Peter's Japan blog

Seems I'll be doing more of these anime conventions from now on :-) After New York Anime Festival in October 2010, this year I'm going to Japan Expo in Paris. Main attractions for me will be May'n and PASSPO, and in the same weekend X Japan is performing in Paris as well, so that a perfect combination! Still more artists are being announced that are coming to Japan Expo so maybe some interesting surprises :-)
Let's hope some more interesting industry guests will be announced, but I'm gonna try to get everyone's signature if there's a signing :-) I'll be there from Friday July 1st till Sunday July 3rd.

Japan Expo Website

This episode shows part of their second Shinahachi Live in NGK in Osaka. And this time we're the highly anticipated live performances of Yarakai Heart, Queen Bee ~Shoujo no jidai kara~ and Ichikoi. The fourth song was the old song "friend". The episode starts off with a little bit of backstage preparation.

I really liked the full Yarakai Heart dance, having now seen the other choreography from the PV. Too bad they have to hold their mikes to sing, so the moves from the PV are halved to just one hand.

Queen Bee was very sexy K-Pop style dance. Normally Yurippe was in the Queen Bee group too, but she was absent, so the choreography was apparently changed a little. But nevertheless it has a lot of potential with some hot moves from Yokoyama and Okawa. Asahi didn't really fit in the group though.

Then came Ichikoi, the song from team Gakuran being Goto and Asahi who are playing guys. They've been doing this act since the Meniwa Aoba Yama Hotogisu Hatsukoi PV and now have their own song. They try to act like men with their clothes, moves and speech ;p I really hope Gocchan comes back in 6 months, because she did very well. I liked her voice better than Asahi's in this live.

And this Shinahachi Live in NGK ended with a nice rendition of friend by the whole group.

And they've fooled the girls again thinking it was going to Zeiin Itadakimasu Quiz.
But it's the graduation episode of chief AD Nishida, this time called Nishi-yan ^^. And Masuno is singing again to the song played in the background xD Uematsu AD also joins to participate in the quiz as he would know Nishida good.

First question is the full name of Nishida, which everyone except Uematsu had wrong xD

Second question is which member Nishida had a first bad moment with (I think ;p).

Third question is which person he likes the most ;p Hint being a name with 3 kanji. Final hint starts with S. But everyone was in it on this question to let Sakacchi think it was her, while it was Saori, the assitant producer xD

This episode had the new Makehende PV as intro! It's such a lovely song by the Kansai girls and they made a great PV for it!

And we get another dodgeball episode! It's the one man battle against the rest of the group, and of course it has to be Nomoto Manami for dodgeball. In the first part of this episode she has 5 minutes to hit everybody. Whoever remains gets an expensive bento pack.
Tonooka seemed to last the longest, but finally had to give in as well.

The second part of the episode was a battle between two teams lead by Nomoto Manami and Ojima Chika, and the had to pick members for their team by jan-ken-pon who could choose first.
It was a tight battle but in the end, Oji's team won!

Also Masuno was constantly singing a song, which sounded very familiar to me and of course it was familiar to me because it was SEVEN DAYS WAR, but in the original version, not the cover by Ayumi Hamsaki :)

So it's finally going to happen, and this time for real ;p They've announced it several times in the past (and put it on my blog), but this it's real :-)
Dates for the time being are London (June 28th), Paris (July 1st) and Berlin (July 4th). More might be to come. Would love to go to one of them! :-)

Arrived in Akihabara at 9h30, strolling around a bit to kill the time.
10h: Ishimaru store opens, and go up to 5F to get and pay my 2 dvds. Was standing around a bit to see what others were doing. Didn't learn much so I just took my printed email and gave it to the guy behind the counter. He knew right away what it was and what to look at and didn't even ask anything so everything went perfect xD. Got my 2 dvds and received the event ticket! With 2 stamps on it as I got 2 dvds. Still had 1.5 hours until I had to be back here so went to eat some donuts at Mr. Donut ;p

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