Tag Archives: Takeuchi Akari

Power-up Week

Radio Nippon’s October Power-up week is coming up, so Meimi asks Takechan was she would like to do for it. Before Takechan can answer, Meimi interrupts with her idea. She wants to bring someone involved in omiai brought into the studio to talk about their job and how it works and if they could put the S/mileage members into the rotation to see what people’s reactions would be. Takechan says she’ll pass. Some of you are probably familiar with the concept of omiai, but in case you aren’t, I’ll explain. Typically when someone in Japan gets married, it’s because of one of two things, renai (恋愛) or miai (見合い). If you can read those characters you might guess what the difference is, but renai is romantic love, so you meet someone and date them and eventually fall in love and get married and theoretically live happily ever after. Miai is when you’re reaching an age where you want to get married (or in many cases when your family thinks you should be getting married) but don’t have a boyfriend/girlfriend and have no realistic prospects, so you meet with a miai specialist, a matchmaker, essentially, or sometimes a grandmother or other relative with connections to find you someone who you might not love romantically, but could see as a lifelong partner and parent to your children and can support your household. Once it’s established that you don’t hate each other in person, you get married. Nakazawa Yuko got married this way; it’s a fairly common practice still, there’s your Japanese culture lesson for the day. Anyway, what Meimi was asking for, then, was to be put into the pile of ladies for men to choose from and for the matchmaker to gauge how good of a candidate she’d be. Takechan is understandably weirded out.

Takechan’s idea is instead to go out somewhere and record the show. They’ve been talking a lot about going to an amusement park for their 100th show so they can’t go there, but she thinks it would be fun to go to a school or pre-school and talk to the students there for the radio show. However, Meimi questions the practicality of going out in public and talking to people, not because of technical difficulties but because none of the members would really feel comfortable just running up to people and asking them questions in the street. Meimi says she’d be fine doing it, but Takechan agrees that she would most likely be the only one. Meimi says, “I can just host that week by myself, it’s okay.” Meimi has no time for shyness.

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Summer Weather

Takechan introduces the show by asking Meimi about her summer, since the fall equinox is right upon them and the official end of summer and the heat is here. Meimi says she doesn’t think that this summer was that hot, which shocks Takechan. Meimi explains that in Gunma, her home prefecture, it’s exceptionally hot, so for her to say that she didn’t feel as hot this summer means that she didn’t really go back to Gunma that often and spent most of her time in other places. Takechan says that she felt the heat most when she was in Hokkaido because the weather changes are insane there. They’d go one day and it would be nice and cool and then the next it would be insanely hot. Meimi chimes in to say that she noticed people in Hokkaido mentioned the weather a lot more and probably spent more time watching weather forecasts as a result. Takechan had no idea, but she does think that this summer was particularly hot in Kantou. Meimi argues and says that they didn’t say anything about major heat waves on the news or anything so it was probably just because they were doing lots of events and things. Takechan says she doesn’t watch the news unless she has nothing else to watch so she doesn’t know anything about it. So let’s start the rest of the show!

Summer Activities

Since it is the end of summer, they bring up all the things they haven’t gotten to do. Most of Meimi’s missed experiences involve water: she hasn’t gone to the beach or to the aquarium or to the pool. Takechan interrupts to say that they did go to the beach (which is true, they did stop by for all of maybe 15 minutes in Wakayama over the tour) but Meimi says that it doesn’t count, they only got to put their feet in the water and didn’t swim. Takechan says that’s enough, Meimi vehemently disagrees. She goes back to the aquarium issue, because she adores fur seals. She says that the staff even brought her a script for Tamura Gekidan involving a fur seal and it made her sad. She wants to see one really bad.

Meimi: Oorf! Oorf! Oorf! How do you do a fur seal noise?
Takechan: I have no idea, I’ve never heard one before.
Meimi: Oorf! Oorf!

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Respect for the Aged Day

The third Monday in September every year is Respect for the Aged Day in Japan. Meimi immediately wants to know if Takechan has any plans to pay respect her elders. Takechan says sure, but she then complains that there are an awful lot of holidays in Japan for old people. She asks if they didn’t just have a Respect for the Aged Day at the beginning of the month, and Meimi says no, that was Labor Day to pay respects to laborers. Takechan is confused. It turns out that Takechan is confusing the root for ‘rou’ in ‘kinrou,’ or ‘labor’ for the ‘rou’ in ‘roujin,’ or ‘elderly person,’ so she thought that there were two Respect for the Aged Days. Takechan also announces that she has something of a grudge against the holiday because she always noticed that everyone was nicer to her grandparents on Aged Day than they were to her on her birthday and she wants to know why, even for just one day, weren’t they nicer to her. Meimi says that she always gives presents to her grandparents on this day; Takechan applauds her. Takechan then asks which day was more recent, Mother’s Day or Father’s Day. Once Meimi enlightens her, Takechan says that last Mother’s Day her family all did karaoke at home and had melon and that was it. Takechan does not have a good understanding of the calendar year and national holidays.

Reflecting on Marotesque Station

Last week S/mileage Station was transformed into Marotesque Station by Kanyon, and Meimi says that it was a very long recording for her. As you might have guessed by Meimi’s lack of judgment on Takechan for not celebrating any major national holidays, she tries very hard to be pleasant and go along with things on the radio, but it was very difficult the last time. Kanyon wanted to talk for the majority of the show about Berryz Koubou and their impending hiatus and she would often look at Meimi and say, “You know?” or “You remember, right?” when Meimi actually had no idea at all. She tenuously agreed to everything she said to make the show flow better and not make Nyon angry, but she was having a lot of trouble pretending like she knew what was happening.

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