Stuck In A Pagoda With Motoko Aoyama

Well, this is a hell of a news item to be commenting on, on my first full day dealing with a new laptop… Someone e-mail pengie and tell her that her title of J-Pop Nostradamus is endangered.

Well, maybe not, but last fall I posted something that hypothesized the reason as to why Maki Goto quit Hello! Project. That link is here. but for as brief as it is, it’s worth recapping here:

Suppose… just suppose… that Maki Goto left Hello! Project and Up-Front Works because she wanted to break into the American market a hell of a lot sooner than Hello! Project and Up-Front Works?

Picture it… you’re Maki Goto and you’re sitting at home between recording and live dates and blog posts, and you’re going online and seeing that Puffy AmiYumi and Dir En Grey are making regular appearances in America, Hikaru Utada is trying to sneak herself in as well, several other J-pop and J-rock artists are making appearances in the States, and talk is already afoot that BoA is going to try to hit the USA in 2008. You think to yourself… “Great. Why not H!P? Why don’t we try over there? We already have fans buying the imported CDs or doing downloads…”

You go to a UFA meeting, bring the idea up, and get a “Not yet, we’re working on the rest of Asia first.”

(…) …and you go home, have a cup of tea, then get an epiphany… an epiphany that reads, “Fuck this waiting shit! I don’t just want to be a Japanese singing star! I want the world and I want it now!”

Fast forward back to present day, and it turns out that Maki has reopened her blog, and her latest entry says (according to Some Boys Blog) that she is currently in Los Angeles.

Doing what? Well, I can’t read Japanese (yet), but its a no-brainer to consider that Los Angeles is the center of the Western entertainment industry. Just remember, I called it back on 11.27.07.