We are Juice=Juice #65 (2015.01.06)

“Happy New Year”

Happy New Year! All 5 members are in the studio again to ring in the new year of We are Juice=Juice. Yuka begins the discussion with one of her favorite New Year’s foods: mochi. Last year, she had been warned a lot not to eat too much mochi, primarily so that she wouldn’t get fat, so she ended up only eating a little. However, by the end of the New Year’s festivities, she felt like she hadn’t eaten any mochi at all which made her feel really sad, so she decided that since it is a holiday, she will enjoy herself this year and eat as much as she likes.

Sayubee: And when you think of mochi, you think of–
Tomo: Sayuki? Your cheeks…

I mean yeah, her cheeks are only super round and puffy and all

So after some brief bullying, they move on to talk about the year 2015 for the group. Yuka notes that they have a lot of incoming kouhai, which means that even though Juice=Juice has been the youngest group for a while, they’re now quickly becoming one of the more tenured groups in the company, so they need to work harder to become more professional and reliable. To help ring in the new year, though, each of the members will be recording a New Year’s greeting for all of us, starting with Uemu.

New Year’s Messages

Uemu says that this is the year 2015, and that is relevant, somehow. However, she hopes this is a good year for everyone out there, and she hopes to make this a year in which the group undertakes a lot of challenges and gets to have a lot of new experiences. Tomo comments that this is the most on-topic that Uemu has ever stayed while talking solo, but Uemu admits that she had no idea where she was going with it at first.

Karin is next. Her personal goal for this year is to study more about music, since she feels that she will be listening to more music this year than usual. Since this is the year of the sheep, too, she’s going to write an acrostic for us using the Japanese word for sheep, hitsuji. I’m not that creative, but here’s my attempt to translate while keeping the acrostic intact.

S – She wants to
H – Have performances that are reliable
E – Every day and
E – Eventually stop being made fun of and
P – Personally wants to move forward

Tomo thanks her for her poem, but says that it’s good that people poke fun at her for the things she does because it’s better for the sake of comedy. Karin agrees to an extent, but she finds that these things get pointed out long after they happen and it just makes her embarrassed and want to cry. Tomo wishes her luck with that. Twice.

Sayubee follows up with her message, saying that she’d also like to listen to a lot of music this year to help work on her singing. She also notes on the year of the sheep, but less for its astrological symbolism and more for the fact that she is warm and fluffy like a sheep and hopes to bring that into the year 2015 as well. Since she’s basically piggybacked off of Karin for her message, she also does an acrostic. Great.

S – Should she
H – Happen to
E – Ever bump her elbow or
E – Even get called a tsundere, she will
P – Possess confidence in herself

Sayubee receives a much more positive reaction from her acrostic even though she clearly hadn’t thought about it as hard as Karin did, but if we have learned anything from this program, it’s that no one cares about Karin.

Then, it’s Yuka’s turn. She will be an adult this year, so she wants to focus on learning grown-up things table manners and etiquette. Since she’s the oldest of the group, she wants to become more reliable and less easily bothered by things, and since she’s the group leader, she also wants to find more things that she’s good at so that she can be a more productive leader. She will use whatever she learns to make the Juice=Juice Family a happier group of people.

Uemu: I want to learn table manners, too.
Yuka: That’s good, because you’re the one I most want to teach them to.

Finally, Tomo’s turn. Just as Morning Musume are changing their name from ’14 to ’15, Hello!Project will change a lot this year. Juice=Juice is getting subordinate groups for the first time, which makes Tomo realize that she has to work harder. She will also turn 20 in the year 2015, so she has a lot of personal goals she wants to accomplish in order to grow up a bit. She wants to do more dancing and become better at that, but she also wants to study more English, enough to get up to Level 2. She’ll do her best, anyway.

Song: Juice=Juice – Romance no Tochuu

“Happy New Year”

They’re not very good at thinking up new words for the opening and closing, but that’s life. Sayubee yells out a little self-promotion at the end. The end.

The 4 members of Juice=Juice who mostly like each other and also Karin