Kakizaki Memi and Matsuda Konoka to be regulars on ETV school show

Huge news for Memi and Kono-chan. They will be regulars on an NHK Education TV show starting Thursday April 18 at 2pm. The show is part of the regular weekday afternoon programming for high schools.

The 20-minutes-every-second-Thursday show will be hosted by top seiyuu Midorikawa Hikaru 緑川光. The show is called Society and Information 社会と情報. It will deal with how computers and smartphones work, and with useful apps. It will also deal with IT and media security and ethics, and there will be episodes introducing databases, etc. (source)

This show will be seen all over Japan. GanaOshi and KeyaKake are seen mainly in the Tokyo area.

So it looks like a pair of Hinata-chans will have a captive audience of high-school students every two weeks, a wonderful way of spreading the group's fame to a younger audience. This kind of show seems to me to be a way for Hinatazaka46 to advance toward being a "national" idol group, accepted as part of the culture.

This follows the pair's first appearance in the educational series, on a show in the series called Anytime, Anywhere High School Course on March 25th at 2pm. This show will star Midorikawa-san and well-known actress Satou Aiko 佐藤藍子. Their particular episode will deal with distance education. There are apparently over 200,000 students in Japan who take their schooling by "correspondence" over the Internet, etc. This includes many young performers, whose schedule makes it impossible for them to attend school regularly. There are at least three schools in Tokyo that have set up courses specifically for young entertainers and athletes, facilitating this kind of education. The promo for the show says that in discussions, personal life and issues quite naturally arise.

The next day, March 26th, there will be another show (an episode of "How I Came to Be Immersed in My Love for... 沼にハマってきいてみた) telling the story of Hinatazaka46 as a whole, and exploring the allure of idols. To prepare for this show, there is a survey about Hinatazaka, asking what you thnk their greatest attraction is: happy aura, friendliness, music, looks, variety, lives, other; and asking which of their songs you like best. Respondents are supposed to state name and age: free market research for Seed & Flower. This show will be on in prime time (!) for a half-hour starting at 6:55pm.

All shows are on NHK's education network, not the regular main network. NHK seems to be taking a real interest in Hinatazaka. This is good.

Some posters in Memi's thread on 5ch are surprised that she should be on such a comparatively serious show. I'm not. She's actually pretty smart, as she revealed on her Showroom with Kyouko, where Kyouko admired her academic side, particularly her love for math and science. As one poster on 5ch says, if he sees Memi writing SQL (a computer language used with databases), he will weep tears of joy. I think she is extremely familiar with life online, as a lover of anime and manga and idols, and a LINE user.

We probably won't see Memi do much burikko on these shows, lol.

I don't know Kono-chan well, but she certainly seems like a smart and capable person to me, and she's one of the 2gens I really like. 5ch is referring to the two as the Princess and the Prince, after this photo from the Christmas lives: