Thing is, whilst Fukumura and Oda and Co. are competent at the Hello-Pro village level. It’s a whole different ball game on the outside, with many younger, skilful, charasmatic players to boot, especially now. And the K-idols (NiziU) are not the only game in town – Stardust has Miss Mercy, LDH has iScream. Both groups have MASSIVE potential. Globally there’s Atarashi Gakko which seems to be following in Babymetal’s footsteps – all these are younger than Fukumura and Oda and have more skill.

At the subconscious level I think the older members of Morning Musume realise this. Oda’s blog about idols last year kind of hinted at things whilst trying to convince herself that HP was using music as a weapon – even though, in actuality, that’s not necessarily totally true.

Some of them really need to bite the bullet, graduate and the more talented ones should form a small group or two outside of HP (but not outside of Up-Front) and see if that works. Perhaps HP ought to place a graduation age limit on Morning Musume similar to the one Sakura Gakuin had.