Neru's triumphant humility

The New Year's Eve Kouhaku TV show was a great success for Keyakizaka46 in general, and a personal triumph for Nagahama Neru. She finally became part of the senbatsu for Silent Majority. She was the main spokesman for the group in a couple of interviews around the event.

And backstage stories now show that she embodied the group's slogan of "humility, kindness, bonds," which was emblazoned on their sashes for the performance.

In her blog, Saitou Fuyuka reported that for the first rehearsals, Neru was at the left end of the back line, a prominent position where she could be easily seen.

But as rehearsals went on, Neru asked choreographer Takahiro to move her inside. She said she felt unsure of her performance and wanted to be more hidden.

This may be true, but the result was that during the performance, Neru was harder to see, and top dancer and dance trainer, Saitou Fuyuka got the prime position on the outside.

I can't help thinking that part of Neru's motivation was that for her to get that prime position might make some members feel she was horning in and getting yet more push from management, after never having been a regular part of the SaiMajo senbatsu before. Certainly that's how some Keyakizaka fans felt, both in Japan and overseas.

But Neru humbly stepped back, being kind to Fuu-chan, and nurturing the tight personal ties among members of the group.

There's Neru, second from the left, inside of Fuu-chan, half-hidden by Habu Mizuho. Everyone knows that Neru is now the group's #2, after Hirate Yurina. But Neru didn't need to make a show of that. She could lead from behind.


She was also the main figure in the four-member interview with comedienne Watanabe Naomi, immediately after the group's performance. She was there with Shida Manaka, Kobayashi Yui, and Watanabe Risa. They all got a chance to speak, but Neru was the solid anchor of the group and did most of the taking.

She even got to do her impersonation of Watanabe Naomi. Not a great one, admittedly, but Naomi-san graciously said it was okay, "because you're cute." That was after Neru had asserted (honestly) that she was a big fan of Naomi's, and Naomi said she was a weird girl.

I found her style in the interview a little too purposefully cute for my taste, but she was clearly very effective in putting across an attractive image for the group: nice people with brains, humility and good will.

Manaka was also particularly effective. Japanese comments have seized on her words when Naomi was taking a picture while Neru was still signing a board and not looking. Manaka called her "Neru-chan" in alerting her to the fact that this was going on. The cuteness and naturalness of this sent fans into raptures.

At the end of the interview, TV staff pushed the door open in a way that led to Kobayashi Yui bumping her head on it slightly. Immediately, Neru was reaching out to hold the door back so no-one else hit it: smart, aware, and looking out for her friends.


As if all that wasn't enough, Neru may finally be getting some deserved adulation in her home town. She was the subject of most of the front page of a section of the Nagasaki Shimbun newspaper on New Year's Day (click all photos to enlarge).

It talks about her being in the summer of her second year of high school, planning a career as ground staff at an airport, when she took the fateful decision to audition for Keyakizaka46. It talks about her parents bringing her back to Nagasaki before she could finish the audition process, but then her convincing them to let her join. It quotes her as saying she wanted to spread the word about the beauties of her hometown of Nagasaki, and talks about the fact that her MV for Mata Atte Kudasai last summer was set there.

It also quotes her as saying she was shocked that many people in Tokyo didn't seem to know about the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki, which her grandmother had lived through and told her about. Neru said that she wanted to talk to people about peace. The article says that the gap between her innocent appearance and her breadth of view may be her greatest source of appeal. It also talks about her connection to the newspaper: she was told by a teacher to read a particular columnist, which she did, and it was a key to improving both her vocabulary and her writing.

In her blog on New Year's Day, she thanked everyone for 2016, but said that this year both Keyakizaka and she herself would be taking up challenges, and that she/they would "carefully and with good faith face their jobs one by one."

That evening, she and Manaka watched the first sunset of the year together. Can anyone tell me where in Tokyo this photo was taken?

Before Kouhaku, there was talk in Japan that introducing Neru into the SaiMajo formation would somehow ruin it. This seemed a strange idea to me, since it would actually make the formation more balanced, with ten members either side of Yurina in the "Moses parting the Red Sea" scene (10+10+1=21). And now one member -- I think it was Fuu-chan -- has mentioned that in fact it did mean that the lines either side of Techi became more even.