Maimi Yajima: Her sparkling "Pure Eyes" photobook scans(a repost) plus much more and could this also be....

 

 .... her final post here? Hmmmm, maybe but then again maybe not though odds are high it could be her final solo post. It would be nice to have a C-ute post or two in the future to take a look back at older things plus to see how the five members are doing, June is an excellent time for that. For the group held their final concert in that month back in 2017, even though it's been almost nine years since their disbandment they're still my all time favorite J-Pop group and I still play at least one C-ute album a week, my last listen was "Queen of J-Pop" from 2013. I've become slightly bored with J-Pop over the last few years, the music is okay but it's a bit too oversaturated with so many groups and seems there's a lot of other pop fans who feel the way I do about the current state of J-Pop. Morning Musume is still a solid group and so isn't SKE but these days it's less about the songs and concerts, much more about photobooks, dramas and other things that aren't associated with music. Oh well, every now and again need to moan a bit and the days of that semi 'Classic J-Pop' sound are sadly long gone and may never return....

 I seldom do posts for women who have gotten married and have a little child or two. That's now the case for Maimi which is why this will probably be her final solo post but did say if there are C-ute group posts in the future of course will talk about her then. But I did promise to do a repost for this book and was going to wait until another month to do this post as the book was released in March 2014. One reason for doing it today is to keep that streak alive of having a post a day for February, if I didn't do this one that streak may have ended. Plus I wanted to give closure(?) to Maimi who is one of my all time favorites, she was #1 in 2017 on the yearly faves list and in 2018 was in the third position on my first 'Top Twenty Faves of All Time' list. Not going to give a lot of details about Maimi's solo career, had a post for her two weeks ago and discussed everything then.

 Maimi by far has more posts than any other Hello Project member, no one will come close to topping that amount. Know I've done so many more posts over the years for Nogi, Keya and Hina but C-ute has always been my #1 J-Pop group followed by Morning Musume and third may be SKE. Juice=Juice would have been third except for that huge turnover in members they had about six years ago, no group topped their singles from 2015 to 2019 and that includes C-ute! Besides the book have a few other tidbits, some are new for here while some were in prior posts but from a decade ago. If Maimi does have one more solo post it would be for her making the third 'Top Twenty Faves of All Time' list, of course she's one of my top twenty faves. Did say on the first list she was in the third position, on the 2022 list she dropped to eleventh so should I also include her on the third list? For now I don't know but the top two on that 2018 list will also make the upcoming one.

 First off are some brand new photos that Maimi posted at her IG page the last two weeks. The bottom ones are from her 34th birthday party that she held for her fan club, it's just so hard to believe a C-ute member is so far up there in age. This was the tenth time Maimi has had fan club party and she calls them Squall, "Final Squall" was the title of a song from C-ute's final single. That came out on March 29, 2017 and hit #2 on the charts, they never had a single that didn't make the top ten yet had five singles peak at number two in the charts but never a number one so talk about being a bridesmaid....

 Seeing as how the photobook came out in 2014 have three other things for that year. One is this set from the January edition of UTB, Maimi had so many magazine spreads while with C-ute and spreads these days are so much larger than they once were.

 Next up for Maimi is this set of group cards for 2014, the top ten for Winter had been in a post done almost a dozen years ago! But the other ones are all new for here, the bottom three are for C-ute's November single "I Miss You" which was such a fabulous song and that sums up how I feel about the group, sigh....

 The photobook was released on March 27, 2014 and on April 7th Maimi held an event for it in Tokyo. Maimi hails from Saitama and so didn't three of the other four C-ute members, I still think groups with seven or less members are much better than huge groups but those smaller ones have been much rarer the last two decades.

 Now on to the "Pure Eyes" photobook, the main two reasons for reposting it is that I got a much better version of the book and the pictures are in the correct order. At the time, March 2014, this had been Maimi's ninth photobook and she had three more after this. She traveled to Hawaii for the photo shoot and back then most Hello Project books were set there. The book contains 77 photos and all of Maimi's books were terrific so it's impossible for me to rank them. There was such an excellent video from the photo shoot but there's only one segment on YT and the quality is bad so won't have it. But above did mention the C-ute single "I Miss You" that was released on November 19, 2014 which was a song I like immensely and the PV is after the super duper book. The single hit #4 on the charts, a huge positive to H!P videos as that most are subbed in English and this one is.