More Idol Fiction from Kato Shigeaki

It has been announced that Kato Shigeaki will be having his second book published in March of 2013. The title of the book will be Senko Scramble and this time will be about a popular female idol of a girl group and a paparazzi photographer.

JE News Daily (English)


I am happy to hear that Shige is still working on being a novelist. As someone who wants to write a few books at least in my lifetime it helps give me hope and drive to do so.

While a part of me kinda wishes he broke away from the subject of idols I can understand why he has decided to stick with it. It helps to write what you know and idol life is of course something he is quite familiar with. And while he says it is all fiction I am sure the themes and some parts are inspired from things he knows from his experience, as it is near impossible for any writer to divorce themselves completely from their work.

I think at least moving on to another section of idoldom, female idols, at least shows some desire to expand topics. And I do hope he is doing it to slowly ween himself away from writing about idols and eventually about more varied topics. As I would love to have him see his dream come true and get his own section in a bookstore. Though he will always have a section in my book collection.

6 Gatsu no Bitter Orange upcoming play

I had to move over the weekend and the internet isn't up at the new place yet so updates will continue to be sparse overall as I now have to rely on public internet spots. I'll try to update as much as I can today with the news items I'm behind on, as I'll be at school and will have internet there between classes.

Kato Shigeaki and Joshima Shigeru will be starring in a play called 6 Gatsu no Bitter Orange. They will play brothers, with Joshima of course as the older brother and Shige as the younger.

The play will run the month of June in Tokyo then in Osaka for the first week of July.

Tokyo Graph article. (English)

Spring drama news 2010

I don't want to fall too far behind now that I'm almost caught up, especially since this is about the time the new dramas for the spring season are getting announced.

The first confirmed drama for a Johnny's this spring is for Arashi's Ohno Satoshi. He gets to lead again in a drama, this one being based off a popular manga Kaibutsu-kun from the 1960s. The story sounds like it wouldn't lend itself all too well to the drama format as it's the story of the prince of Monster Land that comes to the human world and has adventures with the monsters he finds living there. It's already been made into a couple of anime series so it should hopefully be interesting to see how they do this series for live action.

Tokyograph article. (English)

Next, Kusanagi Tsuyoshi will be in a drama special about Japanese-Americans, simply titled Japanese-Americans. The special will be five episodes long as it follows generations of a Japanese-American family and will air on TBS. They will run the episodes across five days in a row, which will be a first for them to try to do.

Tokyograph article. (English)

The most recent drama announcement is for Kato Shigeaki, who will get a chance to be a lead in a drama for the first time. The drama he will be the lead in is called Troubleman and it will air on TV Tokyo. It's being directed by SABU, known for his cult movies, who will be directing a TV drama for the first time.

Tokyograph article. (English)

And so far that's it for drama announcements for the spring. I hope there's more soon and I really hope some of the Hey! Say! JUMP boys get roles or something as Yamada shouldn't be the only one with a drama career.

2/3 of NEWS to be a part of a variety show

It was recently announced that 2/3rds of NEWS, Koyama Keiichirou, Kato Shigeaki, Masuda Takahisa and Tegoshi Yuya will have a regular segoment on a new variety program titled Soukon. Their segment will feature them having to do various running goals and they will also be planting trees as they earn points from these goals as a part of Lawson's green project.

Yomiuri online article. (Japanese only)

As a NEWS fan I'm pretty excited about this, even though I'm not sure how interesting it will be to see these four run every week. But I guess if they change things up enough it could be interesting. And in one of the articles about the program Shige mentions that he would like to run a big marathon, so it would be interesting to see if they can reach that goal, as marathons are something you need to train hard for. I guess we don't have to worry much about these four not being in shape for a while.