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The story
It became a hot topic on 5ch’s Hello!Project board that former Hello!Project member Shimakura Rika’s Showa-era kayo (retro Japanese pop) cover videos are getting ten times the views of similar covers posted by Ogata Yuu, a “yame-halo” (fan slang for an idol who left Hello!Project). The thread included screenshots showing the like counts had flipped in Shimakura’s favor, and while the low comment counts fueled speculation that older viewers and non-fans searching for Showa kayo songs were driving the traffic, opinions were split on whether the view gap came down to Shimakura’s own popularity or simply the fame of the songs she chose to cover.
What people said
There are even comments in the section from kayo (old-school Japanese pop) fans who don't know who Shimakura even is.
Perfect BGM for flipping through Rika-sama's photobook.
Didn't she just do a 'Leave Hello' (industry term for graduating from Hello!Project)?
The thumbnails look good too.
Shimakura Rika – "Odoriko" (The Dancer)
https://youtu.be/9cKdSQq-gPI ;
But the like counts have flipped.
And she gets to do what she actually wants too.
The point is Shimakura's videos are being watched by people outside the 'village' too.
No way that's happening.
Apparently that's exactly what happened with the Murashita Kōzō cover mentioned in Re: #17.
we'll finally know for sure whether it's Shimakura's popularity or the songs' popularity.
Doesn't look like she's thinking that far ahead.
She does have original songs.
There are middle-aged guys who have no clue who 'Beyo' is getting reeled in.
Takase → her solo live is so in-demand both sessions have lottery losers
Yuu → her bar event sold out in general sale
but I bet anyone well-versed in Showa kayo would look at the song choices and go 'she gets it.'
Nah, she's just picking famous oldies one after another — I don't get any sense of particular discernment from it.
I think if she did more upbeat nostalgic pop songs like that, she'd get even more views.
It's racking up hundreds of thousands of views specifically because people want to see Shimakura Rika.
Is she not going to release anything official?
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
“Yame-halo” is fan slang for a former Hello!Project trainee or member who graduated or left the agency, and Ogata Yuu is cited in the thread as one such example. The core difficulty in this discussion is separating out whether Shimakura Rika’s high view count comes from her own popularity or from the search-traffic pull of the famous Showa-era song titles she chooses to cover. The low comment count and the reversal in like counts are raised as evidence of “traffic from outside the fandom,” but this is only speculation within the thread, not data that directly shows who the viewers actually are. Some posters also pointed to cases like the Murashita Kōzō cover, suggesting that searches for that specific song title may be driving traffic — meaning the view count could be shaped more by how well-known the song is than by Shimakura’s own ability. A point readers might easily misread is treating this view-count gap as simply “Shimakura is 10 times more popular,” when posters in the thread repeatedly note that the relationship between song choice and song fame hasn’t actually been disentangled.
※This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Hello!Project board) thread “Did You Know Shimakura Rika Gets 10x the YouTube Views of Yame-halo (Ogata Yuu)?“.
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