Member Ai

I am not too sure if this is a term that is unique to the Johnny’s, but those who have followed any of the boys should be familiar with this term well. It literally means ‘Member Love’, commonly used to express actions/words of affection among the members of the same idol group.

Probably due to the cool, diva image that tomochin often exudes, I love it when she does or reacts differently from the image, the Japanese will call it the ‘gap’. Tomochin gives the impression that she likes to stay in her comfort zone with people that she knows best like Acchan & the rest of first gen since they are the people that she mentions most often on her twitter and blog. As the fandom days grow, I start to realise that when other members get to go on a lunch date with tomochin and interact more with her, they will always describe the encounter as ‘tomochin is surprisingly a very warm and gentle person’ etc.

Now with Google+, the girls are interacting publicly more often than ever and I find their interactions to be so cute and natural and probably the closest thing we can ever get to, to hearing these girls talk like that privately.  Here is a “conversation” that tomochin had with Kikuchi Ayaka (another member of Team K, nickname Ayarin).

(Do click on the images for a bigger view with translation. Top down in chronological order.)

*the screencap in chinese interface is taken & edited from http://www.weibo.com/tomojcoco73