Five years ago on this day, I took a young woman named Tara Welsh out on our first date together. We went to see National Treasure.

I had first discovered her as the result of a bored-during-lunch-at-work search through LiveJournal for people in my area and my own age there in October of that year, communicated with her through Yahoo! Messenger for awhile, and first saw her face to face at the KMart photo lab she worked at on Black Friday. What is funny is, I had discovered the day before via one of her LJ posts that she lived three blocks down a side street from me.

Three years later, on Christmas Eve 2007, I proposed to her. In less than seven months, on June 26, 2010, we finally tie the knot.

Looking back to our first date itself, much of it resembled the lyrics of a certain Tanpopo song from what I consider to be their true classic lineup of Kaori Iida, Mari Yaguchi, Ai Kago and Rika Ishikawa or as I call it after close to six years of following Morning Musume, the Johnson/Marippe/Aibon/Charmy lineup (derived from each members’ nicknames). Tara is not a fan of J-pop by any stretch, but when I showed her the lyrics a little later on, she too was amused at how much the song’s storyline resembled our first night out. So, in honor of a night five years ago that altered both of our lives for the better, here’s that particular Tanpopo song, their classic “Koi Wo Shichaimashita” (”I Fell In Love”)

I love you, Tara. <3

This must be the year for Hello! Project to be doing the unpredictable. First, Morning Musume making their long-demanded debut in the United States, and now this:

Tsunku announced on his blog today that he’s reviving MiniMoni with an all-new lineup. 

MiniMoni hasn’t exactly been far away from Tsunku’s – or fan’s – minds. Their first single, “MiniMoni Jankenpyon”, has turned up on set lists during the W/Berryz Koubou 2004 tour (sung by members of Berryz, despite the fact that two ex-MiniMonis were headlining) and during a Wonderful Hearts package tour a few years later with random MoMusu (one of which was Reina Tanaka, who had once cosplayed as a MiniMoni member in her pre-MoMusu days), Berryz and C-utes. Both times, the random members were dressed in the standard old-school MiniMoni covers. 

So far, only one member has been confirmed for the new lineup: Hello! Project Egg Kanon Fukuda: 

My initial presumption would be that Tsunku will be utilizing mostly H!P Eggs for the new lineup, rather than shoehorn existing Wonderful Hearts into the band, despite the original group’s origins as consisting of 3/4 Morning Musume. Whether the original 150cm and under rule concieved by Mari Yaguchi in 2000 is held to is also presently unknown. But whoever gets in the new lineup will have some big shoes to fill – especially vocally, since the group had four very distinctive voices in Ai Kago, Nozomi Tsuji, Mika Todd and Mari Yaguchi. Ai Takahashi’s later membership in the band in Marippe’s place did nothing to diminish that, thankfully.

The timing of this annoucement is interesting: Mari Yaguchi FINALLY issued a solo single earlier this spring, and was recently in the studio with fellow O.G. MoMusu Kei Yasuda. Meanwhile, Ai Kago’s first post-Hello! Project single is coming out in a few weeks. Nozomi Tsuji is concentrating on her “new” career as a designer of baby clothes at present, and it’s been awhile since anything new was heard about Mika Todd. 

Also a mystery right now (give Tsunku a break, he’s only announced one band member so far!) is what the musical content will be like. MiniMoni’s original sound, however varied, was more youth-oriented, until 2003 when the group started turning towards a more mature R&B-oriented sound. An educated guess might surmise that a new lineup might hark back to MiniMoni’s original approach, but again, with only one horse in the starting gate it’s too early to tell. 

More on this when there’s more to talk about.

According to Totally Hello! Project, Ai Kago’s first post-H!P release that isn’t a DVD or book is finally going to be a reality this June.

So far, the only available link to order is Amazon Japan (see the above TH!P post); hopefully this will change.

This morning I found myself driving my mother to work, followed almost immediately by being dispatched to the nearest McDonald’s to grab sweet teas for her and her co-workers. No problem there, as I wanted one myself. 

It wasn’t until I was waiting my turn at the drive-thru that I realized what today was. 

February 7th.

Ai Kago’s birthday.

I couldn’t remember her exact age, so, knowing that I’d probably forget to look it up when I got home, I pulled out my Blackberry and brought up Wapedia.mobi on my phone.

“February 7th, 1988″

Yep, today is Ai Kago’s 21st birthday.

Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit.

I remember hearing Morning Musume and MiniMoni for the first time via a Xmas “card” mix CD-R of J-pop artists I was sent from an online acquaintence in 2003. When 2004 started, I took the plunge and, amongst some other recommendations from yet another online friend, I picked up a bunch of Morning Musume singles – specifically all the ones released between “Shabondama” and “Ai Araba! IT’S ALL RIGHT”, including the Sakuragumi and Otomegumi EPs. That was soon followed after a few weeks (and slugging around with a CD-R comprised of all those tracks) by my ordering Best! Morning Musume 1 & 2 and MiniMoni Songs 2. The next thing I knew, I was placing advance orders for “ROMAN ~My dear boy~” and – because her and Nozomi Tsuji were in MoMusu and MiniMoni – the first W single and LP. Neither my record collection nor bank account has not been the same since. 

And that, dear readers and fellow wota, is the Reader’s Digest condensed version of how, even after owning a few CDs by Whiteberry, Mai Kuraki, Yui Horie, Yuu Asakawa, and Chihiro Onitsuka between 2000 and 2003, CJ Marsicano became a Hello! Project otaku. 

It seems like yesterday that, while MiniMoni Songs 2 was still one of the newest CDs in my collection, I was looking at the front cover pic of the group doing their best H!Pified hip-hop look. I looked at the front cover, thought the girl on the far right in the blue velour top was pretty hot looking, looked up her name in the liner notes – of course, it was Ai Kago (I didn’t know her as “Aibon” yet) – and decided to look her up and see if I could find any kind of bio about her. Found out she was 16 at the time.

Oops. (Then, of course, as longtime followers of this blog, its predecessor, and a certain worship blog already know, a certain MoMusu a year younger than Aibon would steal my wota heart by the time Stuck In A Pagoda With Motoko Aoyama debuted in April of 2006, making that “oops” rather moot!)

It seems like yesterday that, on my LiveJournal, I was commemorating Aibon’s 17th birthday by facetiously claiming that  I was playing the Motorhead classic “Jailbait” in her honor. Followed, of course, by the stalkerazzi discoveries that she was caught smoking in a restaurant a few weeks before she was to turn 18 (and before W3: Faithful was supposed to come out, too!).

I had started MotokoAoyama.com v1.0 (RIP) around that time, and on occasion I wondered when Aibon’s suspension would end. Her surprise pre-return return to action in February of 2007 happened, of course, followed by more stalkerazzi pictures that caught 19-year-old Aibon headed to an onsen with some older guy. Followed, of course, by her sudden firing (and my almost wanting to Keith Moon my laptop out of the window in disgust – an act prevented by the necessity of needed to keep my writing chops going and my iPod regularly updated). 

Through it all, though, my love for J-Pop in general and Hello! Project in particular didn’t wane one goddamn bit. In fact, it got stronger. And there’s no doubt that, just like the bands she was in at the time got me full throttle into J-Pop, the desire to see her come back one way or another is what kept that love of J-Pop stronger. Her MiniMoni and W past and her firing and then-uncertain future, along with a pic I discovered a few weeks after her departure  from H!P of Aibon posing with an electric guitar at a live event, would also end up being the seed that inspired Here Is The Wonderland. (I’m STILL working on it, folks!)

Thanks, Aibon. Happy 21st birthday. (Now make a fuckin’ solo album, already, will ya?)