The Trend 2007.03.31: Ai Otsuka, Chinatsu Wakatsuki
Who’s hot this week? Ai Otsuka is currently dominating the charts with her just-released best album, “Ai am BEST.” Just look at the numbers so far. I’ve put in parentheses the sales for m-flo’s “COSMICOLOR,” which is on track to be the second-best selling album this week.
Tuesday: 64,396 (10,471)
Wednesday: 46,707 (9,479)
Thursday: 30,362 (14,026 - this is Mr.Children’s “HOME”)
Friday: 17,798 (5,719 - m-flo moved back to #2)
So Ai-chin has sold almost 160,000 copies so far, plenty more than the rest of the other albums this week. But it looks like it’ll still fall far short of the performance of her previous release, “LOVE COOK,” which sold about 335,000 copies the first week. A bit disappointing for fans like myself, but at the same time, it’s still another #1 spot with fairly strong sales.
Who’s not hot right now? Talento Chinatsu Wakatsuki has been pretty cold for a while, and Nikkan Gendai just did a little write-up about the current state of her career. At one point she was a regular on 10 different shows, but that number quickly dropped after she took a break at the end of last year for health issues. Now she’s only a true regular on two shows: NTV’s Thursday late-night “Love Katsu” and Saturday afternoon “Meringue no Kimochi.” And she’s even losing “Meringue” to Aya Matsuura this coming month.
So where does that leave her? Apparently she’s at least been filling up her time with her blog, which she started in January. She’s been updating regularly, about once or twice a day (except for when she was filming overseas). At one point (February 5), she did some kind of Q&A session with her fans, and she posted 74 times in a single day. That actually tops current blog queen Shoko Nakagawa (”Shokotan”), whose record is only 70 times in one day! (Incidentally, Nakagawa reached 500 million hits this February.)
The lack of work and the amount of blog time seems to be a bit distressing for Wakatsuki fans. Apparently Wakatsuki was even envious of the whole Jun Natsukawa age misrepresentation scandal, just because she’s been feeling left out of the news. Ouch.