Sakura Gakuin announced last year that at the end of August 2021 they would disband. This would make them an active idol group for eleven years. I thought I would write about how I became interested in this group, how I started the fandom for them outside of Japan and what Sakura Gakuin means to me. This is how I saw things related to Sakura Gakuin through the years.
THE BEGINNING
I’m reluctant to admit it, but I used to be an active
member of a forum for Japanese idols. I
not only commented in several threads on this forum, but I actually started
many threads myself. One of these
threads I started was for Sakura Gakuin.
So how did I discover this group in the first place? Well, it all began with a torrent I
downloaded named “TOKYO IDOL FESTIVAL 2010”.
It was a large torrent too, over five GB and three hours long. I didn’t watch it immediately, but I did
manage to sit through it one night in November 2010. Sakura Gakuin were the second group to
perform. I remember it all like it was
yesterday: the video began with an announcer saying, “Tokyo Idol Festival 2010”,
and then a flash of six photos, the first five of which was two girls each,
followed by a group photo with the announcer then saying, “Sakura Gakuin”. Then each of the ten girls introduced herself
followed by a performance of the song “Yume ni Mukatte”. It was an exciting performance by a group of
very cute and energetic girls! Although
I sat through all three hours, it was a mixture of pleasure and doldrums. Sakura Gakuin were clearly my favorite of all
the groups in this video. Shortly after
the video was over I went on the internet to look up information on Sakura Gakuin
and found very little about them written in English. As a matter of fact, I found a list of all
their names and a sentence or two written about the oldest members, and that’s
it. I copied down on paper all their
names and birthdays for my personal reference.
The original Sakura Gakuin lineup was Muto Ayami, Miyoshi Ayaka, Matsui
Airi, Nakamoto Suzuka, Iida Raura, Horiuchi Marina, Sugisaki Nene and Sato
Hinata, although joining them as “transfer students” were Mizuno Yui and
Kikuchi Moa. Having discovered their
names, I found that my personal favorite amongst them was tall and beautiful Ayaka,
whose singing and dancing impressed me the most! Then I looked for a place to preorder Sakura
Gakuin’s debut single. I found one and
placed my order. Then I went on that
forum I used and created the Sakura Gakuin thread. All of this occurred over the course of one
night and early the next morning. I
didn’t go to bed until after 6 a.m. I then
waited for a response, any response. For
a couple of weeks, and no one responded.
Eventually someone responded but it wasn’t exactly what I expected. Someone shared a video of Suzuka performing
with her sister Himeka. I then found out
that both Suzuka and Ayami were previously members of another idol group named
Karen Girl’s. Apparently, Karen Girl’s
sang songs for a children’s anime series that never got a U.S. release. Although I like anime, I don’t keep track of
all the series that go unreleased in my country. Also, it should be noted that in 2010 I was
still learning about Japanese idols. I
knew a tiny bit about the voice actresses that sang songs for the anime series
I watched, most of which were magical girl series, but almost nothing about
idols. Well, long story short, people
did start posting comments in my thread.
THE FANDOM STARTS
It was nice to chat with the fans of Sakura Gakuin after waiting a few weeks! A lot of people seemed to be fans of Ayami and Suzuka, with only a few people chiming in about the other members. I didn’t find a fellow fan who shared my interest in Ayaka, though. I edited a wiki on Sakura Gakuin and continued to update it as many times as necessary. I wrote about Sakura Gakuin in my blog “I ♥ Miyoshi Ayaka’s Idol Musings” (which, unfortunately, I deleted due to depression). I edited the Sakura Gakuin performance out of “TIF 2010” and uploaded it my old YouTube channel Doki Doki Morning (which I also deleted, but this time due to me trying to delete part of my Google account). In fact, I wrote about Sakura Gakuin just about anywhere I could. Some of the websites where I wrote about them have now, unfortunately, been deleted. But I let anyone and everyone I knew at the time that Sakura Gakuin was my favorite idol group! A lot of the things I wrote were copied and pasted into other people’s blogs, websites and various places on the internet, usually without my permission. This annoyed me at the time, and it still does a bit, but it goes to show that fans all over the globe liked what I said about Sakura Gakuin. I just don’t like it when people try to claim authorship of something they didn’t write. (And in some cases, these people didn’t seem to have much in the way of English language skills, so I’m thinking they copied what I wrote as a way of making friends.) I was really excited when Sakura Gakuin’s first album “Sakura Gakuin Nendo 2010 ~message~” was released (belatedly, due to the earthquake) in April 2011. I thought the album was perfect, with 11 great songs! The lead track, “FLY AWAY”, grabbed my attention right away with its electronic sounds leading into a rock beat. “Hello! IVY” was another great rocker, and one of the single’s tracks. “Brand New Day” by SCOOPERS, the subunit with Ayaka and Airi, was another personal favorite. I played that song so many times I lost count! The album ended with a ballad named “message” in which Ayami, Ayaka and Suzuka all got solos at the end. A perfect way to end the album! Unfortunately, I didn’t have the foresight to order all 4 versions of the album, something I now regret. This is still my all-time favorite idol album, and I didn’t get this excited over an idol album again until Candy Kiss released their album “Parfait” in 2015.
SLIDING DOWN
The odd thing, to me anyway, was that the breakout
song that got Sakura Gakuin more notice among idol fans was “Doki Doki Morning”
by Babymetal. Yes, I loved the song too,
and even named my YouTube channel after it (something I soon regretted). Heavy metal fans who listened to idol music,
and many who did not, suddenly crawled out of the woodwork and started posting
their comments about how they loved the track.
This was both a good and bad thing.
Good because more people became aware of Sakura Gakuin, and bad because
many Babymetal fans absolutely hated Sakura Gakuin! I think some of them were downright offended
that a ‘cool’ group like Babymetal would have anything to do with Japanese pop
music. This irked me, and I got even
more upset when I saw Babymetal fans calling Sakura Gakuin names I’d rather not
repeat here. (Something that I recall
distinctly was sometime later a Momoiro Clover fan said, “Babymetal’s songs are
the only good songs on Sakura Gakuin’s albums.”) Some fans are nice, and others have to be a
problem. Case in point: I tried to be
polite when a couple of girls on YouTube begged me over and over to subscribe
to their YouTube channel. I wasn’t
interested because they uploaded videos of them singing awful, original rap
songs. They told me that they were big
Babymetal fans. They even mistakenly
thought that because my channel was named Doki Doki Morning that I had some
connection to the group. I told them
(and many others later) that I didn’t. After
begging me again to subscribe to their channel because they weren’t well known,
I caved in. But I thought their songs
were lame and later unsubscribed and blocked them. I hated to do that, but I didn’t want to get
notifications for their videos. Another
bad thing about being named Doki Doki Morning is that a friend told me that
this name might imply that I was a fan of Morning Musume! UGH!
Sorry, but I’m not. In the
meantime, I pointed out to several fans on Facebook and other places on the
internet that the things they were posting on their blogs and fan groups were
written by me, and how about giving me some credit? I even linked where I originally wrote what
they copied and pasted. This led to some
of them flat-out denying that they copied me.
They even sent me personal messages telling me “I wrote that, not
you.” When I linked the website where I
wrote it (again) they said that they did not understand. When I clicked on their names to see who they
were I discovered that they were foreigners, mostly between 16 and 22, who
didn’t have English for a first language.
Eventually they blocked me because they didn’t want me to respond to
their theft of my writings. I later changed
both my username on that forum to I ♥ Miyoshi Ayaka and my blog name from “Doki
Doki’s Idol Musings” to “I ♥ Miyoshi Ayaka’s Idol Musings” so it would be
better understood that I am a big Ayaka fan.
It was tiring trying to convince Babymetal fans that I wasn’t involved
with the group. But my new username came
with a new set of problems. Almost
nobody I knew liked Ayaka and even people I didn’t know decided that they
didn’t like me because I wasn’t supporting their favorite idol. What happened was I got a series of private
messages from people all over the globe asking me why I was supporting Ayaka
when Ayami was cuter! They kept telling
how much better Ayami was and one girl kept making fun of how tall Ayaka
was! No joke! I got messages like that every day for a
while from people I never heard of before, all because they saw my name and
decided to annoy me for no special reason.
I tried to grin and bear it, telling them how awesome Ayaka was, and it
was sad to hear such horrible remarks coming from Ayami’s fans when both Ayami
and Ayaka were good friends. But they
would hear none of it and continued to insult both Ayaka and me. So, I did the only thing I could and waited
for them to go to sleep (since we were in different time zones), deleted their
messages and then blocked them. I began
to think that being a fan of Sakura Gakuin and Ayaka in particular meant I was
inviting the meanest people everywhere to use me as a target for the most
horrible remarks a so-called idol fan could muster.
3 A.M. AND LATER
In October 2011 Sakura Gakuin began making commercials promoting FLET’s Wi-Fi. This continued for at least a year. There were some Q&A games associated with this promotion and I couldn’t really figure out what the text was since I can’t read Japanese. But at least I tried playing them. Sakura Gakuin’s second album, “Sakura Gakuin 2011 Nendo ~FRIENDS~”, released in March 2012, was a good follow-up to their first, but not as perfect as “~message~”. I loved most of the 12 tracks on the album, and it has some worthy group songs such the title song, “Verishuvi”, the awesome rock / electronica hybrid “Otomegokoro”, “See you” and the cover song “Tabidachi no Hi ni”. There wasn’t another SCOOPERS song here, but instead we got “3.a.m”, which was Ayami, Ayaka and Airi singing a three-part song. “Please! Please! Please!” by subunit Twinklestars was very good, but their other track, “Rapicamu”, was kind of blah. The real problems with this album, though, was the awful tracks by subunits Minipati and Babymetal. The new Minipati lineup was different than the first album’s, and this was part of the problem; I just never got into this lineup like the first album’s lineup. But the biggest problem was the songs themselves, and this I blame on the songwriters. Their songs this time around just weren’t up to snuff. I didn’t like any of the later songs written for the second Minipati lineup, either. I’m probably the only Sakura Gakuin fan on the entire planet to have this opinion. As for the Babymetal song, “Ii ne”, which has a 30 second hip-hop section, I have the Vega Mix Version on 3 versions of “FRIENDS” and the regular version on the compilation “LOCAL IDOL BEST”. Honestly, though, I bought that CD for the B Flat / Party Rockets and Jewel Kiss songs. On the plus side two new members joined Sakura Gakuin for the 2011 album, Taguchi Hana and Isono Rinon. I took an immediate liking to Rinon because she was pretty and had long, black hair like Ayaka. Unfortunately, good things never last, and three members of the original lineup of Sakura Gakuin graduated at the end of March 2012. Ayami, Ayaka and Airi will always be a part of what made Sakura Gakuin interesting and fun during the first two years. Talented and funny young Super Ladies all!
POPULARITY RISING
The new school year brought Sakura Gakuin some new
“transfer students”, Notsu Yunano (later Honjyo Yunano), Ooga Saki and Sugimoto
Mariri. Among these girls I took a
liking the tallest, beautiful Mariri! Due
to the rising popularity of Babymetal, who were now more than just a subunit,
Sakura Gakuin were gaining fans who discovered them through Babymetal. Oddly enough, while Suzuka was named the new President of Sakura Gakuin, Marina was made Vice President and Raura named Vice Vice President (!), a position that I had never heard of before or since. To be honest, I think this was done because
Suzuka was often busy with Babymetal, so Marina became the President and Raura
the Vice President when Suzuka was gone. (I wanted to mention that Suzuka’s sister
Himeka was, at the time, a member of the idol group Nogizaka 46. I remember reading from a fan of this group
that “Himeka has a younger sister in another idol group.” Why Suzuka wasn’t mentioned by name or why
the names of her groups weren’t mentioned by this fan, I don’t know.) I should mention that at one point I started a
fan group for Sakura Gakuin on Facebook.
One of the people who later sent me many annoying personal messages was
a member, and I did my best to tolerate her for a while. I eventually kicked her out of the group and blocked
her after she became unbearable to deal with, but she came back under a false
name. There was another Sakura Gakuin
group on Facebook that later became a page that I followed. That was until yet another Ayami fan sent me
messages insulting me for liking Ayaka, and basically cyber-bullied me. I blocked him too and reported him to the
administrator of the page. The admin
told me that he couldn’t do anything about the bully because he was only
bullying one person (me) and not a group of people! Honest!
The admin happened to be the friend of one of my friends and I told my
friend about this. My friend’s response
was that maybe the admin didn’t understand the situation about me and the
bully. Oh, I think that admin understood
the situation perfectly well; he, and the rude-messaging bully, simply didn’t
like me. I unliked the page and never
looked at it again. The lesson I learned
from this was that it’s okay for one person to be cyber-bullied because one
person, in the long run, does not matter.
Although I still liked Sakura Gakuin a lot, I had to admit that I missed
Ayaka terribly. The good news was that
Ayaka was keeping busy with her acting and modeling careers. She modeled for the Japanese version of
“Seventeen” magazine for years and made several TV and movie appearances. For the movie Gumo Ebian! a.k.a. Good
Morning Everyone! Ayaka won the Sponichi Grand Prix Newcomer Award at the 2012 Mainichi
Film Awards. The
Sakura Gakuin single “WONDERFUL JOURNEY” was decent, but one of the B-sides,
“Song for smiling”, was terrific! Why
this wasn’t the A-side, I have no idea. One
of the pluses of this year were a subunit named Kagaku Kyuumei Kikou LOGICA?
with Marina, Hinata and Rinon as the members.
LOGICA? is a mix of 1970s funk rock and modern electronica with lyrics
about science! They released a single in
November 2012 titled “Science Girl ▽
Silence Boy”, which has a pretty funny music video for
the title song. Around late February
2013 Sakura Gakuin released the single “My Graduation Toss”, an upbeat song
about a sad subject (for idols), graduating.
This utterly fantastic song was written by Kawase Tomoko (a.k.a. Tommy february6) and her husband Okuda Shunsaku.
The music video had the girls doing air guitar impressions, and it’s fun
to watch. The B side to the Limited B
Edition was “Mezase! Super Lady” in which all the members spoke lines while the
actor playing Mori-sensei sort of narrated it.
I really like this a lot, and I thought that it should have been included
on the album that soon followed, “Sakura Gakuin 2012 Nendo ~My Generation~”. Little did I know at the time that I’d get my
wish, over and over again, when it was included on every other Sakura Gakuin
album after this. “My Generation” was
released in March 2013 and it was a pretty decent album aside from a couple
songs, one by Minipati and the other the B side “Marshmallow-iro no Kimi
to”. The Babymetal track “Headbanger!!”
was an improvement from the last album’s song, although the songwriters have
the word “metal” attached to their names.
This, and Babymetal’s soaring popularity, caused nearly every fan of
theirs to adopt the same type of names for their usernames on the internet. This wasn’t a good thing, in my opinion. The very good news was there was two LOGICA?
songs on the CD; the aforementioned “Science Girl ▽
Silence Boy”, and a new song titled “Delta”.
“Delta” is, hands down, LOGICA?’s best song! It is the best funk rock / J-pop hybrid song
I’ve ever heard! This was the last album
for founding member Suzuka, and Mariri’s only album, as Mariri decided to leave
Sakura Gakuin after only one year. Mariri’s
decision to leave was a sad one for me personally, as she is one of my favorite
members of the group, along with Ayaka, Hinata, Marina and Rinon.
No comments:
Post a Comment