＜prologue＞
I started a blog called “The Baby Boomer Generation’s Miscellaneous Blog”（Dankai-sedai no garakutatyou:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳） in July 2018, about a year before I fully retired. More than six years have passed since then, and the number of articles has increased considerably.
So, in order to make them accessible to people who don’t understand Japanese, I decided to translate my past articles into English and publish them.
It may sound a bit exaggerated, but I would like to make this my life’s work.
It should be noted that haiku and waka （Japanese short fixed form poems） are quite difficult to translate into English, so some parts are written in Japanese.
If you are interested in haiku or waka and would like to know more, please read introductory or specialized books on haiku or waka written in English.
I also write many articles about the Japanese language. I would be happy if these inspire more people to want to learn Japanese.
my blog’s URL:https://skawa68.com/
my X’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多帳（@historia49）さん / X
1. A brilliant retirement strategy
There is less than a week until Namie Amuro’s retirement on September 16th. The DVDs and Blu-rays of her final tour, “namie amuro Final Tour 2018 ~Finally~,” have recorded the highest sales of any music album in Oricon’s history (over 1.29 million copies).
This final tour was positioned as “Namie Amuro’s Best Tour, the culmination of her 25th anniversary,” and began in February 2018. It is amazing that she set a new record for the most audiences in a single tour by a Japanese solo artist, with about 750,000 people in one tour (about 800,000 people including performances in Asia).
Namie Amuro was born on September 20th, 1977, and is currently 40 years old. She made her debut as a member of the Okinawan female dance performance group “Super Monkey’s” when she was in her second year of junior high school.
She then became a “solo singer” under the production of Tetsuya Komuro.
Her unique “Amuro fashion” has also created a following of young women known as “Amurar”, and she has released many hit songs.
Just when it seemed she would continue on as a solo singer, she got married at the young age of 20 and had a child, but got divorced a few years later.
In recent years, “Amu’s popularity” has waned and “Amuro” fashion is no longer seen very often.
I thought she would fade away, overshadowed by the success of popular younger groups like AKB48 and Nogizaka46. Then, in September of last year, she suddenly announced her retirement.
2. Rising like a phoenix
At first, I had not fully understood the deeper strategy and intention behind the “announcement of retirement one year from now,” so I just felt that it was a bit premature.
However, I think she (probably together with her agency’s brains) carefully considered and steadily implemented the “Final Dome Tour Strategy,” “DVD/BD Sales Strategy,” “Campaign Strategy,” and so on until her retirement. The result must have been the great success I mentioned at the beginning.
It is common for stores that experience sluggish sales to hold huge discounts in what they call a “closing out sale” (in Osaka there was a shoe store that held a “closing out sale” all year round with a banner that read “We’re done, we’re quitting!”, but it recently “closed down for good”), but in her case it is not a story of doom; rather, it seems likely that she will rise from the dead like a phoenix and have a spectacular finale.
Fans who remember her from her heyday in her twenties and former Amuro fans will have felt a sense of nostalgia and the maturity that comes with being 40 years old, while newer, younger fans who don’t know her from her heyday will have felt a “fresh charm.”
As an aside, it feels a bit similar to the variety show “Isshu Mawatte Shiranai Hanashi” hosted by Higashino Koji, in which “veteran actors” and “veteran singers” talk to the younger audience who have no idea about their heyday about what it was like back then, and the audience is surprised.
However, in the case of Namie Amuro, even though she is retiring, she is still young at 40 years old, so unlike the older “veteran singers” mentioned above, her charm will still be fully enjoyable, which is good news for her fans.