Welcome to this Baka's blog on his fave Japanese Pop Culture interests.
Wednesday, August 15, 2018
Sakura Miyawaki: An extremely overdue post....
It may seem like there's been fewer posts recently but that's not quite the case. After having less than half of the posts I usually would for three months fell way behind on things but am slowly catching up. Have always had biggish posts but if you've been noticing lately they're bigger than ever, instead of forty or so pics in a post many recently have had 80-100. Today there's only a little over fifty but am holding back a few pics so there won't be a huge gap in posts again.
Had two posts for Sakura early in the year, second one was for her b-day in March when she finally turned twenty and like so many Idols you thought she should be older. There's no doubt Sakura looks so much like Miona from Nogi but there's another gal who I thought she resembles a bit too who is
Rena T. but not as much since Sakura changed her hair color, wouldn't that trio make for one of the all time stupendous mag spreads!?
HKT has been in kind of a free fall the past few years as far as their sales go, one big reason is that they only release two singles a year. That could be because the more popular members have to do so much work for AKB which cuts down on what they can do for their main group. Above are two covers from HKT's latest single "Hayakuri Calendar", Hayakuri means fast forward.
The single came out on May 2nd, sales to date have been about 265,000 copies sold which would be impressive to 98% of the groups out there. It did sell slightly more than the previous single but less than any of HKT's first eight singles, have the PV for the song at the bottom of the post. One other thing we need to find out is what happened to Sakura's mate Haruka who for a while was my fave member, her 2016 photobook was #1 for me that year and she's almost disappeared completely.
Sakura is one of thirty seven '48' family members who are taking part in the "Produce 48" show, there's 96 singers in all with 59 being from Korea and the show is filmed there. She's doing quite well in the voting as I think she's currently in sixth place with just one '48' member being in front of her. The top twelve in voting will become a group that will release some singles and also perform concerts. The shows though are two hours long which makes me shy away from them but there are many outtakes from the shows that are only 3-4 minutes long on YT.
There's now an "HKTBingo!" show which began on July 17th. I used to love the old ones from AKB which went downhill, can say the same for Nogi whose first few seasons were excellent but then they became unwatchable. Has anyone seen these new shows(?), if they're oki doki think I'll check them out as the members from HKT seem to be okay gals.
Know everyone enjoys HKT cards so these are.... 2018 cards you can enjoy.
Sakura does a very good job at posting pics on her Instagram site and they're always quite superb such as these from the past week.
Haven't been too many Sakura mag spreads since her last post in March though am holding one back for her next post, perhaps by then the "Produce 48" show will be finished. This small set of two pages is from the May 29th issue of SPA! and at only two pages they must not care about sales....
Next two spreads are much larger and Sakura has the cover for both such as this first tremendous set from the May 30th edition of Weekly Shonen.
Last set is another fabulous collection of pics which is from the June 25th issue of Young Magazine, after the pics is the video from HKT's latest single. It's like every song they have, quite an upbeat and enjoyable tune but not one that'll make your all time best song list.
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