A quick look at Tanaka Juri

Over on the LJ community Jr_W0rld, there has been a dedicated translator, juniority, that has been translating quite a few of the Junior articles and I am really grateful for that. Since I had to cut back severely on the amount of magazines I buy because of my budget I feel like it has become a bit harder to follow the Juniors as their main activities tend to be magazine shoots, back dancing at concerts and performing on Shounen Club. Right now I can really only follow them through Shounen Club so that makes it hard to actually get to know them, especially with so many new faces getting pushed to the front of late. And of course it is always nice to learn more about the older faces as well, especially with them getting greater opportunities with the recent debuts.

From this I think I found a new reason to like Tanaka Juri, as he is probably the first Junior I have seen that has mentioned that he does not care about a girl's appearance when it comes to the common "What type of girl you like." question in these magazines. The full quote using juniority's translation is:

A girl who won’t be too careful when we’re together. It’d be nice if she was a girl who had the same attitude as me, and who could read the atmosphere. I think a girl who laughs a lot at jokes it good. I have zero preferences about her appearance. It’s totally ok if she’s taller than me. 

I find it refreshing as most of the time it's always something about a kind girl, a girl that can cook well, or what length of hair they prefer for a girl to have. While I can agree with the kindness being a good trait the other stuff just seems like it would be strange to be considered a deal breaker as it sometimes comes off with some of the boys' answers. Though I guess it can be chalked up that there is probably a chunk of them that are either not paying that much attention to girls in the first place because of their age and are just answering as they have seen others do or have little experience with girls and just go with appearance because it is easy. Though I feel the stress on appearance is not something I care for at all and after a while it seems like the boys are just stealing ideas from each other as they rarely say anything different about the matter. Which is why Juri's response stands out to me as it seems more genuine then most as it is not the kind of answer that you typically find for this question.

I have had high hopes for Juri for a while but he never seemed to be able to get that extra push other Juniors were getting even though he had his own group with Hip Hop Jump, so it makes me happy to see that is changing. I think he is definitely a Junior to watch as he is sure to go somewhere, as I'm sure Johnny's would love to have the first brothers to have debuted with him and his older brother Tanaka Koki eventually. But even beyond that I think he sounds like he is someone I can find to be rather like-able and am willing to say that I am a fan of.