At midnight on March 4, 2026, ARASHI's digital single "Five" went live across streaming services. Despite the hour, hashtags like #ARASHI_Five and #ARASHI_is_back climbed Japan's X trends one after another.

The Oricon daily rankings published the next day, covering March 4, put "Five" at 3,208,857 streams and 74,255 downloads, first place in both categories.

Those numbers demolish ARASHI's own daily bests. Their previous streaming high was roughly 980,000 for "Whenever You Call" in 2020; their download high was about 55,000 for "A-RA-SHI: Reborn" in 2019. "Five" tripled the first and beat the second by about 1.3 times, in a single day.

It also set the all-time Oricon record for first-day streams since the ranking began in April 2019. The previous leader was BTS's "Film out" at roughly 2.862 million (April 2021), followed by BTS's "Butter" at about 2.552 million (May 2021). ARASHI cleared both at 3.209 million.

A 26-Year Callback to Their Debut Song

"Five" runs 4 minutes 27 seconds, exactly the length of their 1999 debut single "A・RA・SHI." Fans caught it immediately.

HIKARI wrote the lyrics; HIKARI and Tomoki Ishizuka composed; Ishizuka arranged. HIKARI wrote "Meikyu Love Song" and "Wild at Heart"; Ishizuka handled "Sakura Sake," "One Love," and "GUTS!" These are the people who built ARASHI's catalog.

The lyrics are threaded with callbacks. The debut chorus sang of something that cannot be surrendered, always right beside you; "Five" answers that the thing lodged in their chests that day is beside them still. Where the debut sang of gathering wind through the body and whipping up a storm, "Five" has the wind they gathered gently turning the page to tomorrow. Wind they once whipped up is, 26 years on, wind they collected. Fans called it a setup paid off a quarter century later.

From Hiatus to Reunion, and the Final Tour

ARASHI debuted on November 3, 1999, with the single "A・RA・SHI." Satoshi Ohno, Sho Sakurai, Masaki Aiba, Kazunari Ninomiya, and Jun Matsumoto spent more than two decades at the front of Japanese entertainment.

In January 2019, prompted by leader Ohno's wish to live freely, they announced a hiatus effective December 31, 2020. After a New Year's Eve countdown concert, the five went their separate ways.

The problem was that their final year collided with the pandemic. The last show was streamed without an audience, and they never got to perform in front of fans. That unfinished business stayed with them.

On May 6, 2025, after roughly four and a half years of silence, the five appeared together on the fan club site. They had established a company, ARASHI Inc., and would reunite for a tour the following spring, which would also end ARASHI as a group. It was a conclusion reached, they said, after taking time and talking it through repeatedly, and the point of reuniting was to thank fans directly and let them see a performance in person.

The final tour, ARASHI LIVE TOUR 2026 "We are ARASHI," opened at Daiwa House Premist Dome in Hokkaido on March 13 to 15 and ran 15 shows across five domes: Tokyo Dome, Vantelin Dome Nagoya, Mizuho PayPay Dome Fukuoka, and Kyocera Dome Osaka. The Tokyo Dome show on May 31 was set as the grand finale.

The Global Reach of ARASHI's Fandom

ARASHI's official social accounts all launched together for their 20th anniversary in November 2019. X, then Twitter, passed a million followers within 24 hours; Instagram picked up 1.72 million. By October 2020 they were at 4.25 million on Instagram, 2.41 million on X, and 3.03 million YouTube subscribers. Fan club information from November 2025 put official Instagram at roughly 4.46 million. Fans worldwide kept waiting through the entire hiatus.

Their popularity extends across Asia, where they toured in the past. They played Tokyo Dome for the first time in 2007, then a five-dome tour and a solo concert at the National Stadium in 2008.

The "Five" music video premiered on the official YouTube channel at 9 p.m. on March 5. It was their first new MV in 1,948 days, since "Party Starters" in November 2020. A bus decorated with the ARASHI name and the number 5, echoing the van that has appeared throughout their career, carried five men singing together. Fans replied with "this is so ARASHI it hurts" and "welcome back."

Karaoke providers DAM and JOYSOUND added "Five" alongside the release. ARASHI has always done well at karaoke, where "Love So Sweet," "Happiness," and "A・RA・SHI" are standards across generations. With the final tour approaching, fans went back through the catalog.

May 31, Tokyo Dome: 26 and a Half Years Come to an End

The ending turned out to matter more than the record.

On May 31, 2026, at Tokyo Dome, ARASHI closed out 26 and a half years. Across five domes and 15 shows since Sapporo on March 13, the tour drew 490,000 people. Throughout it, the group did zero media appearances; the only places the five appeared together were fan club content and the tour itself. Their last public space would belong to fans alone. That was the exit they chose.

The setlist ran 33 songs across roughly three and a half hours, built as a direct continuation of "We are ARASHI!", the line Sakurai shouted at the end of the empty-arena 2020 stream. The opening brought back the rainbow that hung over that audience-less Tokyo Dome, and the clock frozen at "2020.12.31" started moving again.

The last song was "Five." Cannons fired on the final chorus, about not forgetting that they got to say thank you from the heart. The five hugged, formed a circle, and said it over and over: thank you, bye everyone, that was fun. Then they walked off.

Ohno said he was glad they had protected, for 26 years, the ARASHI everyone built together. In 2019 he had talked about locking ARASHI in a treasure box. That night he described opening it again, not with one person's key but with five, and finding a sea of penlights inside like jewels.

"Five," 3.2 million streams on day one, ended up being the last song ARASHI ever performed. Five men who sang about whipping up a storm 26 years ago left, setting down the wind they had gathered. The numbers were only ever a way to measure the weight of it.

On November 3, their debut anniversary, a live Blu-ray and DVD of the tour finale plus a live photo book will be released, exclusively through the Famiclub Store online.

Japan saw extraordinary intensity around a national group's final single. How did it land where you are? As an international fan, what did ARASHI's return and the "Five" record mean to you? We'd love to hear it.

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