At the height of my love for MAX (That’s Mina, Reina, Nana and Rina, in case you didn’t know), I was renting any and every Japanese variety show that the foursome appeared in. In fact, it was because of MAX that I started watching shows like YORU MO HIT PARADE, CD COUNTDOWN and the mighty UTABAN show!
Now, besides those shows, MAX were almost regular guests on a show hosted by the zany duo of Matsumoto and Hamada, called “DOWNTOWN DX”. In this show, they would invite a whole bunch of guests (maybe around 10) and they would break into teams and play these just absolutely wacky games. Some of my favorite ones were rolling an egg down the length of a brick wall, and playing JENGA with shiitake mushrooms! I remember one hilarious epsidoe where MAX was teamed up with flamboyant enka singer Mikawa Kenichi, and at some point, Hamada points a them and says . “Hey, look, that team is all girls!” To which the half smiling Mikawa murmured, ‘Ma, ne.” Ahahaha!
After seeing them on the show a couple of times, I started really liking Downtown DX, and began including it in my stack of weekly rentals whether MAX was on or not! And it was during this time watching DX week after week that I started noticing this pretty and giggly idol-type girl who seemed to be appearing quite regularly on the show. She was spunky and really fun to watch go through the various game challenges, and after catching her on a few episodes, found myself actually looking forward to seeing her each week! But…Who WAS She?
Though the Downtown DX show would list the guests’ names at the beginning of the show, it was thrown up in a box with all the guests lumped together, and it was impossible to tell which name matched with which guest! Even when trying to listen closely to Hamada when would call out to her, it was still pretty hard to make out. It was only when she won a certain challenge and they threw her name up on a scoreboard that I was able to discern which name was hers! Then, of course, came the NEXT inevitable problem… Her name was made up of kanji’s that I didn’t recognize! Why O why couldn’t she have a name like “Yamaguchi” or “Inoue”?!! But, no, it was ones I didn’t know, and I sadly conceded that it just wasn’t gonna be in the cards for me to know her name.
Explaining my dilemma to a friend at work who could read Japanese, she offered to try and translate the name for me if I could copy down the name and bring it in to her the next week. I was excited at the prospect of her translating the name for me, but wasn’t too sure I could do a decent facsimile of the name onscreen! That evening I went home, and when the mystery girl’s name came up, I paused the video and with squinty eyes hand-copied her name as best I could Afterwards, making sure that what I’d drawn was at LEAST a passable copy of what was on the TV, I folded up the piece of paper and took it back to work with me!
I was filled with nervous anxiety…did I do a good enough job copying those kanji’s? And even if I did, would it be a name my friend would recognize? Well, all my fears disappeared in an instant, for when I handed the paper to her, she took one look at it, and without even a moments delay, handed back the paper and said, “Nanako Fujisaki’.
YATTA!!!!! Finally after all this time I had a NAME to go with the pretty face!!
Now armed with an ACTUAL name, I paid a visit to friend who had a computer (Yes! This was back before EVERYBODY had one of those things…) so we could go hunting in cyberspace for information and (better yet) PICTURES of Nanako!
Now, the Internet back then was a lot sparser than it is today. There wasn’t any “Google” or “Wikipedia” to help you with your search, all you had were search engines like Lycos and Hotbot, and the few pages we were able to find using those were those old GEOCITIES sites (where J-pop seemed to flourish, somehow), but never mind, find it we did, and after sifting through the pages and pages of type, was rewarded with (drumroll)…SCANS!! Yes, Scans and Scans of pretty Nanako Fujisaki in bikini after bikini after bikini!! AEWSOME! Sadly, back then nobody had such a thing as a CD burner so the best thing to do (so I could “have” these pictures) was to have my friend print them out for me, and I remember leaving his house entirely satisfied with a portfolio filled with my Nanako Fujisaki motherlode!
Poring over the scans later, it occurred to me that these looked like they were scanned out of some Magazine layout or Shashinshuu. Shashinshuu! If Nanako had any photobooks under her belt I certainly wanted to get my hands of them! Back then there wasn’t anything like CD Japan or Amazon.jp to check out what may or may not exist for any given artist, but thankfully there WERE places I could go to check on things like Gravure Models, and that would be the ad pages in the back of magazines like BOMB! and KINDAIEIGA Magazine. And when the new issues came out and I checked out the listings, not only did I find Nanako had a new Shashinshuu out, but VIDEOS as well!! You can bet I wasted no time ordering THOSE!!
The NEXT tape, “Frozen Daiquiri”…Ahhhhh…This was more like it! Bikinis and cheesecake, just the way I like it! Nothin’ but Nanako lounging in a swimsuit in front of a pool for 10 minutes…Now THIS was more like those Photoshoots that I mentioned!
While waiting for my Nanako Fujisaki Photobook to come in, I was happily surprised to see Nanako making her Japanese drama debut! She appeared as one of the secretaries working for Zaizen Naomi in the Kusanagi Tsuyoshi Drama IIHITO!!! WOW!! So she was making her start as an actress!! Though she didn’t have much to say or do in this one, I was sure she would be branching out into bigger parts soon enough!
Around this time I finally got my Nanako Shashinshuu, a beautiful softbound book simply entitled NANAKO FUJISAKI, and this satisfied my Nanako cravings for the time being, which was a good thing, too, because when Nanako’s NEXT drama came out (another Zaizen Naomi vehicle, this time as hostesses of an upscale club in OMIZU NO HANAMICHI) She once again played only a background character (usually regaled to part of a group) and this time had even LESS to say than in IIHITO!
Now, If I thought things would be getting better for her, I was optimistically wrong! For, lovely as Nanako was, the only thing I saw her in after that was as ANOTHER background character, this time for the amply endowed Sato Tamao drama HASHIRE KOMUIN. Fortunately, I really enjoyed this drama and it provided me with not only my introduction to L'Arc En Ciel but also gave us a HILARIOUS NG clip where poor Nanako gets bonked on the head during a funny gun squabble! AHAHAHAHA!
After that, the only thing I saw her in was an occasional photobook, though I WAS lucky enough to purchase Nanako's 1999 Calendar, which featured some particularly pretty n cute pics of Ms. Fujisaki...(don't mind the creases, time has been murder on these calendars!)
Back when I was downloading all those Nanako scans from the internet, there were some just absolutely lovely shots, and though I’ve managed to acquire a lot of them through purchasing her photobooks, my very, very favorite scans of her were these ones of Nanako wearing this pretty blue dress (see below) and I’ve NEVER seen the book this scene was from! In fact, going online, I can’t even find the original site I got it from in the first place! So all I have of my fave shots are the grainy and slowly fading scans I’d printed out over a decade ago!
Does anybody know which shashinshuu these pics are from? Or at least a site where I can re-download them? Because it’s funny- it’s been over 13 years since I’d first fallen for Nanako, and there’s STILL something of hers that I’m longing to acquire from the former Visual Queen of The Year!
