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The story
A thread titled “Yuyu was so cute, wasn’t she?” popped up on 5ch’s Hello! Project board, and posters were stunned to learn that Yuyu — a member of Onyanko Club’s sub-unit Ushiroyubi Sasare-gumi — is now 58 years old. The discussion spread to cover the idol landscape of that era, memories of her solo career, and broader theories about ’80s idols.
What people said
Can't believe it
Shows how old we've gotten too
Still, I bet she's cute even now
We're washed up too then
It was printed in Dunk magazine (an idol data/photo mag)
But grandma is pushing it
A regular guy, not in the industry
I think he was the manager of some restaurant or other
Some mysterious made-up way of talking she had
I wonder how she's doing these days
Oh, that's the lady from the variety shows, brings back memories
Can't really say for sure though
The one who really won over the stylish '80s guys was Fukunaga… Fukunaga Eki
This
Fukunaga Eki
Really taught me how different people's tastes can be
That's exactly why Onyanko Club hit the mark so well
With that many members, there was someone for everyone
Same weird thing happens with Hello! Project members
Even the ones you'd think "no way" about have their own devoted fans
Right?
You really get it, old-timer
For the All Nighter crowd (a late-night idol lineup/event), it'd be Nemoto or Shimano
At least nobody around me was into them
Kihara and the Shoujotai Miho type are like that
Kind of like the purple ranger in a Toei Sentai show
I used to skip club activities for it all the time
Seriously, she was the only one sparkling — insane aura
Background and Key Points
Onyanko Club was the mega-idol group produced by Yasushi Akimoto that ran from 1985 to 1987, built on a gimmick where members were “students” recruited via an audition segment on the late-night TV show *Yuyake Nyan Nyan* — the same show one poster (58) says they skipped club activities to watch. Ushiroyubi Sasare-gumi was one of several spin-off sub-units the group spawned, similar in structure to how Nogizaka46 or Sakurazaki46 units work today, and Yuyu (Nakazawa Yuko) was its most prominent member, going on to a solo singing career before shifting to variety TV work. The group’s whole appeal, as one poster (48) notes, was its sheer size — enough members that “there was someone for everyone,” which is why the thread’s nostalgia fractures along individual favorites (Yuyu, Takai, Fukunaga Eki) rather than consensus.
The actual split in the thread isn’t about Yuyu’s talent or legacy — everyone agrees she “shined” — but about how to react to her being 58: some treat it as a harmless generational marker (“shows how old we’ve gotten”), others push back on “grandma” as too far while accepting “middle-aged lady,” and a few try to preserve the idol image against the reality of an aging-lady photo.
What outside readers likely miss is the specific cultural weight of *Yuyake Nyan Nyan* itself — it wasn’t just a variety show but essentially a real-time idol-manufacturing machine broadcast to a national teen audience, which is why grown men decades later can still recite a member’s height and weight from a fan magazine. The thread never mentions that Onyanko Club’s structure directly foreshadowed the AKB48-style “generational” idol model that dominates Japanese pop culture today.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hello! Project board) thread “Yuyu was so cute, wasn’t she?“
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