News round-up

Since I have some free time I figured I should do a quick round-up of news pieces here and there from the past week or so.

First up is that Ikuta Toma's Genji Monotagari film has announced more of the cast and he will be joined by fellow agency member, Higashiyama Noriyuki, who will play the man the author of the original tale is based on used for inspiration.

Tokyo Graph article. (English)


Then Koyama Keiichiro will be starring in a play version of the 0 Go Shitsu no Kyaku drama. The play will only have the story that Koyama had a part in but it mentions that they will have Yokoyama Yu reprise his role via pre-recorded video segments during the play.

The play will run from November 13th to December 5th at the Tokyo Globe Theatre and the from December 17th to the 20th at the Sankei Hall Breeze in Osaka.

Tokyo Graph article. (English)


And then there are a couple of SMAP related pieces of news.

First Inagaki Goro will be in the upcoming drama Nagereboshi, which stars Ueto Aya. He will play her brother in the series.

Tokyo Graph article. (English)


And SMAP has gotten a mention in international news. In a BBC news online article about the recent troubles between Japan and China their canceled Shanghai concerts have a mention as one of the many affects this has had between the two nations.

BBC news article. (English)


Finally a little update about how the photo scanning is going along. I do have them all finally scanned so I just have to sort them all into ZIP files and upload them to a downloading site. Hopefully I'll have the time to do this before the week is over.

Some NEWS news

Okay, I know I'm falling behind on updating again but thankfully there hasn't been much going on, just a couple of news bits.

First off Koyama Keiichiro has joined the number of Johnny's that are working with a news program. He will be on NTV's NNN News Realtime program every Thrusday. He will be covering human interest stories.

Tokyo Graph article. (English)

Honestly I'm really happy about this news as this really sounds like something Koyama would really love to do. He's always been very kind-hearted and being able to help people out by letting more know about their hardships is something I can see him being very happy to do.


And for some more recent news, Tegoshi Yuya was in a car accident on March 15th. It was a minor accident so no one was hurt, just a couple of slightly dented cars from the sounds of the report.

Tokyo Graph article. (English)

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.