Tatsuro Yamashita provides the second theme song for the Netflix series Pokémon Concierge. Girl...

Y’all saw the post title, so you know what this post is about. But lemme get something out of the way first.I was a fan of Tatsuro Yamashita. But I soured on him massively after he sat on his radio show and chose to speak highly of Johnny Kitagawa in the wake of the explosive scandal which revealed that Kitagawa had been sexually abusing boys for 40 years. Tatsuro Yamashita chose to use his platform to talk up Johnny Kitagawa as though he was about to hand him a lifetime achievement award. With a general air of ‘Sure, he touched them boys. But, wow. What he did for my career and the industry though!? Amazing.’

The record scratch as I was in the middle of listening to Pocket Music was loud as fuck.

This is why men should not be allowed to use microphones unless it’s to sing on stage.

I am so tired of people not holding others accountable for things they know are wrong — even if the wrong-doers are people they know and love. An inability for people to call shit out and make the hard choices is what allows perpetrators to thrive and get away with fuckery for as long as they do.

For Tatsuro Yamashita to know what he knows and still honour, respect and uphold Kitagawa’s piss-stained legacy publicly is absolutely wild. Johnny Kitagawa wasn’t just stealing a little bit of money from Arashi, telling Kazuya Kamenashi to lose weight or forcing NEWS to risk their scalps by dying their hair orange with a product which has not been JCIA approved. That man was sexually abusing underage boys. What is there even to respect and honour after knowing this? There was not a damn song to come out of Johnny & Associates that was bussin’ so good that somebody would be struggling to come to terms with the fact that Johnny was a piece of shit who should burn in the lava pits of Bowser’s castle. But clearly Tatsuro Yamashita doesn’t feel the same.

Pokémon Concierge | Netflix

Tatsuro’s hairline is what he gets for his response. Ain’t a single working hair follicle on the top of that man’s head anymore. The hair is probably sewn into them Uniqlo Heattech beanies he stays wearing.

HENNYWAY.

As part of Mariya Takeuchi’s comeback following the huge upswing she had in popularity with her 1989 single “Plastic Love” going viral, she provided a theme song for Part 1 of Netflix’s stop-motion animation series Pokémon Concierge. And now her husband — who also experienced a huge career upswing as not just the producer of “Plastic Love”, but as a prominent figure in city pop — has provided a theme song for Part 2 of the Pokémon series, titled “Onomatope Island”.

I get that this makes for a cute press story — ‘The king and queen of city pop provide theme songs for a Pokémon series’. But picking an artist who was friends with a man who sexually abused young boys, then spoke highly of him after the the accounts of sexual abuse were made public to sing a theme song for a show largely aimed at kids is crazy.

I am surprised that Netflix didn’t get dragged into the Tears of the Kingdom depths for this. But why am I even surprised? It’s showbusiness innit.

Pokémon Concierge | Netflix

I’ll tell you what else I’m sick of — Pokémon.

Nintendo and Game Freak are trotting those games out like Call of Duty or EA titles. The Pokémon games look raggedy as hell. But Pokémon Concierge looks really cute and the stop-motion animation looks incredible. It’d be great to see a Pokémon game with a similar sort of art style or ANY different type of art style. Have the whole game look like it’s made from toy models in a diorama, like the remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. Or make the games look exactly like the OG animated series, with cel-shading. Do SOMETHING. And they need to make some of the Pokémon extinct whilst they’re at it. 1,025 Pokémon is too damn many.