Sleep-speaker

Let’s take a moment away from me talking about overseas members I am not so familiar with! I’m kind of obsessed with Shoot Sign right now, both as a song and in terms of the drama it represents. I’ll save you my thoughts regarding my watching the 1986 TBS drama, Tenshi no Uppercut about a girl who takes up boxing to defend herself against school bullies, and I’ll also save you my thoughts on 2022’s Doronjo, the plot of which still resonates for me, and whilst we’ve already spoken about Kojima Haruna and Miyawaki Sakura, both of whom are at the heart of this MV, I realise we have yet to mention Team 4 member, Iriyama Anna!



Born in ‘strawberry country,’ Chiba in 1995, Annin passed auditions for AKB in 2010 and debuted as a member of the kenkyuusei that year in March. Just over a year later, in July, she was announced as a new member of Oba Mina’s Team 4 at the Seibu Dome concert, appearing later in the revival of Boku no Taiyo in the theatre. Both Annin and Team 4 quickly won over the audience! You can see her in the most fondly remembered line up of the team in the Hashire! Penguin MV, and whilst she was transferred to Team A in the 2012 Tokyo Dome Shuffle, at the behest of fellow former Team 4 member and fresh lemon, Ichikawa Miori, and the original team was disbanded in October, Annin continued to win hearts, appearing in the media senbatsu for 2012’s summer single, Manatsu no Sounds Good!, a single I remember excitedly pre-ordering and then feeling very embarrassed about because of the cover.

Annin remained in Team A for ten years, almost her entire career in the group, which I am quietly amazed by. In April, she was one of the members selected to perform in Washington D.C., and this, dear friends, is the reason Annin is such a significant figure in my memory of the group at the time. Though I never got to go to the Paris, New York, or Washington concerts, the names of members who were marginally popular but not significant heavy hitters at the time became ingrained on my heart because they were our AKB; Iriyama Anna and Team 4 became the AKB we felt we had most in common with because we felt included in the celebration. A cursory glance at the remaining videos still present on youtube reveals the enthusiasm with which overseas fans and Japanese students studying abroad committed hard.

Upon her return, Annin was selected as a member of AnRiRe, joining Sashihara for her second solo single, Ikuji Nashi Masquerade. The year after, in 2013, she appeared in the media senbatsu for Sayonara Crawl, the beginning of what became a pattern of her on-off inclusion in the senbatsu for singles continuing until Jabaja in 2018. Both Iriyama and AKB48 were at the height of their popularity during these moments.

In 2014, during a handshake event in Iwate Prefecture, a 24-year-old man, Umeta Satoru, smuggled in a foldable handsaw modified by attaching boxcutter knife blades to the side, and, driven by what he described as envy during the trial later, attempted to stab both Annin and Kawaei Rina, succeeding in wounding both girls and a member of staff who attempted to intervene. The event left everyone stunned and horrified, and, as with the attack on shoppers in Akihabara in 2008, I remember feeling a sense of dull disbelief, a feeling that I had been an idiot for papering over the cracks with feelings for idols, that the world was a dangerous place, and, for a moment, I had turned away and forgotten this. In all the excitement, I sobered suddenly. For a while after, I stopped listening to idol music.

I don’t know if this was the right thing to do, there was a lot going on at that point for me. Maybe Kawaei Rina felt the same as she announced her graduation shortly afterwards, saying that she understandably could no longer attend handshake events after what had happened. We were all left in a kind of stupor, and it felt like AKB, which had grown so big up until that point, began to diminish itself slightly, to recoil, as if fearful of what more attention might bring. It made all of us question what we were doing. Yet if Annin ever felt like that, she never seemed to express it in public, remaining in the group, pushing ever forward with her dreams until her graduation in 2022

Annin is still active, you guys! She has a popular youtube channel in which she blogs about life in Japan and Mexico, one of her videos from 2023 is even about lucha libre, and she continues to appear in TV and movies! I buried the lede with this one, I feel, as she hardly appears in the Shoot Sign video, but I’d been wanting to talk about Annin for a long time



Every time I write one of these entries, I get closer to the point where I only have new members left to talk about, and that feels a little daunting. Next week: back to the anniversary single hype!