10 comments on “Morning Musume 20th Anniversary Official Book Interviews: Takahashi Ai

    • Most of the time the staff are dealing with teenagers and teenagers tend to do silly things. Its no surprise and I doubt it’s different in any other idol group.

  1. great interview! Thank you for all these wonderful translations!!

    I would have been interested to hear her take on being really the first Idol group to GO WEST (see what I did there?) to America in 2009 and what that was like for their confidence etc

    I am glad she gave a shout out to Aibon, that’s so nice!

  2. It’s true the variety shows were a tremendous showcase for the girls’ personalities.

    my faves from back in the day : Ishikawa, Konno, Takitty were undoubtedly because of Hello pro hour ( raburi and charmy. also props to eric kamezou)

    btw, Henkka, in the first sentence of the last question’s answer……what were the intended words that became the mysterious “irrehad”?

  3. Thanks for the translation! If I had to compare the way 5th gen was looked at, it was a fraction of the way 12th gen was looked at after the success of ’14.

    I remember during the promotions of Mr. Moonlight, there was a moment on Utaban where 1st-3rd gen members were already saying 5th gen was struggling to find their place in the group and they expressed concerns about them. Mind you that was only 2 months after they joined! I often remember hosts on television shows just calling them the new members even when they were 2-3 singles into the group. They still did get some decent exposure though, luckily.

    • One thing that led people to complain so much about the 5th gen was exactly the fact that, even though MM were still getting a lot exposure at the time, they never seemed to make use of it. They were a bit uninteresting because they were too much of a good girls, very proper and well behaved. This gap was even more noticeable when you take into account the fact that the previous gen was full of crazy characters.

      I still love all the 5th gen girls to death, and the Platinum era is still my favorite Morning Musume period.

  4. I never thought that the 5th gen was “hated”, since all of them had interesting roles in Haromoni, especially Ogawa, who was so funny.
    I loved the interview. Thanks for the translation.

  5. Awesome article! It really takes me back to those days of following the group through those years and being an obsessed Aichan fan. I didn’t even hear the word “platinum era” until very recently.

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