There are times throughout my STARTO fandom life that I consider to be pivotal turning points that catapult me in a direction that I never expected to go. Whether it’s joining an anime forum that introduced me to the world of STARTO (formerly Johnny’s) or watching a single music video that made me latch onto Hey! Say JUMP as my ultimate group, I can clearly spot these moments in my life upon looking back. I knew the beginning of 2019 was a pivotal time period for me. I just didn’t know it then.
February 2019 is possibly my biggest pivotal time period in my entire fandom life. It’s the year that I started taking STARTO Juniors more seriously, and I entered this wonderful world of undebuted STARTO talent. I fell fast and hard for Sakuma Daisuke of Snow Man, and I was desperate to see him as much as I could. Through the kindness of friends, I was able to see him in the concert Yuki Man in the Show, and I was also able to go to a Takizawa Kabuki Zero performance thanks to a friend.
Our seats for that kabuki performance weren’t the best, crammed in the far left corner of the second floor, but I didn’t care. I was grateful to my friend for giving me a ticket, and to see who I considered to be my ultimate bias at that point of time.
The friend I went with I considered to be an expert on STARTO Juniors. It felt like she knew the names of all of the juniors, and she wasn’t afraid to state her opinions about the added members of Snow Man. The new ones hadn’t felt right to her despite her affection for Meguro Ren.
“If they wanted to stay acrobatic, they should have added Kage to the group,” she said as we sat in our seats waiting for the show to start.
“Kage?” I asked, genuine curiosity peeking through my voice. I had never heard of a STARTO called Kage before.
“Shadow Mountain!” my friend said, taking on a dramatic voice and tone before laughing. “There was a time when Kage would only introduce himself as that. You’ll see him in the show today. He has a solo speech before Monochrome.”
I can’t say that I remember much of Kageyama (the kanji read as Shadow Mountain in English) Takuya or anyone else’s performances during that show. I only had eyes for Sakuma for every second he was on stage, but I do remember Kage’s voice rising and rising throughout his speech before Monochrome, our seats just out of range for where he was on stage. I remember being impressed by it, but, once Snow Man’s Kabuki shows ended, I didn’t think about him except when my friend brought him up in passing.
I did learn a lot about Juniors that year, despite having eyes only for Snow Man and SixTONES. I learned how my friends avoided groups like HiHiJets and BiShounen for various reasons. I learned about the existence of dance family groups like MADE or UchuuSix. Most importantly I started learning about juniors who weren’t in groups and were back up dancers at News concerts. The only solid name and face that stuck in my head was Tsubaki Taiga.
I was extremely proud of myself when I was able to spot him dancing behind Yamada during JUMP’s Parade tour in Osaka. I still remember how my eyes widened in shock as I mentally shouted in my head, “TSUBAKI! THAT’S TSUBAKI!” and I couldn’t wait to tell my friend later. I was starting to learn faces and names of people that were important to my friend, and that’s what mattered.
During the small junior dance corner, I looked at the names of other back up dancing juniors, and I was proud of my limited kanji capabilities. I remember seeing a Suzuki dancing, and I remembered he was the fourth Taiga in the Juniors. I remembered seeing a Matsui flash across the screen as well, but those are the only names that I can recall. By the time Parade came to Tokyo, that dancing time had been replaced with Travis Japan’s Lock Lock performance.
But the Tokyo shows still had some joy. The friend I went to Kabuki with also went with me to Parade. We spent the time before the show trying to find Tsubaki wandering on stage, but I became distracted by a tall boy who had quite the flurry of fans waving at him and trying to get his attention. When he faced the crowd, bowing at them, “kyas!” filled the air.
“Matsui Minato,” my friend said, gesturing to him, and I perked up. I remembered that last name from Osaka. “He’s super popular among News fans.”
We spent the show enjoying JUMP and their performances, and I tried getting fan service from Tsubaki when he came close. We were sadly sitting too high up, and he had a fan of his in one of the lower rows that he was giving a lot of love and attention to. Not that I minded. His fans should get love if he finds them in a huge dome, but I spent part of that concert wondering if I would become a Tsubaki fan one day.
The thing about Juniors is there are, quite literally, a million of them, and they’re always working. I always skimmed the fan club emails because I was still learning their names as 2019 slowly entered 2020. Stage plays, concerts, TV work, nothing was off limits for these boys trying to make a name for themselves. And with covid ravaging the planet? Well, it certainly made working a lot harder for them and buying merch a lot easier.
I remember looking at the goods line ups for so many groups, admiring t-shirts and acrylic stands and necklaces. I scanned over so many faces and names, for Juniors and debuted idols, that the faces started swimming together. There was so much to see from the safety of my own home, but I swore in my heart that I was done adopting groups. I already had too many.
One thing I did like in the pandemic was how accessible STARTO made their content to fans. They held streamed recorded concerts on YouTube as well as the fan club site, even going so far as to build their own streaming platform for concerts being held without an audience. The first of these streams was called Johnny’s Happy Live with You featuring a catchy jingle reminding everyone to wash their hands to prevent the spread of covid.
I purchased a few streams with the promise from friends we would share account info to watch them before they expired. I hadn’t purchased the Junior only concert because I only liked Travis Japan, and MADE had recently disbanded. It didn’t make sense to purchase a stream where I didn’t like the majority of the groups.
The second the concert ended, my Line was flooded with messages.
Kat, you have to watch Crea C perform, one of my friends wrote, sending her log in info. They’re incredible!
I had no idea who Crea C were. As far as I knew, there wasn’t any STARTO group with that name. It was quickly explained that they were an unnamed Junior group that had been scheduled to perform at that year’s spring concert series, the C block of the show, before it had been canceled. Since the concert series was supposed to happen as Theater Creation, Crea as called by fans, their temporary name was dubbed Crea C.
I was skeptical over how good this unnamed group could be. Could they really put on a decent performance? I wasn’t so sure, but skimmed through the stream until I could find them.
To say I was blown away would be an understatement. Their rendition of KAT-TUN’s Don’t U Ever Stop was incredible, both vocally and dance wise. Of course, Travis Japan are fabulous dancers, but outside of them I hadn’t seen this level of dance before.
I was instantly captured by them, and I wanted to know more. I needed to know more. I remember finding out the names of each member, and I realized I already knew four of them.
Kageyama Takuya.
Tsubaki Taiga.
Suzuki Taiga.
Matsui Minato.
All four that I had come to know existed over the last year. The other three members, Yokohara Yuki, Motoi Shunsuke, and Sato Arata, I had never heard of before, but I was willing to learn more. I wanted to love them.
The problem? All of Twitter wanted to learn about them as well and people were swiftly claiming biases from a single performance.
Of course, this isn’t a bad thing. It’s fantastic that people wanted to support them. It was more a problem within my own brain. In my head, the initial bias stages I like to feel like I “belong.” That I’m allowed to have a piece of the love. That I’m allowed to like my boy. Very intense love pushes me away from a bias that I could potentially love, and, for some strange reason, I begin to develop negative feelings towards them. I can’t explain why this happens. It just does.
I also tend not to overlap biases with very close friends. I don’t know how it happens, but I always tend to be closer to friends when we don’t bias the same idols. And with how friends were claiming their biases, I felt more and more stress when trying to decide who to like.
(This is also not meant to cast blame or point fingers at any friend during this time period. I fully know and acknowledge this is something that happens within my own head, and it is no one’s fault but my own.)
During this time period, I had two idols in Crea C that I was considering: Suzuki “Ga-chan” Taiga and Yokohara “Yokopi” Yuki. Both I liked for different reasons. Ga-chan was soft spoken and sweet, his smile like the sun. Yokopi…well, his low speaking voice captivated me, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why he was tempting.
But one of my good friends was considering Yokopi as her bias, and my ex-best friend had claimed him as hers. Not wanting to step on anyone’s foot, I claimed Ga-chan as my bias and continued to claim him despite how the more I learned about him, the more I knew he wasn’t my type. I would keep this sweet boy as my bias for as long as I could.
My interest in Crea C waned as a year passed. I still paid for their live streams and watched them perform online when I could. I even celebrated when they were officially given a name by Takizawa Hideaki, IMPACTors. But I didn’t consider them a group that I would follow to the depths of the earth and back. I didn’t have the money to ballot for their concerts. I didn’t have a lot of money to buy their goods. But I liked them, and that was all that mattered.
If early 2019 was a pivotal moment in my life, bringing Juniors into my interests, then August 2021 was one that changed my life for the better. My friend had an extra ticket to IMPACTors’ Summer Paradise show and asked if I wanted to go. I hadn’t seen them in person yet, so I figured why not. I would go one time, and that would be good enough for me. I could finally say that I saw Ga-chan in person.
My friend hit fairly well, a nice aisle seat with a perfect straight on view of the stage, and from the first song to the very last I was absolutely enraptured by IMPACTors’ performance. It was the first time in a long time that I had so much joy in my heart when it came to idols, and I never wanted that concert to end. This. This is what a concert was supposed to feel like, and, after so long without concerts in my life due to the pandemic, it felt like I was finally home.
This single concert would make this time period a pivotal moment for me in my life. It cemented my love of IMPACTors, but it also changed something else in my heart.
When I go to concerts, I hyper focus on my bias. I watch them from start to finish, so I can take them in. Seeing my bias in person is such a high for me, knowing that they’re a real person and not pixels on a computer or phone screen is so important for me. I love spending every second of the show watching them perform.
But Ga-chan…Ga-chan I felt nothing. He was pretty. He was beautiful. But that same joy as watching my other biases perform wasn’t there, and there were times, because of the view, that I couldn’t see him because other members were blocking my view of him. It was a little disheartening, but I made the decision to watch Yokopi when I couldn’t see Ga-chan.
If watching Ga-chan was like watching a lake, smooth and crystal clear to the eye, watching Yokopi was like watching a river rushing over the rapids. There was something so electrifying about watching him dance, and his voice shot straight into my soul. I loved hearing him sing runs and belt out high notes that only Kage could reach. And then during the MC he did something that stole my heart completely: he made me laugh. My heart was his for the taking.
But I was still nervous to switch my bias. I didn’t want to step on any toes, and I gave myself a month after that Summer Paradise show to confirm if my bias has truly swapped. By the end of the first week, I had asked my ex-best friend to make me an acrylic stand of him, and my feelings haven’t changed. I’ve followed Yokopi from stage plays to concerts and even gone to the same show as him through pure coincidence. I’ve fallen more and more for this lovable boy with fluffy hair and the voice of an angel and all of his strange quirks, even being unable to hold his partner’s hand. I’ve loved following his career and see how he’s blossomed as a performer in this year and a half as his fan.
But if you had asked me in 2019 if I would have followed a group from formation to disbandment, I would have called you insane.STARTO groups are forever. Even if idols come and go, it wouldn’t happen to IMPACTors. I believed deep in my heart that I would see them debut under the STARTO brand.
But dreams aren’t meant to always come true. Sometimes they’re meant to be just dreams. After May 25th, IMPACTors will no longer be a part of STARTO and will part ways with the company. Their future is unknown, and I don’t know if they’ll return together under a new name. Even then, I still love and adore them. They were truly a bright spot in the Junior brand with a unique image and talent that made them stand out amongst everyone.
I can’t hope that they’ll return. I don’t want my heart to get crushed if they don’t. For now, I’ll be content with the memories that I’ve made with all of them and know that they’ve made a wonderful impact on my life.
I will always be an IMPACTors fan no matter what.
