Former Keyakizaka46 ace Yurina Hirate made a surprise appearance at the annual FNS Kayosai music festival, where she debuted her very first original song titled “Reason for Dance“. The song was written and composed by 46/48 mastermind Yasushi Akimoto, and Hirate herself served as a co-producer for the song.
Prior to the show airing Hirate was announced to be appearing, but it wasn’t revealed what she would be doing on the show. She received widespread acclaim on many social media sites, and even became a top trend on Japanese twitter.
Retired idol Aya Matsuura and w-inds. vocalist Keita Tachibana has welcomed their third child! Tachibana made the announcement on his official Instagram account sharing a very cute photo of his rapidly growing family. In the caption Tachibana simply stated that “the other day” his family has grown.
The exact date of birth and gender of the baby has not been revealed, however based on a statement from Tachibana’s agency they revealed that both the baby and Matsuura are doing well, she gave birth in a hospital located in Tokyo.
In a new update for the popular music streaming service Spotify, j-pop and j-rock fans were delighted to find tons of new material finally available for streaming! All of these artists are from Sony Music Japan, which in the past has been extremely strict with how their media was consumed. Over the past couple of years they slowly opened up some of their YouTube channels, and a select few releases were available for streaming worldwide.
Many artists received a much needed update to what was previously available for streaming, while others previously had 0 singles or albums that could be streamed outside of Japan. Some of these artists who received these updates are:
At 6:30 PM JST on December 9, the second night of “2020 FNS Kayousai” will air. The show will feature performances by Arashi, Tokyo Jihen, GACKT, Snow Man, Masaharu Fukuyama, Daichi Miura, Little Glee Monster, Shirota Yu, Sakurazaka46, aiko, JUJU, Nakagawa Shoko, and more.
There is a live stream of the show and Arama! Japan will be hosting a chat on Discord so that readers can chat with each other during the show! Links to the show and the chat are after the jump!
SEKAI NO OWARI vocalist Fukase will be making his acting debut in 2021! He has been cast in Masaki Suda‘s film “Character“.
“Character” follows an aspiring manga artist named Keigo Yamashiro who dreams of making it big. Yamashiro is extremely talented, but what holds him back is his inability to create any villains due to his overtly cheerful personality. Due to this he is currently stuck in the position of being an assistant to a manger writer.
Hikaru Utada has announced her very first release of 2021! “One Last Kiss” will be the very first mini-album from Utada, and the title track will serve as the theme song for the 4th installment of the Evangelion Shin Gekijouban film series “Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time“
Besides the title track, the EP will so far contain no new songs. The rest of the tracklist is rounded out by previously released songs used for the other films. The EP is expected to have 8 songs, with two of them still being unknown. The regular edition cover features a drawing of the character Shinji, while the limited edition has Rei.
LDH girl group E-girls has released their final MV for the track “So many stars“. Originally released back on July 5th, 2020 as a digital single it turned out to be their final release. There were rumours that LDH was planning to delay the groups disbandment until 2021 due to COVID-19, however it was officially announced that as of December 31st the group would be disbanded.
Singer Miliyah Kato has announced that she is pregnant with her second child! The 32-year-old songstress made the announcement on her official Instagram account. Addressing the post to her legion of fans, she revealed that her child is currently scheduled to be born sometime in the Spring.
