From another thread, regarding Rei Inoue joining Juice=Juice…
Moh wrote:lmao I was just thinking about this kind of scenario last week. So why do I still feel like this is a very elaborate prank?
If it was the first time they did something like this, I could believe it's a prank. But after the Country Girls diaspora, it's S.O.P. now.
And frankly, I think that's a good thing. I know Japanese culture tends toward the belief that giving up is its own sort of failure, that failure itself is dishonorable (rather than the specific actions leading to failure), and that you should keep going until you either succeed or die trying.
* But someone, somewhere at Up-Front finally realized it's okay to let dysfunctional groups fail and then reassign the members who actually want to continue working. I often wonder what might have happened if they'd had that realization earlier, before Berryz Kobo and ℃-ute each disbanded.
These days, the identities of H!P groups are based on broad themes…
Morning Musume – legacy, performance
ANGERME – energetic, a little crazy
Juice=Juice – mature, vocals-oriented
Tsubaki Factory – floral, elegant, ladylike
BEYOOOOONDS – multi-talented, theatrical
… rather than on particular groupings of members, so it's okay to add generations (previously an MM-only thing) and reassign members as needed in order to maintain the groups indefinitely.
* Contrary to what many weebs think, ganbatte doesn't mean "Good luck!" and ganbarimasu doesn't mean "I'll do my best!". They're both conjugations of the verb ganbaru, which means "to persist or persevere". Thus, "(I'll) keep going!" is a better translation, but even that sounds a little weird or rude to foreigners.EDIT: Yeah, I know, that's a lot of edits for a post that doesn't have any links that might have broken and wasn't a running update of an event. But the post covers several different thoughts I've been having for a while and seemed unrelated until recently, and I also needed to clarify some things I said about
ganbaru, so… <shrug>