Speculation on some of the recent Junior happenings

There's been a couple of things about recent Junior shuffling that I'm been thinking about recently and thought I'd share my thoughts about them.

The first I wasn't going to think too much about at first, which is Takahata Masaki quitting the agency. That was until I realized that he seemed to be a bit MIA before the Yuma w/ B.I.Shadow announcement. I say this because IIRC, he wasn't at a Shounen Club recording earlier in the year. This in and of itself isn't suspicious though, as there are other Junior that miss a taping every once in a while too. But it did bring up some suspicion with me that perhaps there might have been something more to that. Though even if there wasn't some more recent evidence that Takahata was perhaps already on his way out at least about a month ago, if not sooner, or at least officially out of the B.I.Shadow group.

The first being the newly released magazines, Wink Up, Duet and Potato. Magazine shoots are normally done a couple of months in advance, somethings more, which is why it normally takes a couple of months for changes in looks and groups to appear in them. In all of these magazines, the B.I.Shadow group is made of Nakajima Kento, Kikuchi Fuma and Matsumura Hokuto, without Takahata in sight anywhere.

The next is this month's airing of SC. The BIS group is only down to two members with both Takahata and Hokuto missing, though in Hokuto's case it's probably one of those issues where he had to do something else that day. For Takahata on the other hand, this could be another sign that he had left/was leaving around this time, about a month ago.

Also, as I mentioned in my report of the Junior concert they had a studio recorded version of Akuma na Koi playing before the concert began. Studio recordings aren't things that are usually done in a couple of days, so it had to have been made probably a couple of weeks ahead of time. So the new YuBIS group had to have known for a while what the line up would be, maybe not so much about the debut, but the fact that Takahata would no longer be in BIS would be evident. And with the date of Takahata's leaving was about a week before the YuBIS announcement in the papers, and the concert was just a few days after that, so if Takahata quit because he was disappointed about being passed over for fresher Juniors the times would just about match up.

The other recent change with the Juniors that has me thinking is what's happening with Hip Hop Jump. In the last couple of SC episodes the group has been MIA, and Jesse Luis was even brought out as a fresh Junior (o_0). But at the latest Junior concert the group was there and even at one point introduced as Hip Hop JUMP. Though one thing about that was that they went through the member names before hand, I couldn't catch them all as they were going through them rather quickly, but I thought they had skipped a name or two. And I'm thinking that perhaps I was right and there's been a change in group members. In the three above mentioned magazines there is a page with all five members, one with only three (Tanaka Juri, Hagiya Keigo and Jesse Luis) and one without a HHJ page at all. The group is still MIA from the SC stage for this months episodes so far as well. So I'm wondering if instead of disbanding the group, as I thought Johnny's had, they were instead deciding on how to reshuffle the members.

If the current group is the one in the three member photo shoot, I won't be too heart broken. Camu Cade seemed like a weird fit to the group as he is a couple years older than the rest of the group and I would rather see him in a group of Juniors more around his age. Morita Myuto getting dropped from the line up doesn't really surprise me, as he seems to be one of those Juniors that just gets shuffled around a lot. And while HHJ has been missing from SC, they still have been pairing Juri and Keigo together on the show, so it's no surprise they would remain. I'm a bit surprised that it looks Luis was kept, but happy as he's an adorable kid and Johnny's really should do more with him. Much like I feel they should do more with Anderson Casey, whom I'm very glad to see becoming active again recently.

I'm hoping that HHJ will remain. I mean I don't think it's a group that will last a long time, but I think as long as Johnny's wants a group for Juri to be in it'll stick around. I just hope they can get back to performing together again as a group soon on SC. But that is assuming that they really haven't been disbanded. I guess we'll have to wait for next month's magazines to see what their fate is.