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The story
Morning Musume.’s Fukumura Seika, Sato Masaki, and Inaba Mio are each set to hold solo tours, sparking buzz on 5ch’s Hello! Project board that this could open up a one-person slot in the Hello! Project performer unit “M-line Special.” The trigger is timing: M-line Special’s spring tour traditionally kicks off in early March, and this year’s schedule overlaps with the solo tours. Thread posters pointed to the past precedent of Kudo Haruka performing with M-line Special while also doing solo activities, and speculation flew over who might step in next — Kudo herself, Jokoryo Moe (currently returning from studying abroad), or Hasegawa Emi (who has a CD release coming up) — with no consensus reached.
What people said
What about Inaba and Sato though?
Karin-chan did both in parallel for a while.
That Showa-kayo (retro Showa-era pop) direction is great.
Touring Showa-kayo shows with Karin-chan?
Miyamoto, Morito, Koseki, Asakura + ?
and the radio show that started this month runs through the end of March too,
so she's probably coming back for M-Spe's spring tour.
Oh, the radio show was only for a limited run.
turned out to just be her manager — who couldn't really talk at the time —
telling her "take today off" on the phone and hanging up,
and people just ran with it as her getting kicked off lol
With Maa, Take, and Oze.
That was back when it first became a touring thing.
Koseki and Takeuchi were the fixed members, touring as a trio — Sato for the first half, Inaba for the second half.
No idea, but the agency isn't even putting it on the official site — just ignoring it.
It's Hello! Con season, so staff can be reassigned.
Though it'll likely come after Fukumura and Sato, then Inaba, before hers comes out.
She's got the longest OG (veteran-member) tenure in Juice=Juice (JP), too.
She put one out as "Ozecchi" at the end of last year.
Barely shows up on stage at all, huh.
And Ozecchi's was around December 2025?
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
M-line Special is a Hello! Project performer unit built mainly around senior, veteran-tier members of Morning Musume., and its spring tour traditionally kicks off in early March every year. The thread started from a timing overlap: with Fukumura, Sato, and Inaba each holding their own solo tours, posters speculated this could free up one slot in the unit’s lineup. There’s precedent for this — Kudo Haruka previously juggled solo activities alongside M-line Special — which is the basis for speculation that Kudo could be the one to step back in. Meanwhile, the once-circulated story that Sato had been “fired” from M-line Special turned out to be a misunderstanding: her manager, unable to talk properly on the phone at the time, simply told her to take the day off and hung up, and that got misread as a dismissal — a correction that gets shared within the thread itself. Where opinions diverged was over whether a new member might be added (with Hasegawa Emi or the soon-to-debut Asakura Kiki floated as possibilities) and how the senior members are being handled (whether Koseki Mai has released a second photobook, and Jokoryo Moe’s status now that she’s returning from studying abroad) — all without any confirmed information, leaving it mostly speculation.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hello! Project) thread “Fukumura, Sato, and Inaba are holding solo tours, which opens up one slot in M-line Special.”
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