuting alongside Taguchi Manaka, Suzuki Kurumi, Taya Misaki, Yamauchi Mizuki, and Nagatomo Ayami, finally arriving in AKB must have come as such a relief after those prior disappointment and with Tomu so very present and successful. Regardless, Orin made it there, and after doing her time as a member of the kenkyuusei, she was moved up to Minegishi Team K alongside Ayami, a moment preceded by her first appearance on the B side of #SukiNanda, Jibuntachi no Koi ni Kagitte several months prior. I think it's easy to see why; even without the family name, Orin feels like she is a step ahead of everyone else, like she has been working for the moment for a very long time. The curse of appearing early on B sides, however, is that if you don't make the kind of impact you desire, it can be really hard to find your place in the senbatsu. Such is Orin's story. I don't know what's worse, getting a headstart and being dismissed as someone audiences have tired of or not getting the chance at all. Both options kind of suck.

In 2019, Orin entered university, and in 2020, she passed the World Heritage Test Level 2 test. I'm easily impressed by anything academic like this, so this seems like a big deal to me, and it makes me think of fondly of an old friend who was obsessed with studying English Heritage sites like the one I visited very recently. She was kind of an idiot, and whilst I'm certain she does not think fondly of me, I still think happily of the time we spent together on the 29 bus sharing headphones and listening to AKB songs. I digress. Obviously that friend was not Muto Orin and that's who we're really talking about here.

In 2022, Orin moved over to Team A, switching places almost with Manaka, who was on her way to Team K. In 2023, she graduated from Seijo University, and in 2024, things started to get good, beginning with an appearance in the senbatsu for B side, Lion wo Nerae! from Colorcon Wink, and then appearing as centre for Omoiyari, which has a lovely horn section in the arrangement, from Koi Tsun Jatta. This song confirms that Orin is a member you need to know, a member you need to support! I want all of you to listen to it and report back to me!

What can I tell you to win you over? Orin got to fourth place in a national karate tournament during whilst in fourth grade, she has a pet dog called Oguri, but more than that, is Orin's favourite phrase, something I think is both charming and wonderful, something we could all do with repeating to ourselves from time to time:

"A little fist full of dreams will never betray you."

Trying to keep up with posting every member featured in Team AKB Oshi as the sixteenth generation graduates is a thankless task. This version of the song has a shelf-life of a couple of months, a couple of weeks considering Kururun's impending graduation. Similarly, her fellow sixteenth generation member and actual school classmate, Taguchi Manaka will depart on 22nd June.



Manaka made her debut alongside Kururun, Taya Misaki, Yamauchi Mizuki, and the rest of her generation at that same December concert. In the first shuffle event a year later, she was moved to Team A, also alongside Kururun—sorry if this entry is giving you déjà vu!—which was the same year we first saw her begin to appear on B sides, starting with Maebure, a Watanabe Mayu fronted song also featuring NGT's Takakura Moeka, from Negaigoto no Mochigusare. It was in 2022, however, that things really took off for her with a transfer to Team K and her appointment as captain—Team K's last captain, nonetheless. In the same year, she made it to the senbatsu for the Honda Hitomi fronted Moto Kare desu as AKB struggled to find its place post-IZ*ONE, incorporating a stronger focus on dance and the kind of parred back focus on movement found in contemporary K-pop of the time. To hammer this point home, each of their members got their own dance solo spotlight videos, not least of all Manaka. I'm not a huge fan of this one, a house cannot have two masters, as they say.

A year later, on the B side of Doushitemo Kimi ga Suki da, Manaka appeared as one of the three centres for the "Universe Girls" alongside Asai Nanami and Nagatomo Ayami for the song Da Re Da. The Universe Girls unit was later used for Lion wo Nerae!, the B side of Colorcon Wink, the next single that Manaka featured in the senbatsu for, Koi Tsun Jatta and recent single, Nagori Zakura following after.

Manaka is one of us, her official profile outing her as a fan of tokusatsu, although unfortunately it doesn't specify which shows are her favourites! She brought with her a unique sense of humour, as you can tell above from her impersonation of comedian and television host, Tamori, above, and losing that humour is to AKB's detriment. I really hope that she remains close with Kururun once they both graduate and the two of them are able to look back on these years and smile.

I'm looking forward to what Manaka does next!

We're still talking about Team 8, I'm so sorry, but we have to, Team 8 is what makes the backbone of current AKB. So, alongside her fellow members, Abe Mei, Okabe Rin, Okubora Chinatsu, Nagano Serika, Fujimura Natsuki, Onishi Momoka, Kuranoo Narumi, Shitao Miu, Cho Kurena, Hamamatsu Riona, Fukuchi Rena, Honda Hitomi, Yokomichi Yuri, the other Yokoyama Yui, Yoshino Miyu, Oda Erina, Oguri Yui, Yoshikawa Nanase, Hayasaka Tsumugi, Hirose Natsuki, Iwasaki Moeka, Yaguchi Moka, and Takahashi Ayane, Hashimoto Haruna, born in the early summer of 2000, made her debut 14 years later!



Like her peers, Harupyon debuted as part of Team 8's revival of PARTY ga Hajumaru yo—performing Skirt, Hirari—and the later revival of Aitakatta—performing Nagisa no CHERRY. Also like the rest of Team 8, her first recorded debut was 47 no Suteki na Machi e on the B side of Kokoro no Placard in 2015. I won't go through all the B sides that Harupyon has appeared on—you can guess them based on previous Team 8 entries alone—but I will mention that during her time in the group, she became close friends with Rissen Airi, who joined Team 8 in 2018, and now works elsewhere for another agency. I will also mention how much I instantly fell in love with her introductory speech as soon as I read it:

"I will work hard to deliver smiles to everyone! Wait for my visit with smiles as a souvenir!!"

If that doesn't tell you all you need to know then I don't know what does!

Initially debuting at the SKE48 theatre performance with Yaguchi Moka, Hirose Natsuki, Hayasaka Tsumugi, and others, she also joined Moka in gaining a concurrent position in Team K in 2017, and then moving to Team B in 2021 where she stayed until the teams were eventually all folded up into the situation we have here. This gives me an opportunity to talk about Team B Oshi once more. I was a little hard on the idea of Team AKB Oshi last time we spoke about the song. Team B Oshi implies the existence of Team A Oshi. As far back as 2014, when Harupyon was first joining the group, this was being performed at concerts. The difference is that I will excuse this because it's Takahashi Team A. If Takamina says it's okay, it's okay, basically.

Haruna, always hopping like a rabbit, dreamed of being an idol since elementary school, and now here she is, the self-styled girl with glasses from Toyama Prefecture. Team 8 may be "on hiatus" but, at the same time, Team 8 now is AKB48, and in the spirit of that sentiment: who's your Team 8 oshi?

Former Team B captain, Iwatate Saho is the first member up in AKB48's self-cover version, Team AKB Oshi. How does she feel about that? We might never know, but I for one feel kind of awkward about it, not because I haven't been crying about maybe never hearing Team B Oshi performed again, but because the way in which this is happening and the manner in which it has been delivered feels so lacklustre. Being in the eye of the storm, I am inclined to think Sahhoo feels more charitable about it, but here I am trying to clap along and wishing the production of the video and the approach to the song had maybe been just a little better.



Sahho joined as a member of AKB's thirteenth generation in 2011, arriving alongside Aigasa Moe, Mitsumune Kaoru, Murayama Yuiri, Mogi Shinobu, Kitazawa Saki and Okada Ayaka. When she first joined the group, she was 17-years-old, now she's 31 and the last member of her generation still in the group as per Yuiri's graduation last year. In 2013, at Tokyo Dome, she was promoted to Minegishi Team 4 alongside Yuiri, Saki, Shinobu, and Aigasa, and also Shinozaki Ayana, Okada Ayaka, Kojima Mako, Okada Nana, Nishino Miki, and Hashimoto Hikari. I love talking about Team 4, you know this, but the Minegishi and Takahashi incarnations of the team are definitely not my speciality subject, so in many ways I'm learning just as much as I speak to you. I have always known Sahho, I recognise her name often, but I have never really followed her, and now that we are here talking about her and I am conscious of her longstanding presence, I worry that the next time we speak about her it will be in a sentence containing the word "graduation." That, however, is still to come, so let's not worry about it now!

Like Nogizaka's Takayama Kazumi, Sahho was on a Watanabe B side, in this case, Watanabe Miyuki, with the song in question being Harukaze Pianissimo, the theme of the runners-up of the 2014 Janken tournament, all of them having lost to Milky, who very much got the better deal with Yasashiku Suru Yori Kiss wo Shite. Having made it, during various times, to placement in AKB's Upcoming Girls (2014), Future Girls (2016), Next Girls (2017), and Undergirls (2018), Sahho is no stranger to B side appearances, having appeared on the reverse side of every release from Gingham Check (2012) to Kibouteki Refrain (2014), and then every other release almost until Negaigoto no Mochigusare (2017), her place secured from then on and a centre role for Lion wo Nerae! from Kashiwagi Yuki graduation single, Colorcon Wink in 2024.

Sahho is a good person. During the Google+ days, she reached out to a fan who had posted openly about wanting to end his life, and she urged him not to, she talked him down. However way you want to look at interaction on the interaction, Sahho saw someone in distress and she intervened. That makes her a role model in my book. In 2019, she was moved to Team B, and in 2019, she became the captain as Takahashi Juri went to become captain of Team 4. In 2023, she spent a year in Team A before the new system was place and we found ourselves where we are now, with Team B Oshi suddenly resurrected and Sahho as the first member mentioned.

A former classmate of Nogizaka's Nakada Kana, a girl who, as of August of last year, has spent more than 5,000 days in AKB48, I really hope that Iwatate Saho stays with us for another 5,000 days!

Iwasaki Moeka passed the Team 8 auditions in 2014 alongside her peers, Abe Mei, Okabe Rin, Okubora Chinatsu, Nagano Serika, Fujimura Natsuki, Onishi Momoka, Kuranoo Narumi, Shitao Miu, Cho Kurena, Hamamatsu Riona, Fukuchi Rena, Honda Hitomi, Yokomichi Yuri, the other Yokoyama Yui, Yoshino Miyu, Oda Erina, Oguri Yui, Yoshikawa Nanase, Hayasaka Tsumugi, Hirose Natsuki, and Yaguchi Moka. Unlike so many of the members we have covered already who saw their debut at the SKE48 or HKT48 theatres, Moetan's first appearance was actually in Akihabara, in the famous theatre at the top of the Don Quijote store and the two floors of arcades sandwiched in-between them... though I can't actually remember if those arcades would have been there in 2014. I get the feeling that at that time the building was all still Don Quijote all the way up, but I can't say for sure. I digress! Moetan debuted! The Team 8 revival of PARTY ga Hajumaru yo was the stage! Two years to the day after, she graduated!

Wait, what?



Even during the Team 8 era, it's sometimes tempting to think of AKB48 during these years as mandatory military service, yet if we entertain the idea that someone can become a ghost whilst still living, then to this day, Moetan is definitely haunting the AKB theatre. Maybe. Born in 2000, a true Millennial, Moetan was also the first ever member of AKB48 to be born in Nagasaki Prefecture, a testament to how far reaching the popularity of AKB had become at the moment, the group being a true national institution at this point. In keeping with the idea of AKB being so all encompassing at the time, Moetan never actually planned to audition at all, but rather her mother and sister sent in an application for her and she only discovered two days before the big event! It's kind of cute imagining Moetan being completely oblivious to everything, sitting there talking about her admiration for Watanabe Mayu and then suddenly finding herself thrust on stage with a real shot of following in Mayuyu's footsteps.

If there's one thing I like about Moetan, it's how enthusiastic she was regarding the members that were important to her. She was always talking about how much she loved Mayuyu and fellow Team 8 member, Shimoaoki Karin, how much she loved HKT48's Moriyasu Madoka, also from Nagasaki Prefecture. You don't need me to explain to you how adorable Moetan was during her time in AKB, she's more than capable of conveying that herself:



The gap between the idea of AKB48 as this coming-of-age-rite-of-passage and the pressure of real life is never more telling than in Moetan's story, however. In early April of 2016, Moetan announced that she had been accepted for her first choice of high school and really wanted to push forward towards her dream of one day become a doctor. To make this all the more tragic though, a day after this announcement, she was hospitalised with influenza and was unable to graduate properly, her name being quietly removed from the books without her ever being able to properly say good-bye. Ah, physician heal thyself, eh, Moetan? And yet, at the same time, it's easy to imagine how Moetan might want to haunt the theatre for the rest of her days. Good news though! In 2019, in Osaka, Moetan came back even if only for that concert! Joining Nacchan and Pena, Moetan finally got to say her good-byes.

My favourite subject is Team 4! Takashima Yurina arrived as a member of Minegishi Team 4 in 2013 at Tokyo Dome, joining Aigasa Moe, Kitazawa Saki, Shinozaki Ayana, Murayama Yuiri, Mogi Shinobu, Okada Ayaka, Kojima Mako, Okada Nana, Nishino Miki, Hashimoto Hikari, and others in the lineup of the new team. Having auditioned in 2011, Yuurin had slowly been working up support as a member of the kenkyuusei and a member of the thirteenth generation alongside many of her new Team 4 peers and at last it had started to pay off!



Yuurin's first performance in the theatre was during a revival of Aitakatta alongside the other members of her generation in 2011. A year later, after she had passed the selection exam then mandatory to fully enter the group, and became an established presence, those early performances resulting in an increased attention that led to her being promoted to Minegishi's new team. Having long been a fan of AKB48, Yuurin had initially tried out for the twelfth generation alongside Hirata Rina, Saeed Yokota Erena, Muto Tomu, Tano Yuka, and Sasaki Yukari, but had failed to pass the test. By the time the next auditions came around, she had apparently doubled down and whatever it was that had been wanting in her earlier was nowhere to be seen when it came time to decide on those selected.

With all this and a year in Team 4 under her belt, when 2014's next big concert took place, it was announced that she was being shuffled into SKE48's Team KII... only it never happened. Following a cancellation announcement, Yuurin informed us in a Google+ post that she had protested, offering the rationale that such a big move would have interfered with her studies. I think it would have been nice to believe that it was her loyalty to Team 4 that motivated her, but sadly less than a year after the abortive transfer, she announced her graduation, suggesting, maybe rightly so, that whilst being on that stage was important to her, graduating well from high school was maybe more so.

During her time in AKB48, Yuurin never managed to rank in the elections or appear in the senbatsu, but she was present on a number of B sides from Gingham Check onwards. Although she described herself as both timid and weak, it is clear that her time in AKB meant a lot to her and that those three years were an important part of her childhood. Our last news of Yuurin comes from 2024, when she posted about her work at an advertising agency, and whether she is still doing that or not, it only remains for us to wish her luck and hope that whatever is happening now, she still finds time to look back on those days between 2011-2014 fondly.