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The story
Opinions split on the Hello! Project subforum of 5ch over the practice of having OGs (graduated members) appear as special guests at current groups’ live shows. Some voiced sympathy for the OG members’ fans when these appearances are sprung as a secret — “Feel bad for the OG’s fans,” “Secret guests kill the vibe” — while others pushed back with “Only a tiny minority actually cares about that.” Posters also cited past examples, like Sato Masaki and Takeuchi Akari appearing as guests at regional revitalization concerts in Bizen and Kaga.
What people said
Only a tiny minority actually says that.
That would absolutely bring the house down.
Everyone's just holding it in.
Nah, only a tiny handful of people are making these kinds of statements about their feelings — they should realize they're the ones who've gotten way too invested and lost perspective.
Treating "attend every show" as some kind of baseline expectation is messed up.
For OGs there just aren't many events to begin with,
so it ends up feeling like you're expected to attend all of them.
If you're appearing, just say you're appearing.
Then it wouldn't be a secret guest anymore, would it.
Why would they need to cater to you specifically?
Ticket sales are already solid, so there's no real point in bringing them in.
They didn't need to make it a secret in the first place.
Doing that would defeat the whole purpose
— the OG would just be tagging along lol
https://helloproject.com/news/16465/
Sato Masaki, Miyamoto Karin, and Ogata Risa have been confirmed as special guests.
Bet this left OCHA NORMA fans with really mixed feelings.
https://helloproject.com/news/18559/
> Also, Takeuchi Akari and Ishida Ayumi have been confirmed as special guests.
What we learned this time: even if it's sold out, a guest can still show up and sing a Satoyama song (OCHA NORMA's local/nature-themed songs); if it's NOT sold out, it gets announced beforehand.
Probably more people were happy about it.
I'm a new fan but didn't raise my hand —
newcomers aren't used to it, so it's hard to put your hand up.
Seriously?
I figured it'd be like 20-30%.
Miyamoto even wrote an apology blog post over it.
Who even cares about that lol
They went out of their way to tease it too.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C83CX2KV0AEMVVP.jpg
— some fans actually quit over it.
That's straight-up underground-idol behavior lol
Only with underground idols can you actually complete every single event.
Honestly, after so long without breaking through, the whole fandom's mentality has sunk to underground-idol level.
The old-guard fans' mentality is way too "underground idol."
Though to be fair, some groups really do end up sliding into that underground tier.
The logic in the first half and the second half doesn't connect.
Even with fewer events, that doesn't mean "attend everything" becomes some kind of default expectation.
If anything, going around posting these "statement of feelings" things is more likely to get you disliked normally
— you never know where it might reach the person involved.
If you don't have the perspective or the mental bandwidth to think about that, you're going to end up disliked all over the place.
The point is that because there are so few events, it ends up amounting to attending all of them anyway.
It'd be better if it did reach her —
if she's fine just showing up as a secret guest like that, she clearly doesn't understand how the fans feel.
Background and Key Points
Hello! Project is the idol umbrella under Up-Front Works that has run groups like Morning Musume, ANGERME, and OCHA NORMA since the late 1990s. In this ecosystem, “graduation” from a group is treated as a clean, largely permanent break — a graduated member (an “OG”) does not normally perform with her old or a sister group again, which is why any OG cameo is a rare event and fandoms build strong personal attachments to specific graduated members rather than transferring loyalty to whoever is active. The Bizen and Kaga shows cited in the thread are “Naruchika” concerts, tie-ups where a municipality sponsors an idol performance as part of regional revitalization (chiiki okoshi) tourism promotion — a common arrangement in Japan where local governments pay idol groups to draw visitors, which is why lower-profile venues get extra star power in the form of guest OGs.
The thread doesn’t split over whether OGs should appear at all — most posters seem fine with that — it splits over whether the appearance should be announced beforehand or sprung as a surprise, since a surprise means an OG’s own dedicated fans, who might have traveled specifically to see her, could miss the show entirely for lack of notice.
What’s easy to miss is scale: when asked how many in the crowd were seeing Takeuchi Akari for the first time, only about ten hands went up, suggesting the “controversy” is a loud but numerically small contingent, not a fandom-wide backlash — a distinction several posters make explicitly by comparing the complainers to obsessive underground-idol fan culture. The thread also never engages with the municipal-sponsorship angle, which is likely why these guest slots exist in the first place.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Hello! Project board) thread “Opinions on OGs Making Guest Appearances at Current Groups’ Live Shows.”
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