There was a couple of surprises in the concert today. Kimi ni Tsuite (c/w from the single Beginner)ħ6. Iikagen no Susume (Koko ni Ita Koto album)Ĩ1. First Love (c/w from the Namida Surprise single and performed by Rena Kato)Ĩ2. Ice no Kuchizuke (c/w from the Flying Get single)Ĩ3. Nakeru Basho (c/w from the Beginner single and performed by Diva (not the 4 member DiVA)Ĩ5. High School Days (Koko ni Ita Koto album)Ĩ6. Anata ga Ite Kureta Kara (Koko ni Ita Koto album)ĩ2. Today’s concert which included the countdown from 100 – 76 went like this:ĩ6. You may have voted for your favorite song with a voting ticket that was included in the Kaze wa Fuiteiru CD single. This is a countdown concert spread over 4 days charting the best 100 songs that fans wanted to be performed. It's not a genuine election.Today was the first day of the AKB48 Request Hour Setlist Best 100 concert at the Tokyo Dome City Hall in Suidobashi. "It's like shareholders who have a bigger say if they invest more. "It's supposed to be a general election, but it's the people with money who determine the result," a 16-year-old high school pupil told the Asahi Shimbun. While some heralded the election as a popular challenge to the authority of the AKB48 impresario Yasushi Akimoto, the vote left some fans feeling disillusioned. "But the thing is they grow up with their fans." "These girls start from the amateur level with few singing and dancing skills," he told Reuters. Hidetomi Tanaka, a professor at Jobu University, offered a more prosaic explanation. This week's election fever has been attributed to discontent with conventional elections, with one expert even drawing an improbable comparison with the Arab spring. Just as K-pop has outgrown its South Korean roots, sister groups have emerged in Jakarta, Taipei and Shanghai. Together, the 48 stable has more than 230 members comprising four main groups and several smaller offshoots. But neither that, nor the arrest of one singer's mother for allegedly having sex with a minor, has slowed the group's rise to J-pop's apex. Their performances owe more to a heightened sense of kawaii cuteness than overt sexuality, but AKB48 members courted controversy over a recent confectionary commercial that some conservative commentators deemed inappropriate. Members appear in commercials for everything from chocolate to mobile phones, and they were recently enlisted in campaigns to sell Japanese government bonds and prevent teenage suicides. The group, named after the geeky Akihabara district of Tokyo, have had a succession of million-selling singles and generated sales of more than US$200m in CD and DVD sales last year alone. Since their debut in 2005, AKB48 have built up a huge following among girls in Japan and, more recently, other parts of Asia, as well as salarymen who flock to concerts and publicity events for the chance to shake hands and exchange a few words with their idols. One fan reportedly spent US$6,700 to secure 2,700 votes in online auctions. With the most devout snapping up multiple CDs to boost the prospects of their favourite singer, the single sold a record 1.62m copies in its first week. Each copy came with a code number enabling consumers to cast their votes online. The marketing brilliance did not end there: the public could only secure votes by buying a copy of the group's latest single, a Japanese and English track about the joys of summer. The group's 90 members appear in rotation depending on their popularity with the public. Oshima and 15 other performers earned enough votes among the 1.4 million cast to guarantee them a place in the lineup for the group's 27th single, to be released in August. Likening herself to a flower bud about to come into full bloom, she told her fans: "You have given me water and light. Even the normally staid broadsheets recognised that her election, with 108,000 votes – putting her well ahead of her closest rival – was a significant moment in J-pop history. Images of Oshima, who will lead the group for the next year, were plastered over the following day's newspapers and generated hours of analysis on daytime TV shows. Japan's broadcasters spent weeks trailing the vote, culminating in three hours of live coverage from the Nippon Budokan venue in Tokyo on Wednesday night. In a contest that has gripped Japan for weeks, Yuko Oshima – a relatively mature singer at the age of 23 – emerged as the most popular member of the band, whose sugar-coated refrains have rivalled their Korean counterparts for the affections of Asian pop fans. There was no place for greying, middle-aged men in dark suits - the candidates were dozens of teenagers and women in their early 20s, all vying for the title of president of the J-pop phenomenon AKB48.
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