The Shounen Club 9 July 2006 review

And here is the second July episode that should be Arashi's final appearance on the program.

While I do love Koyama Keiichiro and Nakamaru Yuichi as hosts of the program the Koyama and Tanaka Koki combination with these episodes is good too. Like with the start of the program Koki stealing Koyama's line to introduce the title of the show.

We have two guests for this episode as Ueda Tatsuya is brought out at the end of the introductions and is announced to be the producer for the episode. His chosen theme for the episode is Chousen (Challenge).

The theme medley is a Challenge Medley (so there really is no confusing what meaning they were going for with chousen). Instead of it sticking with the Junior groups we get a good deal of mixing between them. I was surprised how much Yamashita Shoon there was, but I am not one to complain about that.

And Sanada Yuma not only gets to sing in a song but gets his name on the screen. I do not think he becomes a regular Junior with a mic until after Hey! Say! JUMP debuts but I think seeing these things is a reminder that he was at least being noticed by the agency before then.

For the following MC we get some of the tiny Juniors asked about what they want to challenge. This gives us Kyomoto Taiga getting his name on the screen for the first time as he gets to talk about karate. And I believe Yamada Ryosuke was saying that he wanted to challenge going into a haunted room.

Directly after this the group of tiny Juniors sing a song Ueda wrote and Koki pretends to lead them as one would lead a choir.

This leads into Ueda singing a solo song that he penned himself, SPARKING. It is of course a rock song and Ueda looks like he would be at home as a lead vocalists for a rock band.

There is then a game segment where various challenges are pulled out of a box and the Juniors on stage are randomly picked to try to beat them. The first challenge is to do 20 winks in 10 seconds which Yokoo Wataru proves to be an expert at winking.

For the final challenge Koyama has Takaki Yuya stay to be a part of it after he brings the giant balloon ball onstage. The challenge is to headbutt the balloon across the stage which they mostly do.

Afterwards we have an MC with Koki and the members of Ya-Ya-Yah that are present that day. They of course each go over things they want to challenge.

Then there is a Yax3 medley that begins with Yabu singing a solo, Asu e. For the solo he gets what looks like all the tiny Juniors on the program to be a part of it.

The Yax3 song is Summer x Summer x Summer, which they performed in the last episode. So nothing really different other than they are in much uglier outfits for it this time.

There is a talk with Ueda about his pastime of boxing as one of the things that he has been challenging recently.

Ueda gets a second solo performance as he sings his song Gakigoori with Goto Hiromi on the violin for it. He is joined by Koki to sing their group song Rhodesia to end the performance.

We do not get to return to the Juniors after this performance though as Arashi is brought out once more. This time they start off with a talk with Koyama and Koki about things they are challenging.

Arashi perform their other big song of this time, Wish. This is a good performance to check to see how accurate Kawai Fumito's impersonation of Matsumoto Jun is. I would say that it is rather spot on.

For Junior ni Q the question is about what Juniors want to challenge. Arioka Daiki gets to be one of the Juniors spotlighted and he wanted to challenge going on a trip alone with the country he wanted to visit being England. I now want to see this become a Johnny's Journey program, though perhaps making it a little challenging at least so we do not end up with another Takaki and Chinen Yuri in France snorefest.

We also get to see a young Abe Ryohei who wants to be able to twirl a pen in his fingers. He tries to do so but only gets close to actually accomplishing the feat.

He is not the only future member of Snow Man to be featured as Fukazawa Tatsuya gets called over as well, though I could not really get what his challenge was. Though his voice was all kinds of squeaky when he spoke.

Having this so late in the episode means that we are already at the end song performance. I still have my issues with the song but at least there is this grouping that made me super happy this time around.


Another solid episode where everything clicks well together. It is a bit sad to know that this is the last we will see of Arashi on the program because of their history with it, but at this time they were already on the path to the mega popularity levels they will achieve a in about a couple of years so they could be considered too big for the program and it would have been too long since their debut.

It is also nice to see more of the Juniors that are currently featured on the show. It really makes me feel like I am actually catching up even though there are still a few years worth of episodes still to go to get there.