Episode 23: SixTones and SnowMan
This episode goes in depth on the history of the two new Johnny’s Entertainment groups: SixTones and SnowMan!
(Transcript added 1/23/2022)
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And just a little idol vocabulary before we get started, the name Johnny’s Juniors refers to the undebuted talents at Japan’s all male Johnny’s & Associates agency. They range from the young tweens back dancing at their very first concert to mid-20 somethings who have already established themselves as actors or dancers. At some point for those latter guys the label “Junior” is quietly dropped and they just become Johnny’s talents. Actor Ikuta Toma, who was part of the same golden group of Juniors that included the young Arashi, is a good example of a talent who remained at Johnny’s despite never debuting in a vocal group.
And with that out of the way… Welcome to the Idol Cast. Hit it!
Our opening song today was “Daybreaker” performed by SixTones and Snow Man which aired on the February 3, 2016 episode of Shounen Club, the Johnny’s Junior-focused musical variety show because, yes, this episode is all about the two exciting new Johnny’s debuts from this year. On January 22, 2020, Snow Man and SixTones (that’s spelled “Six” Tones because there are six of them but pronounced “Stones” because Japan) released a double A-side single. “Imitation Rain” by SixTones and “D.D.” by Snow Man and within a week they had sold an incredible 1.3 million copies, representing the pent-up energy of SixTones and Snow Man fans who have been waiting years for our beloved groups to debut.
I chose “Daybreaker” specifically to start this episode off because “Daybreaker” is a song packed with meaning for Juniors fans. I covered this briefly in episode 7 but “Daybreaker” was the song given to popular Johnny’s Junior groups Kis-My-Ft2 and A.B.C-Z during their long, long wait to debut. I don’t know if SixTones and Snow Man could have guessed in January 2016 that they’d have to wait four more long years.
“We just keep it moving on. We just keep it moving on. Feeling brand new daylight day break we’ve been waiting going on.”
I’ll get to introductions for SixTones and Snow Man in a bit because to really start this story, we have to go back twenty-five years to 1995 when a 13-year old kid named Takizawa Hideaki joined Johnny’s & Associates as a trainee. Without Takizawa, there would be no SixTones, no Snow Man, and, quite frankly, no future for Johnny’s & Associates in 2020. It is impossible to overstate the influence he has had on the agency since he joined as a teen. Everybody has a Takizawa story. Everybody. He comes up in interview after interview giving advice, giving encouragement...
So let’s rewind back to 1995 when, in a not-unusual move, the young Takizawa was encouraged to audition for Johnny’s & Associates by his older sister, who was a huge Domoto Koichi fan. I don’t know if he thought much of it at the time but soon after his audition he was chosen to backdance at a Kinki Kids concert and the young Takizawa Hideaki fell in love with both the stage and the world of show business. His motive to join Johnny’s may have been standard issue but Takizawa, known to everyone across Japan as Tackey, was anything but a standard issue kid. He wasn’t there to play around or get famous (or get girls), no, Tackey, at age 13, was already thinking about his long term career. He’d seen what the crushing grind of salaryman life had done to his father and he was determined to make his career doing something that was meaningful… and fun.
Within half a year, he’d gotten a starring role in a drama and was well on his way to becoming the most popular Junior in the entire agency. Having seen more than enough of Tackey over the years, it’s pretty clear to me that Tackey’s popularity with fangirls came more from his dreamboat looks and gentle smile than his talents as an entertainer but what’s remarkable about Tackey is what he chose to do with that popularity. Rather than launch himself into a solo career, he became the defacto “leader” of all the Juniors through sheer force of personality. Under Tackey’s watchful eye, the Juniors entered the spotlight. He was instrumental in getting the first concert to showcase the Juniors (120 all together including many, many, many who would go on to be in mega-popular groups like… Arashi and Kanjani8) and was the host of the fondly remembered Juniors variety show Hachi Ji da J which ran from 1998 to until Arashi’s debut in late 1999.
A few months after Hachi Ji da J ended, came the debut of Shounen Club, the Juniors-focused musical variety show, in April 2000. Again, Tackey was all over this program, and he was allowed to explore his newly found passion for video by directing and filming short clips for the show. Even after he debuted in 2002 as a duo called Tackey & Tsubasa with his friend Imai Tsubasa, Tackey remained a friend-to and champion-of the Juniors.
To give a sense of Tackey & Tsubasa at their height, here is “Kamen” released May 4, 2005, and is pretty indicative of their overall style. Light electropop mostly sung in unison. And the visuals were a huge part of their songs. I can picture them so clearly in my mind, two petite men standing side-by-side moving perfectly in sync...
In 2007, Takizawa tried his hand at producing his own unit for the first time. It was an interesting experiment, centered on Yara Tomoyuki aka Yaracchi, an extremely talented dancer and choreographer (he’s responsible for Arashi’s famous “One Love” choreography among others) but who remained (and spoiler alert would remain) an undebuted Junior.
Takizawa’s early experiment resulted in temporary unit Budokan, with Yaracchi as the center and leader backed by four other very talented Juniors including A.B.C-Z’s Tsukada Ryoichi, who trained to be an olympic gymnast, and Kis-My-Ft2’s Senga Kento. Like 2019’s Kpop supergroup unit SuperM, Budokan had so much dance talent assembled it almost seems obscene. Takizawa even directed a music video for the group, shot on location outside at a school track field in frigid November. They were good--Budokan would pop up for a few special performances on Shounen Club over the next year or so--but the group was missing… something. A spark. A direction. And nothing ever happened with them. Still busy with his own performing career, Takizawa had time to figure out what exactly makes a group work.
The impression I’ve gotten over the years from Takizawa is that debuting as a duo unit was, in the end, not the right career path for him or Imai Tsubasa. They always seemed more interested in their own activities than in what they were doing together. And for Takizawa that meant being ring leader of a pack of guys. Not even 2 years into his own debut and Takizawa was championing Junior group KAT-TUN, pulling them into the spotlight to stand beside him. And once they debuted he took up and carried Kis-My-Ft2, my own favorites A.B.C-Z (whose leader Kawai Fumito has followed in Takizawa’s footsteps as somebody Juniors can go to for advice), the as yet undebuted dance unit 4U who have carved out a nice niche in theater, and, finally, yes, Snow Man, who were hand picked by Takizawa himself.
These groups weren’t just backdancing in concerts, although they did backdance in quite a few concerts over the years, their main focus was something that I would consider both Tackey & Tsubasa’s true calling: musical theater.
I briefly touched on this when I talked about Shonentai in my history series but there is a big part of Johnny’s & Associates product that is almost completely inaccessible to people outside of Japan. As outsiders we tend to get narrow tunnel vision about the Japanese entertainment world, mapping what we are familiar with here in the West directly onto the industries in Asia. We talk about record sales and song charts and music video views on youtube because those are things we understand and have access to. But that’s just the thinnest slice of what an idol group--a Johnny’s group--does. There is a huge market for live theater in Japan and Johnny’s owns a pretty respectable piece of it. And fans of musical theater are serious fans. They manage to support not just a healthy market for tickets but also at least three or four print magazines, DVD/Blu-Ray sets, live CDs, and so on. I was certainly not the only person to purchase the lush 1000th performance anniversary edition of Kinki Kids’ Domoto Koichi’s long running stage play SHOCK, which featured a hilarious special making-of video in which the notoriously reserved Koichi travels to New York with our friend Yara Tomoyuki, who makes Koichi do things like try on novelty hats and eat a giant slice of pizza.
This culture of theater operates outside the realm of things like Billboard chart rankings but is a vital piece in the idol group puzzle. Idols sustain long and fulfilling careers on the stage in Japan; these shows tour across the country, allowing fans in far flung places to see their favorites in person. Just myself, personally, one year on my trip to Japan I was lucky enough to have timed it to catch the tail end of the run of the rock musical Coin Locker Babies, which featured not only two members of my beloved A.B.C-Z but also a couple of talented Johnny's Juniors and respected veteran rock star ROLLY. I had to travel way out to what the Japanese call inaka or the countryside to see it but it was well worth the trip. Even in kind of a far flung locale for a play starring two members of one of the least popular groups at Johnny’s, at least judging by record sales, that audience was still packed. Sold out. And the musical with the same cast was on its third revival. That is something you cannot understand without seeing it live and in person. Why does A.B.C-Z still exist, one might ask, looking at the sales numbers as the members cross over into their 30s… well the sold out audience and third revival tour of Coin Locker Babies helps explain why.
So, I mentioned that Kinki Kids Domoto Koichi has the long-running series (Endless) Shock and in an earlier episode I discussed Shonentai’s long running annual revue PLAYZONE but Takizawa really took things to another level with what should be remembered as his real masterpiece, what we can call his “Takizawa Kabuki” series which began with Takizawa Enbujou in 2006 and continues on to this day with Takizawa Kabuki ZERO 2020 scheduled to take place in July of this year.
2006’s Takizawa Enbujou was Tacky’s mission statement and calling card. He was not somebody who would be satisfied following the path laid out by others. Using two very talented former Takarazuka theater troupe actresses and a massive cast of Juniors including then-juniors groups Kis-My-Ft2 and ABC, as well as future members of Hey Say Jump and Snow Man, Takizawa put his own special twist on traditional Japanese theater--merging it with modern Japanese musical theater and classic Johnny’s & Associates stages until it became something uniquely his own. On the one hand, you have Takizawa carefully applying the female onnagata kabuki make-up on stage in a mesmerizing set piece and on the other you have shirtless young men doing raucous synchronized taiko drumming so loud you can feel it in your bones. His goal, always, is to keep the audience hooked on his cast of handsome young men and coming back for more. Everything is over-the-top and no expense is spared in making these productions the best they can possibly be. For the Juniors, making it through a run of Takizawa Kabuki is a right of passage. A real do-or-die, trial by fire challenge. Are you man enough to make it through two shows a day on a nationwide grind of a tour balancing delicate onnagata performance against macho shirtless taiko? Well, are you, punk?
It’s no coincidence that the groups that stayed the longest under Takizawa’s umbrella--A.B.C-Z, 4U, Snow Man--are absolute stallions on stage.
Let me run you through a little bit of what these shows look like. Let me play you the opening to 2010’s Takizawa Kabuki, which Takizawa not only starred in but where he also made his debut as director.
The 2010 Takiazawa Kabuki was filmed at the Nissay Theater in Ginza which is just around the corner and I mean literally just around the corner from the Grand Theater for the historic Takarazuka all female theater troupe which I need to do an episode on because they have also influenced Johnny’s style over the years and vice versa but sometimes you’ll walk past and see all the Takarazuka fangirls lined up on one side of the block and then you turn the corner and all the Johnny’s fangirls are lined up on the other. It’s certainly convenient for fans of both like me.
The Nissay theater is really lovely inside. But okay as Takizawa reads out the introduction the lights are down and there’s a video playing on a large screen at the back of the stage but when the lights come back up you see that the entire cast of Juniors have filed into the aisles. They’re dressed in white suit coats and black ties and looking very dapper. Takizawa reads their names to come up on stage and the audience applauds… Mis Snow Man! Some of these groups are defunct now. Awww Kawai had ridiculous hair back then. And Hashimoto was a complete baby. Maybe only like 16 years old. He looks so serious. Then comes Yara Tomoyuki who gets a spotlight because he’s the co-star of the show. The Spring dance! The curtain flies back and you see a massive traditional gate at the back of the stage. The Juniors race out in a wall of chaos, dressed in faux-traditional outfits in sparkly silver and blue, carrying massive red flags that they twirl and dance… A.B.C-Z are dressed in purple and silver to indicate their higher rank. And then Yara comes out with They Budoh (RIP) and he’s dressed in black and silver with a zebra print border. VERY cool…. But the set changes in the back and suddenly Takizawa appears standing on top of the gate and… he’s flying. He’s wearing a giant cape and flying over the stage while singing. It’s pure chaos and I love it.
The reason I really want you to understand this theater world is that without it there is simply no way for you to understand how the members of the two new debuted groups ended up in the position they are in today. Snow Man was hand picked by Takizawa to become a unit for 2009’s Takizawa Kabuki but the SixTones members also cut their teeth on the Johnny’s theater circuit. Appearing in the aforementioned PLAYZONE (which Imai Tsubasa eventually took over from Shonentai) and Shock, as well as the angsty Dream Boys (began with Takizawa in 2004 and passed off to the Juniors), A.B.C-Z’s own annual revue ABC-Za, the Junior’s focused revue Johnny’s World, and the darkly bizarre Shonentachi all of which act as a performance boot camp for the young men as well as letting them build fan bases of their own. Johnny’s & Associates does not have anything like Korea’s parasitic fansites, and instead does a brisk business in official stage photos, to include the Juniors, sales of which must surely indicate rankings of popularity and size of a group’s fan base. There’s a funny video on the Johnny’s Junior channel that shows Snow Man giving a backstage tour of Minami Za in Kyoto to include the merchandise sales area where they make fun of each and every one of each other’s photos. Charming boys.
But yes from appearing in other’s productions they can pivot to doing their own small shows at venues like Theater Crea and just keep on going on.
I will never forget my first visit to Japan in 2014 to see ABC-Za, Johnny’s Densetsu, and walking past just a sea of girls lingering by the Nissay Theater hoping to catch a glimpse of Snow Man as they went in the stage door. That was six years ago. At that point I only knew Snow Man from small features in Johnny’s idol magazines and behind-the-scenes makings for things like Takizawa Kabuki and it wasn’t until I saw that sea of girls with my own eyes, did I understand how popular they actually were. Because that is something that is not conveyed through sales charts or YouTube views.
My point with all of this is that 1) none of this could have happened without Takizawa’s own drive and tastes in entertainment and 2) although SixTones and Snow Man are only now making “official” debuts, both groups have been performing together for years. These rookies are no rookies. Both groups have appeared not just on stage but in dramas, films, and even--in the case of Snow Man’s own muscle bunny Iwamoto Hikaru--on Ultimate Ninja Warrior.
But back to Takizawa for a few more minutes-- so Takizawa’s interest in video dates at least as far back to 2000 and the early beginnings of Shounen Club and then in 2010 he took the remarkable opportunity to host his own online video channel showcasing the Juniors: Taki-CHANnel, a pun, if you speak Japanese. To understand how ground-breaking this was for Johnny’s & Associates, you have to understand that the agency, then still very much under the control of the elderly Johnny Kitagawa, was hesitant to put content online. This extended not just to talents having their own social media and putting music videos on YouTube but the agency went as far as to prevent their talents’ photos from being used on websites for dramas and films. Imagine not being able to post the photo of the star of your drama series on instagram or twitter. That is the power Johnny’s & Associates has in Japan. And also shows the slowness and caution with which the entertainment industry in Japan approaches new technology--why give away access to content that fans are protective of and already happily paying for?
At the time Taki-CHANnel didn’t really make sense to me because I didn’t yet understand that Tackey’s main focus was not his own performing career. But looking back it all falls into place. When Tackey retired from performing in 2018 and was handed control of the Juniors, one of the first things he did was open a youtube channel for them and start putting out English-subbed content. And what did he start with? A gorgeous music video, directed by Takizawa himself, for the then still undebuted SixTones. The song was called “Japonica Style”, drawing from the traditional Japanese-inspired aesthetic that Takizawa loves and has been refining for almost 15 years.
Despite the low budget, Takizawa’s visual flair just soaks through every frame. The camera lingers tenderly on each of the six members, Matsumura Hotkuto’s sultry gaze as he fishes a rose petal out of a fish bowl showing everything Takizawa has learned about appealing to the female gaze over his many years at Johnny’s & Associates. Rose petals caught in slow motion as the members dance gracefully beneath them…
So. With everything now queued up let’s rewind back to the beginning to take a look at our two new groups. I’ll start with Snow Man since they are the group that Takizawa had a direct hand in forming.
Snow Man started out life as Junior group “Mis Snow Man”, a name that I’ve never discovered the origin of but probably drew from the initials of planned members the same way the names KAT-TUN and Kis-My-Ft2 happened. Mis Snow Man was made up up of the six core members of what would become Snow Man along with three other Juniors, two who would be spun off into their own vocal-based Junior duo, Noon Boyz, and one would be moved to a different dance unit. Mis Snow Man was a performance-based unit formed for Takizawa Kakumei in 2009. The members had all been grouped together for various projects before and so it must have seemed like a natural fit.
After the Noon Boyz were spun off, the six member “Snow Man” was announced for Takizawa Kabuki in 2012. This unit, who specialized in dance and acrobatics, would become the core of the group moving forward.
Here is the quick and dirty guide to the members:
There’s tall, lanky leader Iwamoto Hikaru, 26, who has a dry sense of humor and loves Korean hip hop and whose legs seemingly take up 90% of his body. He is not only a wonderful dancer and talented actor but he also participated in Ultimate Ninja Warrior.
Fukazawa Tatsuya, 27, aka Fukka, who long ago overcame his shyness to become the group’s clown and dedicated “talker” and who always has an impression of his seniors ready to go and is always willing to be the butt of jokes.
Watanabe Shota, 27, who has a sweet face and a slight lisp. He often plays the mood maker and is well liked.
Abe Ryouhei, 26, aka Abe-chan, is the book smart member. He is one of the few Johnny’s talents to have graduated from university, something which he is rightly very proud of. He’s known for his Abe-chan no Tenki Youhou or Abe-chan’s weather report that he’ll leave taped up in the theater where they’re performing. You can find them collected on twitter. They’re extremely cute.
Strong featured Miyadate Ryota, 26, aka Date-sama, whose reserved personality is rather the opposite of what his “cool” look would imply.
And finally adorable--sometimes annoying--ball of sunshine Sakuma Daisuke, 27, the shortest member, and son of Sakurai Naomi, one of the members of 80s female idol group Kyan Kyan. He’s an oddball and an anime nerd with a massive smile which I have been on the receiving end of once in concert and I will never forget it.
Over the years these six men became a finely honed dance and performance unit, appearing in stage plays, backdancing for their senior groups, appearing as featured guests in other Johnny’s groups’ MVs, starring in their own self-produced theater shows, appearing in dramas--such as the hilarious and very fondly remembered (by me) Bad Boys J, in which they play teen bad boy gang members--and even getting their own feature film, Last Hold, also starring A.B.C-Z’s Tsuka-chan in which they all play members of a university rock climbing club. For anybody who has been following Snow Man like I have, this “overnight success” has come after a long, slow climb to the top.
In fact, Snow Man had been such a stable and popular group that it was a huge shock to everyone when in January 2019, soon after Takizawa took over control of the Johnny’s Juniors, that he turned the six member Snow Man back into a nine member group, adding dancer Raul, now 16, a half-Venezuelan kid a good decade younger than the rest and who is now everyone’s large son, quick-witted big-talking Mukai Koji, now 25, who is half-Thai and has a background in martial arts, and handsome Meguro Ren, aka Meme, now 22, who was one Tackey’s favorite Juniors.
I admit to being very skeptical when I first heard the news but, as always, Takizawa knew what he was doing. It took me a while to get used to the idea of my group changing but the three new members really gave them a new spark. Not that Snow Man were stale before but after working with the same people for 12 years, you’re naturally going to have settled into a comfortable dynamic. Throwing in 3 new members forces everybody to readjust. And for Snow Man who have spent their entire careers being the Juniors spoiled and coddled by their seniors, suddenly giving them an adorable large son who loves play fighting and acting silly, means an adjustment in how they think of themselves. They’re the big brothers now. And Takizawa, in his wisdom about these things, must have known how the aunties like me would coo over gangly Raul hanging all over teeny tiny Sakuma like an overgrown puppy.
Snow Man were a solid unit but sometimes you do need a little bit of tension to generate a spark. With nine members there is a lot more they can do with choreography, which was--and remains--Snow Man’s speciality. Working so closely with A.B.C-Z’s Tsukada--who as I mentioned earlier is an Olympic level trained gymnast--has given them a tool kit of tumbling and aerial moves that you just don’t see from other boy groups anywhere. Add to that their years of working with, yes, Takizawa, as well as the incredibly talented guys in A.B.C-Z and Yara Tomoyuki, not to mention all of the practice producing their own stages, has sharpened their performance skills to almost unbelievable degree.
But in some ways they are still rookies. I’ve just hammered on the point for most of the episode but Snow Man is a live performance group. They come from the theater world. And what looks good on stage doesn’t necessarily look good on film. It’s a tough learning curve and I remember seeing A.B.C-Z struggle with the exact same problem. Going from thinking about the live experience to thinking about how something will look captured on video is not intuitive and takes time but I trust Snow Man will get there. How could they not?
So, their debut single, “D.D.” which, as the lyrics explains, is short for “Dancing Dynamite”, is a high energy dance track meant to showcase their performance skills rather than their vocal talent. Written by Kurihara Satoro from the group “Jazzin Park” a reliable songwriter behind quite a few anthemic Kis-My-Ft2 and Johnny’s West songs.
Here’s Kurihara’s “Luv Sick” written for Kis-My-Ft2:
And Kurihara’s “Big Shot” written for Johnny’s West:
You’ll hear how D.D. fits right in.
The video is shot on one of those kinda-futuristic industrial looking Avex soundstages with potted plants in this massive terrarium that makes it feel like the airport lounge in like 2150 or something and SnowMan are waiting for their flight to Mars. The group choreography involves a lot of broad gestures and formation changes that look great even from the cheap seats on stage but that get lost a bit on a busy screen. The tumbling moves--some of which come directly from A.B.C-Z’s dance master Goseki Koichi--during the dance break also feel bit cluttered and the camera stutters back and forth as if it doesn’t know where to focus. The choreography shoves 12 years worth of material into 3 minutes and 30 seconds and it’s too much for the limited format of the music video to handle. The single focus dance practice video gives a much much better ideal of what Snow Man is capable of and I’d recommend watching that one first.
And here we go…. Dancing Dynomite!
Notice I didn’t mention vocals… well, not that Snow Man can’t sing, they can, but their speciality is dance. SixTones on the other hand well…
SixTones as the name is spelled implies has six members, they are:
Kouchi Yuugo, 25, the leader and in the tradition of Arashi’s Ohno is also the group’s old man. He’s also the mood maker and behind-the-scenes glue of the group.
Kyomoto Taiga, 25, who has an angelic voice and the delicate features to go with it. His father is the well known actor, singer, TV personality Kyomoto Masaki and his mother is former idol Yamamoto Hiromi but for all the years I’ve been following him, I have never seen Taiga try to coast on his pedigree. He’s worked hard to get where he is today.
Tanaka Juri, 24, is the group’s rapper and has drawn a lot of musical influence from his brother, former KAT-TUN member Tanaka Koki. He has a bright and cheerful personality so it’s always funny to me when SixTones covers KAT-TUN songs and Juri drops into that swaggering Koki growl-rap. And this may be apocryphal but I believe he was named after the Tigers Sawada Kenji aka Julie because his mother was a huge fan.
Matsumura Hokuto, 24, is the actor. He’s outgoing and a bit eccentric always adding extra dramatic flair to every choreography but he also likes reading and often seems to me to be caught in his own world. I quite like Hokuto.
Jesse, 23, is the other lead singer along with Taiga. He’s tall and handsome but also half-white which makes him rather exotic looking to Japanese eyes. His father is from Las Vegas, if I remember correctly. Jesse takes his role seriously and he and Taiga often work together on music.
Finally, there is the baby, Morimoto Shintaro, 22, younger brother of ex-Hey Say Jump member Morimoto Ryutaro. He was personally scouted by Johnny himself when he was a tiny boy and for years was this cute, small, annoying and VERY LOUD presence on stage swanning around as the winter prince. Then he hit puberty and grew into a rather wide and athletic man with the same boyish and annoying personality. He’s a variety show delight.
If you hadn’t picked up from the presence of the brothers of the “ex” group members, SixTones are to Snow Man what the Rolling Stones were to the Beatles… kind of the dangerous bad boy group. Much like SnowMan, though, SixTones have been working together for many, many years. They were first grouped together as part of the idol high school drama Shiritsu Bakaleya Koukou which aired in 2012. The premise of the drama was that a school of male juvenile delinquents has to merge with a rich catholic girls school… for reasons. The six SixTones played the main six teen punks with Morimoto Shintaro in the lead role. The drama was a smash hit--at least as far as these teen idol shows go--and was successful enough to get a major film sequel (which also featured Snow Man as yet another rival group of teen delinquents).
The yet-unnamed group that would become SixTones got along so well, and were so well liked by fans, that they were determined to stay together as a group. We fans referred to them informally as the Bakalyea Boys or the Bakalyea 6 until they were officially formed into a group--SixTones--in 2015. And they kept getting more popular, until in 2018 they were chosen to star in the movie version of the boys juvenile detention center musical Shonentachi (also starring Snow Man and Totsuka Shota from my favorite A.B.C-Z) which was just released on DVD in December.
But unlike Snow Man who really did work as a unit on stage year-in-and-year-out, the Bakaleya Boys did quite a bit on their own. The members individually appeared in theater productions, dramas, and variety. In particular, Kyomoto Taiga was chosen to appear in a starring role in a non-Johnny’s musical, a big name revival of the show Elisabeth. He played Rudolf, Elisabeth’s son, who gets a real show stopping duet with Death. And it’s also worth mentioning that Matsumura Hokuto has appeared in quite a few non-idol dramas and feature films.
But like Snow Man, SixTones also had many opportunities to produce their own shows, performing to packed halls at the tiny Theater Crea before graduating to bigger and bigger stages until on August 8, 2019, for the first time since Takizawa’s Golden Era as a Junior, the Juniors held their own concert at Tokyo Dome--SixTones, Snow Man, as well as Travis Japan and some younger groups took to the stage. The 8-8 Festival as it was called wasn’t just a celebration of the Juniors’ hard work, it marked a new beginning for the agency. Johnny Kitagawa, who you can hear more about in episode 2, had just passed away in July and--according to reports--before he passed away, he and Takizawa had decided that Snow Man and SixTones would make their debuts. On June 28, 2019 the members of both groups gathered in Johnny’s hospital room, where Takizawa informed them of what would be happening. And on August 8, 2019 it was announced at Tokyo Dome to absolutely deafening cheers from the assembled fans.
SixTones would focus on the domestic audience with a planned area tour while Snow Man would be starring in their own stage play and sent out on an Asia Tour. The new era had begun.
I already discussed SnowMan’s “D.D.” but let’s move onto SixTones. “Imitation Rain” written by the legendary Yoshiki of legendary metal band X-Japan. And I’m just going to say if you haven’t seen the excellent documentary (in English!) We Are X about the group and Yoshiki’s career… well, what are you waiting for? Apparently Takizawa was a big fan of Yoshiki and just, decided to ask him if he’d write SixTones’ debut song. What did he have to lose? Fully expecting a no, Yoshiki surprised everybody and said, yes. He was quoted as saying, “SixTONESが海外でのJ－POPのイメージを一新させる可能性を秘めたグループだと確信した” “I’m convinced that SixTones is a group that holds the promise of renewing the image of J-Pop overseas.”
For Takizawa to aim that high for SixTones debut shows the high value he places not just on the group but on the music they’re going to be making. Yoshiki isn’t just any songwriter and he doesn’t take just any project. Although he is best known for X-Japan’s metal, Yoshiki has a flare for the dramatic and sentimental and mixed in with the metal songs he’s written is “Seikai no Owari no Yoru ni”, written for the all female Takarazuka theatre troupe, performed here by former Top Star Haruno Sumire.
But the very first ballad Yoshiki ever wrote was for X-Japan, a song called “Endless Rain”, here he is in 2013 at the Grammy Museum talking about it.
Certainly other famous and respected songwriters and singers have written for Johnny’s groups--Shiina Ringo, for one--but Yoshiki is on a different level. “Imitation Rain” would be his very first collaboration with Johnny’s & Associates, a sign that Takizawa would be continuing in his path of uniting the worlds of art and entertainment.
Imitation Rain opens with Yoshiki’s trademarked piano, falling lightly like rain before the heavy guitar riff kicks in. The song highlights the strong voices of Jesse-who sings first- and then Taiga. The video shows them dancing in a flooded stage, water splashing around artfully as the members pose. After a whisper-rap by Juri, we’ll hear a guitar riff and the heavens open as Taiga takes center stage for a rising key change bridge…
Listen for yourself!
And now….. Who knows what will be next for these two groups. There is always another hill to climb in show business. And the first single after debut will likely be fraught with huge expectations but I trust both groups are up to the challenge. SnowMan just did a successful first overseas show in Thailand and SixTones were invited back for a rare encore performance on the popular live performance show Music Station, where they closed out the show by performing their song live on a flooded stage. They absolutely nailed it.
Well, that’s it for me today. You can find out more about both groups on their respective YouTube channels. Many of the videos do come with English subtitles if you check the settings so watch and be charmed. Or feel free to message me if you need help figuring out how to find the DVDs of Takizawa’s stage shows.
And I’ll leave you today with “Time Travel” from Sexy Zone’s new album because I quite like the disco-ness it…