02 November 2012

Let's Speculate: Junior expansion?

EDIT: Meant to actually put this in the original post but for whatever reason did not. But there is very little in the way of actual concrete information about this. So this is pretty much what I have cobbled together from comments I have found in various places in the English language fandom and anything I could figure out from information about Hirano Sho on Japanese sites, which I will admit could be off as I am far from fluent in Japanese.

So basically this is a lot of speculation. Sorry if this has caused any confusion. I know usually I am much better about warning about that in these kinds of posts but I ended up ignoring my inner editor and failed to give this warning before posting. And it has honestly been bugging me since hitting the post button.

~*

This information has been floating around a bit but I finally got around to rounding up more information about it. But there does seem to be a third group of Juniors other than the Tokyo and Kansai Juniors, Nagoya Juniors.

Nagoya Junior: Hirano Sho
Word has it that there are only about 15 Nagoya Juniors. So far the only one that anyone has information on is Hirano Sho because of his inclusion in the Kansai Junior group Kin Kan (Which seems a bit odd seeing as Kin Kan stands for "Kings of Kansai", but whatever it's a Johnny's group name so it does not have to really make sense.). But this looks like to be a new development and most get grouped with the Kanjuu, like with Hirano getting put in a Kanjuu group.

Whether or not Johnny's plans on growing the group even more so they can eventually get their own studio for lessons is only known to Johnny's. Though expanding on the Juniors would not be surprising seeing that there are more and more debuted groups to back dance for and it is probably easier to just have local Juniors do that for groups instead of having to bring Juniors with them to all the stops on a tour.

Nagoya has always been on the map for entertainment behind Osaka and Tokyo. It does have one of the official Johnny's Shops and if a group is hitting only a few cities on a tour it is pretty much assumed it will be on that short list. In fact I believe one of the first concert tours Hey! Say! JUMP did for going outside of just Tokyo just had Osaka and Nagoya as the additional cities. Of course the huge success of AKS sister group SKE48 cannot be overlooked as they are not only based out of Nagoya but were the first sister group of AKB48. So while Nagoya is not as well known as Tokyo and Osaka it should not be overlooked as it does indeed seem to have its own strong entertainment ties.

Of course that all said it does not look like we will see too much of them for a while, outside of Hirano because he is in an active Kanjuu group. But it shall be interesting to see what the future will bring with this development.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is JE taking some notes from AKB expansion?

Anonymous said...

I would love where did you get this information from. Thank you.

Anonymous said...

(edit) I would love to know where did you get this information from. Thank you.

bearz said...

wow~ i just saw him in the recent shounen club and as i never saw his face before so i thought he is one of kansai boys because i don't understand japanese lol but i think he's so cute ;3 thanks for info ;D