A couple of folks contacted me over the past few days to inform me that the band Arashi（嵐）was going to end their activities as the popular Johnny's Entertainment/STARTO group after a final tour in 2026. I'd found out myself a little earlier on NHK News. Still, that was news to me since I'd thought that they pulled the curtains on their collective career at the end of 2020! But it's all about semantics here. It was merely mentioned that Arashi was going to suspend activities at the end of 2020, meaning that they could get back together for something or other.
It also didn't help that I've barely seen any of the guys since 2020. In fact, I only saw one Arashi member for the first time in years on TV recently. Kazunari Ninomiya（二宮和也）had a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in a flashback as the long-dead father of one of the main characters in the current NHK morning serial drama "Anpan"（あんぱん）. Frankly, I thought that leader Satoshi Ono（大野智）had long gone into painting and/or fishing, his two hobbies.
Fireminer, one of the guys who contacted me and a regular commenter, suggested that I could find a song by theirs to talk about, and luckily enough, I came across the dynamic "Wild at Heart" which was Arashi's 37th single from March 2012. In the music video, not only did they put on the disco suits but they were also given the rotating stand in a large room treatment. It seems that a lot of Japanese music videos liked to utilize that environment for a while. Soluna, Chris Janey and Junior Jokinen were responsible for the song which reached No. 1 on Oricon and ended up as the No. 6 single of the year, selling a little over a quarter of a million copies.
I'm going to mention another form of "lucky" again as I did in the previous paragraph. I was lucky enough to encounter "Wild at Heart" because it was used as the theme song for the Winter 2012 Fuji-TV drama, "Lucky Seven"（ラッキーセブン）, starring Arashi member Jun Matsumoto（松本潤） as his character ends up joining the motley crew of a detective agency. I remember catching a few episodes of the series on the old TV Japan.
Fireminer here! You picked a good song for the article. And it's just so... 2012. There was a disco & funk revival back then. I remember even Nickelback got into the act: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoBldRsvciM
ReplyDeleteHi, Fireminer. That's quite the different image for Nickelback, and I swear I think both it and Arashi used the same set for their videos!
DeleteDon't feel too bad, my wife and I also thought that Arashi had called it quits and each gone their separate ways after the Tokyo Olympics.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it looked pretty final to me back then.
Delete