Arashi news round-up

Arashi-related news of late. All of these were announced awhile back; I just didn’t post about them then.

* Jun, Nino and Aiba have a new Kirin CM, and it’s really cute. Ohno has a new Morinaga Hot Chocolate CM. Aiba has a new Mercedes Benz CM. And Arashi will be promoting the new year postcard for Japan Post this 2015, so remember to send your nengajos! Speaking of sending nengajo, check out this page from Japan Post that lets you customise your own hanko.

* Sakurai Sho is hosting Best Artist 2015, which is on November 24th.

* Arashi’s zekkouchocho! penlight will be an interactive type (like Digitalian, maybe?) and will be activated by the seats! Also, “FUNKY” will be in the Japonism set list. You can see the explanation on the Japanese J-Net.

* Arashi is ranked #1 in Oristar’s Favourite Artist of 2015. It’s the sixth year that they ranked first.

* JE is cracking down on resold tickets; as of today, 135 tickets from the Nagoya concert have been invalidated. You can see the list of invalidated tickets on Johnny’s Net site – click on the second link in red text on the main (Japanese) site and it will take you to the page with links to invalidated tickets. I just went through it and saw that a lot of tickets from the Osaka and Tokyo dome shows for Digitalian were invalidated last year (>_<).

* Japan Airlines will be having a “Ganbare! Nippon” event featuring Arashi next year, on February 10th.

All Or Nothing (2002)

Technically, this isn’t a concert DVD. It’s not QUITE a documentary either, since a lot of it was very much scripted, but I guess it also kind of is.

It starts out like a concert DVD – Arashi starting their Join the STORM concert with a full performance of “Jidai”, but the next few songs are just cuts and clips before the screen pans out, and you see Arashi sitting around a table, looking at themselves. Sho started out by saying that he didn’t hate what they were doing so far, but he thought that they ought to take a further step ahead, and strive to improve themselves. After a discussion each of the members agreed to choose a challenge to take on.