Arashi Cameos

Aiba
- Nino's drama Freeter, Ie wo Kau
- Sho's drama Yoiko no Mikata


MatsuJun

- Ohno's drama SP Mou Yuukai Nante Shinai (as Tokita Shuntaro from Lucky Seven)
- Ohno's drama Kaibutsu-kun
- Sho's drama Yoiko no Mikata (as Sawada Shin)

Nino
- MatsuJun's drama Natsu no Koi wa Nijiiro ni Kagayaku
- Ohno's drama Maou

Ohno
- Sho's drama Yoiko no Mikata (as a claim agent of C no Arashi)
- Sho's drama Tokujo Kabachi
- Sho and Nino's drama Yamada Taro Monogatari

Sho
- Ohno's drama SP Mou Yuukai Nante Shinai (as Kageyama from Nazotoki wa Dinner no Ato de)
- Aiba's drama My Girl
- Ohno's drama Sekai Ichi Muzukashii Koi (as himself, context News Zero)
- Ohno's drama Uta no Oniisan (as himself, context Yatterman)

Actors/Actresses who have worked with Arashi

Through J-dramas, I've come to know Arashi, and through Arashi, I've come to know so many more actors and actresses, some of whom I've come to really adore in their own right. So let's take a look at what roles each of these talents have been cast along with Arashi and identify any ones who have had completed the Arashi Grand Slam of working with all five!

*This post may be updated on an irregular basis. I hope to see many of these actors/actresses get more projects with Arashi members in the future.

**For some of the roles listed, the actors were in the same drama/movie as an Arashi member, but they may never have shared a scene.

Things I love about 99.9

I have just finished watching the first episode of MatsuJun's new Sunday drama 99.9 Keiji Senmon Bengoshi, in which he plays Miyama Hiroto, a young lawyer who specializes in criminal law and believes in getting to the bottom of the truth even in the face of cases where the defendant has a 99.9% chance of being declared guilty.

In the first episode, we're introduced to Miyama as an eccentric lawyer with a paralegal sidekick Akashi (who has apparently failed the bar several times and is thus stuck working with him). He stands in stark contrast to the polished, trimly dressed lawyers in the Madarame Law Firm (represented by the corporate lawyer Sada Atsuhiro (Kagawa Teruyuki) and Eikura Nana's Tachibana). Miyama is playful, carries an old leather backpack, likes to suck on hard candies, and doesn't wear his attorney's badge on his lapel like most lawyers do. He is also poorer than most lawyers, as criminal law tends to be a lot less lucrative than the corporate wangles that bigshot firms like Madarame specialize in. 

Warning: Spoilers Below (well, sort of)

Arashi Fandom is in a Happy Place

I have been neglecting this blog. For that, I apologize. I guess the deeper I sink into this fandom, the less inclined I am to editorialize the actions and performances of our beloved five Arashi members. I've found that there are both good and bad things about fandom, and one of the bad things is that it's very easy to start getting swayed by the (often strong) opinions and conjectures of other fans, and the next thing you know, you're spending hours trying to refute something that probably didn't matter much to begin with while you could have been basking in the raucous laughter of a good old episode of Shiyagare instead.

So you know, I've just been trying to spend more time with the raw sources of my happiness, not on some carefully curated tumblr or twitter feed. And as a result, I've just felt like I'm in such a supremely happy place whenever I step into the online world these days.

Arashi Live Tour 2015 "Japonism" 12/17 in Fukuoka - The Concert Experience

Japonism was an album that was made with performance in mind (actually, come to think of it, what Arashi album isn't?), and this year, I had the immense fortune of hitting for amazing arena tickets that just bordered the moving stage's trajectory, so needless to say, I worked Fukuoka into my winter travel schedule, and paid my first ever visit to Yafuoku Dome.

Yafuoku! Dome, under some beautiful, forecast-defying weather on Dec. 17.

I'll skip all the pre-concert drivel, but in short, everything went by without a hitch. I went to the Dome around 3pm to avoid the early morning crowds and shop for my concert goods. It was nice and bright when I got there (see picture above), there was barely any line for the goods, plenty of the venue-limited masking tapes were still available (they hadn't even started limiting the number per person yet), and I got everything I wanted within 30 minutes.

SPOILER ALERT BELOW

Japonism - Arashi Album Review

It's that time of year again. It's Arashi album season. And yes, that means staying up late at night to loop these familiar voices in their new melodies. Fear not though, because our fab five have given us a pretty fine album this time!

As any Arashi fan who doesn't live under a rock might know by now, the new album is entitled Japonism (conception by Sakurai Sho), and its overarching theme? To fuse the beauty of Japanese musical elements into the usual pop/rock/whatever-it-is-that-one-labels-Arashi. Now, the whole fusing traditional with modern thing is something that's totally been done before by other Asian artists (Jay Chou, anyone?), and when it's done right, it can be absolutely soul-shatteringly brilliant. So how did Arashi do?

Arashi x Pazudora - Fantastical Worlds

Whenever I hear of a new company engaging Arashi as endorsers of their products, my eyes go bright, and a brief dopamine surge kicks off in my brain as the anticipation buds. Over the years (and I've done a couple of posts on Arashi CMs here and here), the fab five have acted as endorsers for various products, from cars to potato chips (and even diapers, in MatsuJun's case), and even though I don't have the opportunity (or necessity, really) to purchase many of the things they endorse, I still hang on to every frame of their CMs because 1) they're beautiful; 2) they're action-packed; 3) they're humorous; and 4) they always have a happy ending. It's the plastic world of commercials, after all.

I've found that different companies tend to make use of Arashi's image in different ways. For example, Kirin likes to play the OT5 card a lot (perhaps, they feel the completeness of Arashi most keenly, since they were a company who didn't start out with all five members in their initial contract, and had to acquire Nino and Sho after the other three). Kirin's CM's also tend to be light and jovial, which is undoubtedly meant to evoke the frothy, fizzy feel of their beer. Nissan, on the other hand, tended more towards making Arashi look sleek and modern, which of course fit perfectly with the intended image of their sleek and modern cars. In contrast to most others, JAL likes to hover closer to reality, collaborating with Ohno on a jet design and often referencing Arashi's real-life duties as idols in their CM scripts. Hitachi, the other big corporation with all five under its name, places the heaviest emphasis on comedic elements and often casts Arashi in various domestic vignettes to showcase that.

Starting a couple of years ago (2013? 2014?), a new player signed on to deck itself out in the five-colored rainbow, and this was Gungho, the company that developed the popular smartphone game "Puzzles and Dragons" or "Pazudora" for short.