The Shounen Club 1 June 2008 review

And we have the Juniors that were missing from the month before back for this episode.

The episode starts off with a song for all the main Juniors to sing, which is Anniversary. And the Takada quintet (which is the MasuRyo quartet with Takada Sho) is now a part of the usual introductions for the program.

The theme of the episode is Toki (time) and like usual the theme medley is up first. There is a mix of the grouped Juniors and members from the Junior groups this time around. Like Tamamori Yuta and Miyata Toshiya joining Yamashita Shoon for a song. And all of A.B.C. with parts of Question? also perform in the medley.

And finally the Junior Boys get on screen name tags when they perform their song for the medley. And I think this was about the time I began to notice them though did not do much to actually follow them as I was pretty focused on Kis-My-Ft2 and TOP3 at the time.

Near the end the guest, Yasuda Shota, for the episode joins the Juniors to sing a Kanjani8 song. And we get the usual ending with everyone singing.

This is followed by an MC segment with TOP3. Each has a board that has a pie chart dividing what they do in an average day. I can only assume that it has to be for a day off as none have school listed. Sanada Yuma seems to spend a lot of his time sleeping and Hashimoto Ryosuke has a rather large block of time dedicated to playing with friends.

TOP3 then perform the Junior song Hanasanai de Ai. The song starts off with just Hasshi singing then the other two come in later with solo lines and even back then it was easy to tell that Sanada and Nozawa Yuki were not strong singers. But with Hasshi with them it all balanced out as he was the lead vocals of the trio.

We get the first Heisei Post segment without any Hey! Say! JUMP members and Nakamaru Yuichi has taken it over. Though it shows signs of what this segment will turn into when Nakamaru brings out Yasuda to help answer the fan postcard asking about what to do about fighting with a friend.

This then directly leads into the MC segment with Yasuda as Koyama Keiichiro comes out to join them. They talk about the song Yasuda will perform as he wrote both the music and lyrics for it and performs it acoustic with him playing a guitar.

The song is called Sorezore no Kimi to. I rather like this song because it has a really nice calming sound to it. And it is nice that the audience is quiet for the song so it feels like you are getting the full impact of it.

The game segment is next and we get Kanjani8 Mania for this episode. Each member of each team get a board to write down their answers to the questions about K8 and Yasuda of course judges. Judging in this case though is just talking about the answers as there are definite answers. They are all in the "Who is the most __?" format with the first being good a cooking, the next about who is moved to tears the easiest, then the final one about who is the best sempai.

Nakamaru gets to have revenge on Koyama for showing his photo from when he joined the agency by pulling out a photo for Koyama from when he joined the agency.

After that there is a Kis-My-Ft2 medley. For the second song of the medley, Ready?, it is the group without Fujigaya Taisuke and Kitayama Hiromitsu, as they have gone offstage to put on their roller skates, and it is interesting to see the two mainly featured in the song are Senga Kento and Nikaido Takashi. It makes me realize that I do not remember when things changed and Tamamori starts to get pushed but I have the feeling it is probably in 2009 or 2010.

The VTR segment is up next and it is a Junior ni Q segment. The theme is about when in time you would go if you had a time machine. And all the Juniors shown are still with the agency. Nikaido is up and he wants to go back a few months to when Takizawa Hideaki was guesting and the judge of the game segment because he says he did not read the atmosphere right and wanted to apologize. I guess he must be talking about when he was answering his questions with Imai Tsubasa's name and I can only assume Tackey gave him a hard time about it.

Then it is Morita Myuto who wants to go to the future when there will be flying cars. He figures that it would be forty years in the future, but I do not share his optimism for that.

Masuda Ryo is brought over next and he wants to go into the future as well. He put down he wanted to go ten years into the future to see his twenty-five year old self. He also mentions Nakamaru but I did not get how that tied in.

Up last is Kitayama who wants to go back to when he was a Fresh Junior to give himself advice. They get to talking about some of the dances they had to do as Fresh Juniors and Koyama brings up that for one concert he had to do a dance without a shirt and we get "dance" moves with it.

Butokan is up next, starting out with an MC segment. Of course we have all five members back again for this month after being down to three in the past month. Yara Tomoyuki gets to show how he spends his days and unsurprisingly it is full of dancing, from lessons to even street dancing.

The group then performs Now and Forever. At this point there does not seem to be a lot to be said about the group performing the song as they are consistent with it. I think I would have liked to have seen the group perform something else as the song is rather generic and it is really the performance that makes it stand out.

And then we are at the end of the show and the song used to close out with is KAT-TUN's PRECIOUS ONE. While it is mainly the older Juniors performing the younger Juniors are around to mainly back dance. That is until near the end when they have some "alas that work surprisingly well in the song.


While K8 is always great to have as a guest individual members do not have as much of an impact if this episode is to go by. It makes sense as K8 shines best with group and member interactions, which you are not going to get when there is only one. And Yasuda seems to be a bit on the quiet side compared to some other members of the group.

But even with that taken into account this was another solid episode of the program. I think at this point it is easy to see that the members of TOP3 are bound to go far though in the end it is not all together. In fact it should only be a couple months or so before Hasshi is added to A.B.C. to make that group A.B.C-Z.