Reaction: Wonderful Hearts Land

Well there it is - I missed the initial pre-order on this ...er... tourbook? Photobook? I dunno. I'd compare it to a souvenir program you'd get at a fancy play - only much thicker and ridiculously expensive. It was backordered here and didn't even ship out until 3 weeks after I'd placed my order! And after all that waiting, I still wasn't 100% sure what it was I had just ordered.

The first treat I was pleasantly surprised with was a couple of neatly folded posters tucked into the front cover:

And here's a look at a typical set of pages. As you can see, beside a bunch of different shots of the Morning Musume members, each member also had a set of pages devoted to them. Starting with a studio shot of them in costume from the opening number (some kind of pseudo country-western theme), then pages with smaller shots of the actual performance (including the occasional candids from rehearsals), and finally another studio shot on their other major costume from the Morning Musume segment of the show.

That would be Gaki-san, if you recall her back in DOM5

There was one thing that surprised me about the book. Wonderful Hearts referred to a small subset of Hello!Project acts (the younger ones) during the 2006 touring season. In fact, although they did headline the concert, Morning Musume was only one of the acts appearing at the summer concert tour entitled Wonderful Hearts Land. This book however features only Morning Musume. And depending on your point of view, is both a good and a bad thing.
First of all, I really don't have much interest in seeing photos of the "munchkins" that make up the kid groups like Berry'z Koubo or C'ute. However, I'm still very much taken by Ishikawa Rika who, as a member of Vi-yu-den, also makes an appearance in the concert... and is sadly relagated to only a few behind-the-scenes shots in this book.

Still, it's one of those treats for my personal guilty pleasure. Take the concert at face value - we're talking tons of lip-synching going on. Lots of "we're Japanese so we suffer together and fans want to see us crying over Konkon's graduation speech." But hey, that's all part of the Musume experience, right? LOL! ^_^;;