I am sad because Nakano Yuuka has stopped blogging. This announcement came on August 2, in which she said that she has had an opportunity to challenge her big dream. My friend Acchan has translated Yuuka's final blog post here:
http://morningsunchan.blogspot.com/search/label/Yuppi%20%E5%84%AA%E8%8A%B1. I hope that whatever dream Yuuka has that she achieves it, and is successful. She is a truly wonderful and talented singer.
What's even sadder is that, perhaps due to Yuuka's blog being deleted, the two Japanese people who had recorded and uploaded Yuuka's performances to YouTube have either deleted their videos or made them private. I'm not sure why they would want to remove all traces of Yuuka, except the Chou-Chou performances, from YouTube. Thankfully I was smart enough to download all of them, and have now re-uploaded all nine videos. However, I felt the need to edit some of these videos before uploading. One video had ten seconds of the camera flying all over the place after Yuuka and her friend had left the stage. I removed those ten seconds and replaced them with short end credits giving brief info about the performance. Another trio of videos were from the same concert, and two of them were cut short. As disappointing as this was, I found a way to edit all three videos together so they didn't look too bad. I re-uploaded them to YouTube and then reconstructed my playlist "The Chou-Chou Legacy". I now have 27 videos which totals 2 hours and 34 minutes. I asked both of the original uploaders (in English) if they could upload more Yuuka videos, but they instead did the opposite. I feel I may have said or done something that they did not like, and now I may have made enemies of Japanese people that I had no intention of offending. Because of this I am reluctant to add more of their fan videos to my playlist. There is at least one MokaRika performance that I have ignored adding, which was uploaded by the person who deleted seven Yuuka videos. Yuuka used to add YouTube links on the right side of her blog for all of her fan videos. If she ever starts another blog, she will find that my re-uploads are the only videos of her currently on YouTube. I hope she resumes blogging again soon, and makes her debut with a single. I also hope Yuuka realizes that a stranger in the United States may be her biggest supporter, despite having never seen her live.
Another thing that has bothered me is the strange case of Yoshiki Haruka. Okay, it's not really that strange, but it is disappointing to me. Haruka is a dancer in Party Rockets, an awesome rock-based idol group. Haruka had super-long hair, and her hair was the longest of the six members. She has now - you guessed it! - cut her hair super short! I can't believe it! I will never understand why the prettiest girls in this world will grow their hair super long, and look super beautiful to me, and then just out of the blue cut it short. Now the decision to cut her hair was Haruka's. She wasn't forced to cut it short by a control freak producer / songwriter, as was the case with a certain Hello! Project group who released a single called "Short Cut". But I will still treasure all my photos and videos of Haruka with her super long hair forever. (Unfortunately I don't know how this blog works too well. Making links with words instead of a URL and adding photos is new to me. You will have to click this: https://twitter.com/Party_Rockets/status/244635086291623937. )
Thanks for reading this!