Welcome to yet another H!P-related blog. I’ve been lurking around the H!P blogosphere for the last couple of months and have finally decided to announce my existence, so here I am. Greetings. I am … uh … I have a couple of Internet handles but they date back to like high school and I need a new one. Let’s see… since this an H!P blog, and H!P is partly responsible for my coining a new word back in November or so, I’ll go with Kawaiirrhea. Here’s a definition:

kawaiirrhea (or kawaiirrhoea) [kʰəˌwaɪəˈɹiːə] n.
: an overwhelming feeling of being inundated with extreme cuteness, as often occurs in conjunction with experiencing the output of Hello! Project
(from Japanese kawaii ‘cute’ + Greek rhoia ‘flow’)

I’m a college student living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and taking probably too many courses, so I won’t be posting too frequently, except when I’m procrastinating, which happens frequently.

I will mainly be writing about topics related to Hello! Project and to a lesser extent, other elements of the J-Pop landscape. Also, since I’m something of a (multi-disciplinary) geek, you may find random unexpected intrusions from math, computer science, physics, linguistics, or literature (or other fields). Don’t worry; it makes sense … I think.

The title of this blog is inspired by the awesomeness that was Mini Moni, though with Mini Moni no longer an active group, I will more often than not be writing about stuff not related to Mini Moni. (Googling “Mini Moni Mania”, I only found 6 hits, none of which were blogs, so I figured it was ok to use the name. Apologies to anyone planning to use this name or currently using it without my knowledge.)

That said, I hereby declare that Mini Moni ja Movie Okashi na Daibouken! is the best film ever produced in all of history. No kidding. I will undoubtedly write more about this truly revolutionary movie later.

I guess I should say something about how I got introduced to Hello! Project. I consider my first introduction to H!P to be my viewing the PV for Aya Matsuura’s “Ne~e?” on Youtube sometime during July 2007. I was just getting into J-Pop at the time and stumbled upon the video by accident. Prior to that, I had heard about Morning Musume and had seen the infamous lizard clip, but I didn’t really know anything about their music. (Though I have a vague memory of hearing that Morning Musume had 30 or 40 members. At the same time. I don’t remember where I heard that from.)

Anyway, “Ne~e?” didn’t immediately grab me, but there was something about it… So colorful! So outrageously bizarre! So kitschtastically kawaiirrific! I was hooked.

I ended up watching all of Ayaya’s PVs and was quite impressed with the majority of them. For some reason though, I didn’t quite make the leap to the rest of H!P at that point.

Later on, around September, I discovered Berryz Koubou and Tsukishima Kirari starring Kusumi Koharu. Then Mini Moni and the rest of H!P followed, and I found myself hopelessly entangled in senseless obsessed fandom.

And that’s where I am now. My favorite H!P acts (past and present) are Berryz, Buono!, Koharu and Kira☆Pika, Aya’s and Miki’s solo work (most of GAM’s output hasn’t really grabbed me), Maki Goto pre-”Glass no Pumps”, W, Mini Moni, and “Go Girl ~Koi no VICTORY~”-era Morning Musume.

So thanks for reading, and I promise awesomeness to come in the entries to follow.

–Kawaiirrhea