The Shounen Club 14 September 2010 review

Shifting schedules a bit so I can work on catching up with things so I can then get ahead as I am going to be busy with family in the upcoming Fourth of July weekend. That said here is the belated review for this episode.

This episode opens up with a medley that also works as an introduction for all the Kansai Junior groups. It is nice to have this as not only do we get all the names of the groups but each group gets to perform on their own in the medley. This also confirms that Shadow WEST does exist at this point with Mukai Koji and Kaneuchi Toma being the prominent members of that group.

The usual hosts and show supporters then go on stage to introduce the theme of the episode, power. They tease about having a special guest show up in the following performance.

The performance has Koyama Keiichiro and Nakamaru Yuichi perform short medleys of their group songs. They do have Kanjuu performing with them. The final song they bring out the special guest of the episode, who was the special guest of the previous episode, Yokoyama Yu.

He gets to have an MC with the hosts but with the members of Veteran getting to hang out in the background. Yoko makes sure to bring them into the conversation which ends up with them talking about how Kanjani8 are as sempai to the Kanjuu.

Yoko with Veteran as his back dancers performs a live only song, Chocolate. It is a collaboration piece with Yasuda Shota writing the music while Yoko wrote the lyrics to it. It is a fun song to watch being performed as it has some interesting choreography to go with it.

Then there is a Gekkan Koyamaru segment and Koyama is up for this month. His photo is a group shot of NEWS, from back when the group was six members of course. He talks about them, specifically Masuda Takahiro and Kato Shigeaki.

We then get a medley from the Kanjuu group BOYS. Of note this was the group that Hamada Takahiro was in before the other half of the duo quit Johnny's and Hamada was left on his own. In the end we can now say everything worked out for Hamada but I do wonder if things would be different if Nakata Daichi remained in Johnny's.

Yara Tomoyuki then gets to perform and he does Now and forever. He gets to have Hamanaka Bunichi to perform with him so there are two-fifths of Butokan in this. Three other Kanjuu also perform with them so they can have a roster of five for it. Of note Kamiyama Tomohiro and Fujii Ryusei are two of those.

The game segment is Jumping Paradise, so not many Juniors to be found. But it is set up to let Nakama Junta get a retry at a challenge that he did in an earlier episode of the season. The three Hey! Say! JUMP members and Junta have to try to skip rope with a small Junior on their back. Hardly the safest of games but luckily no one wipes out for this.

There is then a collaboration performance with B.A.D., BOYS and Veteran for the song BIG GAME. As expected there is a lot of energy with this song and while there are quite a few Kanjuu performing everyone gets a moment of focus.

This is followed by a Kansai Junior ni Q segment, with a part 2 for the past topic of the meaning behind their names. Most of the Kanjuu this time I do not recognize at all and have no clue if they are still with Johnny's or not. Outside of Mukai Koji though, who is still with Johnny's.

Then we get a letter exchange segment between two members of 7WEST, Shigeoka Daiki and Takemoto Shinpei. Shinpei quit Johnny's some time ago, in fact IIRC he will no longer be with Johnny's by the next set of Osaka episodes come along. Shigeoka of course has done well as he made his debut with Johnny's WEST.

Of course with Nakayama Yuma around it means that 7WEST is not going to get a chance to perform without him. So they join him in performing their group song Kimi no Wana dake Maboroshi demo Kamawanai.

And we have hit the end of the episode after that. We have the Kanjuu performing Yuuki 100%, lead by Yuma of course. It is at least a good way to ensure that the episode ends on an energetic note and it is the older and younger Kanjuu onstage for it.


At this point fans of Johnny's WEST cannot go wrong with the Osaka episodes if they want to see the members of the group pre-debut. This is basically the years that those members started to get steady pushes from the Kansai side of things and start to become more prominent.

Knowing how little of the Kanjuu we will get for some time it makes me glad that they do eventually get more time on the program. Though right now it only seems to be a small handful of them but at least that can be explained away with the fact that the JW debut has left a rather large vacuum of popular Kanjuu.