Kanjuu Might Debut!

It was announced at one of the performances of the stage show Another that Johnny Kitagawa is thinking of debuting a new unit with its members being all Kansai Juniors. His plans would be to debut a seven to eight member unit that will debut early next year.

From the newspaper article it sounds more like Johnny gave his okay to these plans but like with all announcements like this it will probably have to wait before we see it either start to happen or just be forgotten. Though I do think this is will be the same as the A.B.C-Z debut announcement, where things started off vague and questionable but it happened anyway. In fact that debut was also first announced at a stage show, IIRC.

My recent thoughts about the chances of a Kanjuu group debuting have been high and I figured if it were to happen than next year would not be a bad time frame. I can only assume the group will be mainly the older Kanjuu and they are at a point that if they do not start debuting soon they might as well leave the agency. It has almost been ten years since the last group of Kanjuu debuted and debuting Nakayama Yuma multiple times does not make up for that. And while next year is Kanjani8's 10th anniversary for their debut it would seem weird for them to celebrate it after going all out for their 8th anniversary just last year. Plus I think they would gladly step aside to let their juniors debut, as if any group understands how hard it is for a Kanjuu to get to the point where they will be debuted it is them.

With the group being seven or eight members I would assume that it would at least be the usual seven Kanjuu that get the most promotion, B.A.D. (Kiriyama Akito and Nakama Junta), 7WEST (Shigeoka Daiki, Fujii Ryusei, Kotaki Nozomu and Kamiyama Tomohiro) and Hamada Takahiro. If they decide on an eighth member I can see them either choosing Hamanaka Bunichi, as he is one of the better known older Juniors, or even Mukai Koji, as he is not far off in age from the members of 7WEST and has built popularity with Kin Kan. Though personally I would rather have Bunichi debut over Mukai for now as this would probably be Bunichi's final shot at it and I like Mukai with Kin Kan and want him to debut years later in a group with KK and Naniwa Oji. Or he could end up in Twenty Twenty if that group goes through. (The vote for the 2020 Olympics host city is on September 7th, so we could be getting some major news about that too.)

In the end all I know is that I have been wanting a debut to happen for the Kanjuu for years and I will be crushed if it does not happen. So Johnny better not forget about this.