Johnny's at 2009's Kouhaku

Well midterms are still sucking most of my free time away but I'll try to finish my report in the next day or two as I will have a bit more free time. But until then to keep up with the news...

The official list for the Kouhaku program, which is a New Year's Countdown music program, has been announced recently. Like usual SMAP and TOKIO, who have been on the program for over ten years are of course returning but there are two other Johnny's groups joining the line up this year, Arashi and NYC Boys all for the white team. And for those not familiar with the program all the acts are devided into two teams, the female artists are the red team and the male are the white team and whoever gets the highest ratings collectively are the winners of the program. And I honestly can't remember the last time the red team won.

Official Kouhaku list. (Japanese only)

As many I was quite shocked to see NYC Boys on the list, as they are meant to be just a temporary unit but the more I thought about it the choice did not seem so strange. Kouhaku picks some of the top selling acts of the year to perform, so Arashi seems to be a no brainer there, and NYC Boys did sell over 200K copies of their single, which even some of the big acts in Japan don't do anymore these days. Unlike Hey! Say! JUMP, who have released nothing this year. Because I'm sure Johnny's would have had them there instead of NYC Boys if they were eligible but even if they were to release a new single in December it would be too late to have them invited. So they had to go with the closest thing, NYC Boys, IMHO.

Also this year has been a good year for Juniors, especially the younger ones and I think this is also a continuation of this. Especially in one of the articles it mentions that Juniors will be joining the group for there performance and hinted it would be the younger ones that won't be able to participate in Johnny's Countdown, so I would not be surprised at all to see Morimoto Shintarou get some screen time for this.

And then looking at the program itself, there's no denying the fact it is no longer the popular program it once was. For years the viewer numbers have been declining and less and less of the younger generation are watching, so groups that are hits with Japan's youth like Arashi, who's a hit with everyone these days, and NYC Boys who are targetted for the younger generation of the population are good choices for the program to pick to try again to reverse the declining ratings trend.

And that's about all I've come up with about this decision. I think keeping these factors in mind the decision makes more sense, but personally I think I'll be looking more forward to seeing Hey! Say! BEST all together on the Johnny's Countdown stage for the first time this year. And I hope they have a bit more of a presence at this year's Countdown than they did at the last one.