The Shounen Club 12 April 2009 review

And we are back to a good quality video again. Thankfully this should be the final year's worth of video this will be a thing with and it will be nice clear video for them all soon enough.

The introduction is the basic each group gets spotlighted as they dance with groupings of course getting each Junior introduced by name. But to note Jesse is missing for this month's episodes, I do not think they have already begun to change out members of Hip Hop Jump yet, IIRC he tends to disappear from time to time during his earlier years so this is more likely one of those times.

Like with the last episode three Juniors are called up to help introduce the theme of the episode, Akogare Hero (Admired Hero). This time it is Fujigaya Taisuke with B.I.Shadow. Nakajima Kento gets to talk and of course gets to talk about admiring Yamada Ryosuke and that is all they have time for as they start the theme medley after that.

Looking at things it seems to make a lot of sense that Morimoto Shintaro gets a new group of Juniors to perform with as everyone from his usual group is shooting up in height. I also find it disappointing that we do not have as many chances to hear his voice nowadays as we did back then.

With the Fresh Juniors we have Matsumura Hokuto getting introduced with them even though he has already been placed in a group. But he does get to wear something to place him with BIS and not the more generic outfits the others are in.

Of the rest I only recognize Kishimoto Shintaro as a Junior that is still with the agency. We should be seeing more of him in future episodes as he is a part of the Snow Prince Gasshodan group that will be put together later in 2009.

There is then an MC segment with the Fresh Juniors. Of course the focus is on with sempai they admire. Hokku gets his Junior ni Q appearance brought up as he gets to talk about his admiration of Yamashita Tomohisa. Kishimoto says that he admires Hashimoto Ryosuke.

The guests of the episode, Hey! Say! 7 then perform, they start off with an accent dance before moving on to perform their unit song GET!!, which is one of their songs that have been released on CD. It is also one of my favorite unit songs for them. And this performance really helps highlight that these kids have grown since debut as their voices are much closer to where they will be once they settle than before.

For the MC they go over the sempai that HS7 admire. They do not even have to ask Chinen Yuri about who he admires as Nakamaru Yuichi brings up Ohno Satoshi on his own to start the conversation. Nakajima Yuto says it is Takizawa Hideaki for him and for Yamada it is Domoto Koichi. Okamoto Keito actually gives a bit of a different answer than usual and names Taguchi Junnosuke instead of his usual standby of his father Okamoto Kenichi.

A.B.C-Z then perform a special medley of their songs, Ashita no Tame ni Boku ga Iru, Vanilla and  InaZuma Venus. I kinda like how they seem to be ramping up energy-wise with each song, going from a ballad to something uptempo to something even more uptempo to end on.

After that is is Junior Colosseum time. There are no teams this time around but we have the usual selection of Juniors to participate. They are given a prompt and if they want to try it they get on a platform to do so. After the time is up for the prompt Nakamaru gets to judge who did it best.

One of the rounds is about impersonations but the prompt does ban them from doing ones they have done before. But that does not stop Kawai Fumito from doing something Matsumoto Jun related as he does Sakura Sake going from Sakurai Sho to Matsujun's part.

There is then a new segment brought out, Gekkan KoyaMaru, which is a focus on the hosts of the show as one of them shows off photos of something and discusses it. Koyama Keiichiro is up for this episode and he has photos of a trip to Nagano that he took with Kato Shigeaki.

There is then a Junior special medley that lets the Juniors that were not in the earlier medley, the older ones, perform. It starts off with the odd pairing of Nozawa Yuki and Kishi Takayoshi to sing a duet.

But then the rest of Mis Snow Man show up to perform No More Wait before we return to the younger Juniors coming out to perform.

It is time for Junior ni Q and the question is about heroes. Takada Sho is called over and he listed three names, with Senga Kento being one of them. So they call Senga over and he is mostly flustered about it.

Since Senga is there they go over his answer of Sakurai Sho. He shares a story about Sho, though I could not catch all of it.

Goseki Koichi is called over next as he put Nakamaru down as his answer. From what I could follow when he was trying to think of who to write for his answer he thought of Koyama and Nakamaru and decided to just put down Nakamaru's name.

Following this is a letter exchange segment between Fujigaya Taisuke and Totsuka Shota. This is definitely one of these segments I really wish I had the subtitles for as the two have known each other long enough you can tell they are pretty comfortable about saying what they want about each other.

There is then a KAT-TUN Respect Medley, performed by Ebikisu with a little bit of Question? in the mix. In light of recent events for KAT-TUN that was actually not easy to sit through, especially since it is so easy to hear that Fujigaya's rap is strongly inspired by Tanaka Koki's.

The end song is Hero and is with the older Juniors like usual. Even though it is nice when it is the older Juniors if just because they can get some focus during the end song the stage always seems to be a bit empty. But I think that is more because they do not move much in these performances than anything else.


A solid episode that gives us some more Fresh Juniors to see, even though most are gone by now. But it is still nice to see the ones that are still around. I mean Kishimoto has grown so much it is amazing to see how he looked when he was younger and how he looks now.

And I dread going through more episodes for a while as I cannot remember if KAT-TUN returns as guests in the near future or not. I think the full weight of Koki leaving Johnny's will hit if I see the group together on this program.