Hi again! I’m a little bit late in these news, but I’m so damn excited. This actually made my interest in JPop and JCulture in general come back. Sawajiri Erika is back to Japan, she spent some time living in the UK married to a much older guy (I know, I have seen this kind of story before) and doing nice things, like going to a Led Zeppelin concert (oookay). Now the bitch’s back, and she’s going to divorce the guy and, really, I couldn’t be happier.

First, I really love Erika. Her drama “1 Rittoru no Namida” is well-loved by maaany Jdrama fans, and it was really important to me at a certain point. But what I really like about her is that she is totally different from a lot of japanese idols. The girl ACTUALLY IS a bitch. She has the fame of being arrogant and bad-mannered, she was always involved in rumors about fighting actresses-groups and she supposedly made people call her “Erika-sama”, and all this actually sound so LOL to me (is it just me or japanese gossip is always more exciting? I don’t know, maybe it’s just cause it’s from such a faraway country :p). Things worsened because of her betsu-ni incident. I’m not sure why, but there’s something about her that’s really interesting, you never know what she’s going to do next. She announced the divorce and the reporters are going CRAZY. Appearently she was getting criticized once again for a list of exigences made by her husband or whatever. Now the he’s reaaally messed up with some financial problems, poor guy.

But I don’t care about her personal life, I really think Erika is very talented.  Her acting chops are nice, she has great body language. But most of all, the girl’s FIERCE. I love her as model, her photoshoots are not what you expect from your standard idol, they are stunning. I don’t know how much she is actually part of the process of creating her image, but she seems pretty aunthentic to me. She’s is aware of who she is, she’s not trying too hard to be cute or sexy.  Also, it looks like she really prepared for this comback, because she looks prettier than ever.

Anyway, I really love the songs she released as ERIKA and the Kaoru Amane song also. She’s kind of a rock chick, even though the style is pretty much the standard american comercial rock kind of thing. She actually has a good voice, I like the way she whispers in some point of her songs, I just don’t know if she can sing live. She may sign with Avex, and that would be pretty awesome, specially if she’s really cooperating with Matsuura Max. It just worries me a bit that she may try to change her ways. The japanese audience (actually, this happens in the whole world) is pretty critical and scary. If a person does something publicly criticizable, this person HAS to be punished. It happened to Erika, Koda Kumi and Tsuyoshi from SMAP and it’s kinda sad that she’s objectified as this  kind of martyr, but she’s a different kind of artist, one that japanese media isn’t really used to, that’s probably why she’s so hyped. This sounds funny, but I think that it’s so rare to find an openly arrogant artist in Japan. Anyway, her attitudes’ reasons are still a mistery for me. Maybe that’s why I like her.

I can’t wait to hear what she might realease, and she’s pretty succesful as a singer. Her latest magazine spreads are awesome and I’m glad to see someone coming back to give a little more colour (and some juicy gossip) to the JPop world.