Iâm starting this new post and copying some stuff from our old post here to keep stuff about the same topic in one post. Hope you donât mind :)
Hereâs our previous conversation about Yuto:
Iâm impressed with Yutoâs acting! Personally, I really enjoyed his performance in Pink and Gray. His skills are not totally up there yet, but I think he has a lot of potential and I look forward to watching his future projects.Â
Yes, heâs still a work in progress, and itâs a pity that JE focuses most of the resources on Yamada. Iâm not against Yamada, just that itâs really a pity because Yuto has the potential and also giving him good resources like they did for Yamada will help him to grow and develop as an actor. In the long-term, thatâll be an investment that will ensure stability as the current generation matures to become the core pillar of JE. Itâs better to also spread out the risks and not put eggs all in one basket, and logically speaking, having one more talent with acting and box office potential is better no?
 @wakaechanâ replied:
Yes, I completely agree. God knows how much I love Ryosuke and everyone in HSJ, but I would certainly love to see Yuto getting more opportunities to act, especially in more diverse material. Ryosuke has been doing a broader range of stuff in recent years and I think it really helped him grow. If Yuto can go on a similar path, it strengthens HSJ as a group and also helps with the long-term development of JE. Ah, well, resources are always problematic for idol groups with lots of members, and with nine members HSJ will always be struggling hard in this aspect. Fingers crossed for more resources!Â
@the50-personâ replied:
The thing is that Yamada has always been developed as the centre right from the early days. Itâs only been recently that Yuto got a bit more spotlight.
And hereâs my new reply:Â
Thatâs very true. Iâm a new fan of HSJ, so Iâm not going to pretend that Iâm an expert on them, but based on my limited knowledge of their history I do have a lot of frustration about how JE has handled the group since their debut back in 2007. I have nothing against Ryosuke being developed as the center â with such a large group they do need one, and I think Ryosukeâs the right choice and worthy of every job JE has given him. The problem is how they manage other members of the group around Ryosuke, so everyone can work together as a team while highlighting Ryosuke as the center. It should be about developing him to serve as an introductory/entry point to the group and keeping him as a focal point, not throwing every job they can at him and ignoring the development of other members. As a fan of the group, itâs painful to think about how poor Ryosuke was clearly overworked while other members suffered from fragmentary developing opportunities for quite some time. Thankfully, things have been getting much better in recent years, and Iâm finally seeing HSJ moving forward as a team.
I think most of their problems occurred in the period a couple years after their debut. They weren't given that much good work in general during that time, and with the stuff they were able to get, like I said above, my impression is their management team didnât put in enough effort to figure out more clearly which direction(s) each member should be mainly focusing on, so they can allocate different kinds of resources to members who are most fit for a certain job. It almost felt like they simply resorted to giving the best jobs (acting or otherwise) to Ryosuke (and Chinen sometimes) and then rather haphazardly assigning other things to other members. There was also the whole NYC business. I can understand how they wanted to use the popularity of Ryosuke to boost the group, but this strategy wonât work in the long term if they fail to invest in and take risks with other members at the same time. I can also understand how they may have wanted each member to try out a couple of different things to find their strengths, but with nine members itâs logistically impossible to give them that amount of resources for trial and error, so wouldnât it just be more realistic to do some general planning earlier on about how to develop each member and then adjust along the way if needed? Well, weâll never know about the inner workings of JE management, so this is just a bunch of thoughts Iâm pulling out of my head as an outsider and I could totally be wrong, but in retrospect I really feel like they could have designed a better development strategy for the group over their ten-year career trajectory.
Now at HSJâs eleventh year itâs good to see how theyâve finally settled at least some members into more focused directions, and the group has been getting more high quality resources in the past few years, so I really hope they can keep this up. Theyâve already put Yuto on the actor trajectory, so Iâm sure he will be getting more acting opportunities soon. Better late than never, right?
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