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Oh this is one of my favourites, the one with the chicken and the egg, because I keep hearing it all the time and I don’t get it. Is this one trying to be a metaphor for a supposedly very difficult question? If so, it’s not doing a very good job, in fact, it isn’t even in the right business, because the answer to the question “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” is actually so very simple. You’ll have to read almost through the whole post to find it, but hey, don’t complain. If you’re here you don’t have anything better to do, and if you don’t have anything better to do you might as well read it.

About that Mezamashi clip I posted earlier… when the digital clock in the corner of the screen shows 7:33 the wall clock behind Hey! Say! JUMP says. 7:30. Still at 7:33 on the digital clock in the next scene where they’re asked if any of them watches Mezamashi and they’re all like “Hai! Yeah, me! Me! I wactch it every day!” the wall clock is at 7:56…

Man, I so want to know what happened in those 26 minutes. Did they just hang around? Did they have breakfast? Did they give a 25-minute interview that we’ll never see? Did they have to do this scene over and over again until they finally got it right? Or did they start fighting and scratched each other’s faces and spat at each other and pulled each other’s hair until finally someone started to cry? Oh well, I guess we will never know…

But hey, who cares? On to other matters. I hear that Shonen Club will be remodeled at the end of the year? This is just a rumour but I kinda trust the source. It says “Some HSJump members will permanently host Shokura (taking over Nakamaru and Koyama) while the other H!S!J members will rotate to help-host (The roles currently held by Yuuto, Hikaru and Yabu).”

This is exactly what I meant with what I wrote two days ago: “So why not let them stay on Shokura? Taking HSJ out of Shokura might very well lead to a huge drop in TV ratings. Having a debuted group on Shokura would very likely result in better ratings for the program.” Thank you. I rest my case.

And it doesn’t even have to stop there.

I think Taiyo and Shoon could shine a whole lot more if the Ya-Ya-yah TV program changed the way I already described it in a reply to a comment from Aki earlier, so I’ll just paste it here: Johnny’s will go on and there will be more debuts in the future and they better start pimping some kids now if they want to debut them in 3 or 5 years. Like they did with Yuto who was just a weird little tyke when he started out on Ya-Ya-yah. Look where he’s now. Look at Yamada and Morimoto. (It is only now as I’m writing these lines that I remember that Yamada and Morimoto had their very first TV appearance on the first Ya-Ya-yah episode I saw when I was in Japan for the first time. Now, a little over 3 years later I see them debuting. How could I not be incredibly happy?) I’m getting all nostalgic here, but I wish the Ya-Ya-yah program could go back to the age of fun and games with the littluns, and instead of Midorinu and Koyama Ya-Ya-yah finally get to host their own show and introduce us to the next generation. It would be great for the ratings and Ya-Ya-yah would get more attention even if they don’t debut together (although that would still be kinda possible). I’d totally love that.

And I think it might be possible.

I think Johnny himself had no idea about Hey! Say! JUMP when Hey! Say! 7′s single went on sale. This was just an experiment. Johnny wanted to see if a Heisei group could already make it to the top of the charts. And boy, did they make it. Johnny himself called their success “overwhelming”. He built the Heisei bandwagon and he was the first to jump it. It may take all of us some time to realize it, but what we’re witnessing here might be the biggest revolution JE has seen since the rise of SMAP. And before anybody gets me wrong: I’m not comparing HSJ to SMAP, I’m comparing the impact they have on JE. SMAP released 7 Albums in the first 3 years. Their impact on the company was that it became filthy stinkin’ rich. Rich enough to build what we perceive today as JE’s system. And I think that this system became so perfect that Kitagawa is now done with it. You can’t make a perfect thing better, but you can make other things perfect. You can make things shine by polishing them, and this is what is Kitagawa’s business. And getting back to that chicken-and-egg metaphor: you can’t make an egg more perfect, unless… you make it redundant.

I think he’s trying to change the system to a younger average debut age. Let’s face it. Even though we hear “Hey! Say!” all the time and everywhere these days, this isn’t about Heisei. It’s not that Johnny Kitagawa thinks the Heisei era is so great. What he says is not “I like Heisei”, what he says is “I like kids under 18″. I already wrote in in an earlier blog post: I think he’s in it for the younger kids, and if he could have done earlier what he did now he would have done it. It’s not that he hasn’t tried. He let Ya-Ya-yah have a single at a very young age, and he sure pimped them a lot in the early days. But even though they were successful enough to give them their own TV program and pimp them more they weren’t successful enough to make it on their own in the music business. Correct me if I’m wrong but I think HS7 sold more copies of Hey! Say! than Takki sold of Sumurai which was released one week later. Ya-Ya-yah’s single never even reached No.1 in the charts. I think the fact that a group of 15-year-olds could outsell Takki sent Kitagawa over the brink. All this is of course just a theory I have, but we’ll see if Johnny will ever debut a group with an average age over 18 again. I also think that groups will become more short-lived. Johnny will experiment more with units and with people. Group names will become disposable, but for the individual it will become easier to reach the goal of debut.

Johnny wants kids on TV. A lot of people want kids on TV too, and they’re not necessarily kids themselves. How many 14-year-old girls actually watch Hyakushiki at 1 :08AM? There’s no way this show could make any money in the middle of the night if it weren’t for a sufficient number of Showa-born people watching it.

So what has all this to do with chickens? It’s that the answer to the question is that the egg came first. Chickens are birds. It’s a scientific fact that birds evolved from dinosaurs. Dinosaurs laid eggs for over 160 million years before the first bird hatched out of one of them. Sometimes you just need to look at the bigger picture.

I think Johnny Kitagawa likes eggs for their potential AND WILL to grow into chickens. And he thinks he’s doing them a favour by giving them the chance to get rid of that awkward egg-shell and allow them to be chicks right away. The only way to make an egg more perfect is to make it redundant. I think this is what he’s trying to do. I think Johnny is creating a chicken that instead of laying eggs is giving birth to live fledglings.

Nobel Prize! NOW!

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