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Hajimemashite minna san....welcome to my site on my fave Japanese Pop Culture likes such as dramas, movies, magazine scans, promo events etc. Mainly concentrate on my faves...Risa Watanabe... Miku Tanaka... Yui Kobayashi....Miyuki Watanabe.... Nene Shida.... if you're a fan at all of any of them then you've come to the right place(!) but many others are featured here besides them. Do mainly quick reviews on things I've watched, try to make the reviews brief, quick to read through with not too many spoilers, just whether they're good or bad and why I thought so plus whether you may find them enjoyable. Many, many screenshots are included from everything I've watched plus any video trailers if they're available. Hope you find something that interests you, don't hesitate to comment, arigato gozaimasu!

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Saturday, November 29, 2025

Erina Mano: Her astonishing "Dear Friends" photobook.... a repost....

 


 Final post for November and while it didn't have the most posts for a month only took one day off which could be considered quite an achievement! Four days ago led off the post for what movies I had recently viewed with many pics and tidbits about Erina and thought why not go one step further and have a whole post for her! Been using those drama/movie posts to resurrected an old favorite who may have become forgotten about and sadly there's too many of them. So did have a lot of Erina's bio info in that post and what she's been up to the last few years which isn't much as she did get married 7 1/2 years ago and last July had her first child. Seeing as how Erina will be hitting the age of 35 next April we may not be hearing much about her in the future and if we do it definitely won't be with such a fabulous photobook, the leadoff picture to this post certainly can grab anyone's attention!

 Still on that project to clean up some very old posts and mainly ones for photobooks done before 2017. I had a bad habit of splitting up books into two posts when one was enough, if a book has over 150 pictures may still cut it in half for two posts. But this photobook has just 92 pics so there's one reason for doing a repost of it, the second and more important issue is that I got a much better version of the book so the photos are superior. I also put them in a better order and I wasn't quite as adept at editing photos back then as I am today or making improvements to them. One other reason is that those two posts didn't receive as many views as I would have thought, sure some of that had to do with the quality of the book plus seeing as how it was posted over ten years ago many viewers may not have known about it.



 Erina had ten photobooks between the years of 2009 and 2018, as the years went on each book topped the previous one! So it was a shame her March 2018 will be her final book as Erina looked too good to describe, she was 26 in age for that book's photo shoot and 22 for this book which came out in September 2013. This was Erina's sixth book and they had been published by Hello Project though she was never a member of their popular groups such as Morning Musume or C-ute. Erina was a solo singer and no other H!P solo act came close to having as many books as she did. I never considered Erina to be a J-Pop Idol and think too often we label a female singer as an Idol but in her case I never have. She did graduate from Hello Project in February 2013 or just before she celebrated birthday #22 but only on the musical side of her career. Erina's last album came out in that month and had a similar title to this book which was "Best Friends". This sixth PB contains 92 pictures and the photo shoot took place in Hawaii, it had been Erina's first time there. There was a DVD from the photo shoot and have a segment from it after the pics but the quality of it isn't all that terrific but still worth a view.....