Nagahama Neru blog post: Kouhaku, New Year's, 2017

Cushion

Nagahama Neru
2017.01.04


Good evening ⊂⌒っ´-.-`)っ

The New Year's holiday is ending...
I guess it's time to pull ourselves together and get to work ~

(Remembering the holiday.)

(Eating with everyone.)

On New Year's Eve, we had the chance to appear on Red & White Song Battle ["Kouhaku"].
To everyone who has always supported us,
Truly, thank you very much.

I can't express it very well,
But in the moment we stood on that stage,
All kinds of thoughts came rushing toward me.

I thought that really, we got the chance to be on that stage
By the help of all the people around us.


Wonderful songs and choreography and costumes.
The miracles just came one after the other
And led us to this place.

I had the strong awareness
That we nobodies
Didn't grasp this stage, we were given it.


Being granted this appearance on Kouhaku,
In this place of such weight and importance,
What could we do to fulfill people's expectations.
To pay back their kindness. That's what I thought about.

However,
Looking at the members,
Rehearsing together,
Firming up our dancing just in time for the performance

From my heart I thought
That if we were together, no matter what, things would be all right.

I was really scared
About the 21-person Silent Majority.
But to be honest, dancing there together with everyone made me really happy.


And then to be able to meet Watanabe Naomi.
I continued to think over my good fortune, and bragged about it to my family.

Staying up until dawn on New Year's Day
We played karuta and UNO. It was so much fun.

It looks like this year will be another fun year.

Thank you very much for reading my blog.

Nagahama Neru

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posted 2017/01/04 13:11

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Really, I think Neru is the best writer in the group. I hope I was able to get across some of the feel of what she said. I just re-read the translation of a Rolling Stone interview with Neru on Keyakizaka Matome. You learn a lot about who she is there. Give it a read.

Neru talks about being given the chance to stand on the Kouhaku stage, but doesn't make clear whether she means just herself or the whole group. I went with the latter, on internal evidene, despite the fact she calls herself/them "nobodies."

On the members' blogs, all photos with writing in them are flipped before posting, so they can't be read. I have flipped them back. I think people are not all perfectly symmetrical right to left and can look odd in a mirror-image.

In the photo of Neru with Satoshi, it looks as if Neru is pulling away. But note her hand on Satoshi's back.

That photo at the top with the strawberry parfait has caused a bit of a stir. The parfait is sold by a Korean cafe called Cafe de Paris. As far as 2channel posters (and I) have been able to discover, it is not yet sold in Japan. So perhaps Neru (and family? and friends?) went to Seoul for a couple of days -- to Gangnam, in fact. Was she playing the literary game karuta with her parents (her father's a teacher), with members, or with other friends? Posters mention the fact that Kyushu is closer to Seoul than to Tokyo. Posters expressed admiration that Neru could just fly away for a brief holiday like that.

The optimistic way Neru ends this post makes me very happy. No thought of graduation there, I'd say. I'm excited to find out if she ends up going straight on to university, and if so which one. But for her own pleasure and health, I'd be just as happy to see her concentrate on her current profession for a while.