Weekly Oricon Single Rankings (Ending 04-29)

This week’s number one single was “Sakasama no Sora” (さかさまの空） from SMAP with 135,248 copies sold. How incredible a story have they had? An idol group still going strong after twenty years, and by the looks of it beating out the newest Johnny’s group, Sexy Zone. SZ will have to try harder!

The #2 was AKB48 soloist Itano Tomomi (板野 友美) with “10年後の君へ” selling 72,911 – an entirely respectable number for a solo foray.

Mr.Children continued going strong with “祈り～涙の軌道/End of the day/pieces” at number 3, getting 36,143 sales last week for a total of 210,552 over two weeks.

Beyond the top three, there are only a few groups of interest to me:

“Go for it, baby” by B’z continued to chart pretty high in its fourth week, nabbing #17 with 4,909 sold for a total of 178,139.

“Lady ダイヤモンド” (Lady Diamond) from Sexy Zone secured #19 with 4,561 for a total of 128,462. It is still running far below the track of their debut single, which scored over 240,000, but that’s the usual sophomore blues for you.

At least Sexy Zone is still running ahead of Perfume‘s “Spring of Life”, which took #23 for 4,267 and a total of 107,533.

 

Shounen Club 2012.04.11 Review

Shounen Club (（ザ少年倶楽部 – Boys/Youth Club) airs twice a month, on the first two Wednesdays. So, this episode is our second dose of extremely genki (元気 – energetic) songs for April. In structure, it was pretty much indistinguishable from last week’s episode – no special guests and all the usual suspects (HSJ, SZ, KMF2, and ABC-Z) had their turn.

The show began with Hey! Say! Jump performing “Born in the Earth.” I’m not thrilled with the song, but the performance was salvaged by extreme hyperactivity from Nakajima Yuto (中島 裕翔).