The First Storm — 1999–2006: Five Unknown Boys Who Started a Hurricane

We are ARASHI — 27 Years with the Storm, and What Comes Next [Part 1]

May 31, 2026. Tokyo Dome. Fifty-five thousand points of light sway in the darkness as five men take the stage for the last time. They are 42 to 45 years old now, and 27 years of story are etched into their faces. The youngest, Matsumoto Jun, is 42. The eldest, Ohno Satoshi — the reluctant leader who once turned off his phone for two weeks rather than face being an idol — is 45. Between that first bewildered day and this final, luminous night stretches one of the most extraordinary journeys in Japanese entertainment history.

But to understand how they got here, we have to go back. Not to the sold-out domes and the record-breaking charts, but to a cruise ship bobbing in the Pacific, and five teenagers no one believed in.

Let's rewind. Twenty-seven years. To the waters off Hawaii — where everything began.

On a Cruise Ship off Honolulu — September 15, 1999

The debut press conference for a new Johnny & Associates boy band was conceived as spectacle. The venue was a cruise ship off Honolulu, Hawaii. Twenty to thirty reporters and photographers were loaded onto a separate boat, motoring across the water and pulling alongside the larger vessel to discover — only then — who the new group actually was. The emcee was Higashiyama Noriyuki of Shonentai, one of the agency's most seasoned and respected performers. Everything about the staging said: this matters.

The press corps disagreed.

"Where's Takki? Where's Yamapi?" complained one reporter, name-checking Takizawa Hideaki and Yamashita Tomohisa — the two young stars the media had expected to see. "Are these guys really going to be okay?" a photographer was heard muttering. The sentiment was nearly universal. In the rigid hierarchy of Johnny & Associates talent, these five teenagers — aged 16 to 18 — were B-listers at best. The A-list had been passed over or saved for other projects, and the reporters knew it.

The members themselves were hardly exuding confidence. Consider the irony: of the five boys standing on that ship, three were actively thinking about leaving the entertainment industry.

Ohno Satoshi, 18, the designated leader, had already told agency founder Johnny Kitagawa twice that he wanted to quit. He had been told he was going to Hawaii to "help with a recording session" — a white lie that got him on the plane.

Sakurai Sho, 17, was weighing whether to study abroad. He had joined the group under the assumption that it was a temporary project tied to a volleyball tournament broadcast, and that ARASHI would dissolve once the tie-in ended.

Aiba Masaki, 16, had the most surreal recruitment of all. Just three days before the Hawaii departure, Johnny Kitagawa had phoned him with a single question: "Hey YOU, do you have a passport?" Aiba said yes. He boarded a plane, arrived in Honolulu, and discovered — upon arrival — that he was now a member of a group called ARASHI.

Ninomiya Kazunari, also 16, would later be described as having harbored his own doubts, though he was characteristically less vocal about them.

Matsumoto Jun, 16 and the youngest, stepped onto the ship's deck with something closer to determination than enthusiasm — a quiet steel that would, decades later, make him the architect of ARASHI's most legendary concerts.

Sakurai Sho articulated the strangeness of that day with striking clarity years later, in a 2014 interview with Nikkei Entertainment: "The day before the press conference in Hawaii, we were nobodies. Not 'up-and-coming' nobodies — just literal nobodies. And then the moment we held that conference on the ship, we became 'ARASHI.' We were, in a sense, born."

The Name — Three Reasons for "Storm"

The group name itself was the work of Johnny Kitagawa. Candidates had included "Akebono" (Dawn), "?" (pronounced "Questions"), and — a detail that would become hauntingly significant 27 years later — "Five."

Kitagawa chose "Arashi," meaning "Storm," for three reasons. The first was aspirational: he wanted the group to "create a storm across the world." The second was strategic: the word "arashi" begins with "a" in both the Japanese syllabary and the Roman alphabet, meaning it would always appear first in any alphabetical listing. The third reason was strikingly practical, revealed years later by Higashiyama Noriyuki on the December 3, 2020 broadcast of "VS Arashi": the name is a single kanji character, which guaranteed it would always fit in the tight character limits of newspaper TV listings. In an era when Johnny's groups like SMAP, V6, and TOKIO all had English names, this was a radical departure.

The members themselves felt uneasy about a kanji name at first. But Matsumoto Jun would eventually say: "I've come to feel an incredible attachment to it — to the name 'Arashi.'" That attachment would prove mutual. The name, and everything it contained, would eventually belong not just to the five of them, but to an entire generation of Japanese people.

The Man Who Turned Off His Phone for Two Weeks — Ohno Satoshi

To understand ARASHI, you must first understand the paradox at its center: the group's leader was also its most reluctant member.

Ohno Satoshi had entered Johnny & Associates as a Junior in the early 1990s, drawn by a love of dance. In 1997–98, he performed in "Johnny's Fantasy KYO TO KYO," a grueling Kyoto stage production requiring five shows a day. The experience was transformative — not in the way the agency hoped. Ohno felt he had reached a peak. "I'd mastered dance," he would later say, or at least felt he had gone as far as he wanted to go. He phoned Johnny Kitagawa twice to say he was done.

Instead of accepting the resignation, Kitagawa asked him to "help with a recording." When Ohno arrived at the studio, the score in front of him bore the words "ARASHI" and "Ohno solo part." Before he could process what was happening, he was on a plane to Hawaii. "I'd already gone all the way to Hawaii at that point," he later said, laughing. "I couldn't exactly say I wanted to quit."

But the ambivalence didn't vanish with the press conference confetti. In the weeks following the group's official debut, Ohno went silent. He turned off his mobile phone for approximately two weeks, ignoring all calls and messages from the agency. For two weeks, the leader of Japan's newest idol group simply... disappeared.

This detail might seem like a minor anecdote. It is not. Eighteen years later, in June 2017, in a hotel room in Osaka, Ohno Satoshi would tell his four bandmates, "There's something I need to talk to you about." The conversation that followed would eventually lead to ARASHI's hiatus announcement, their return, and their final goodbye. The seeds of that future were planted here, on a Hawaiian cruise ship, by a young man who never quite wanted to be an idol — but who, somehow, could never quite bring himself to stop being one.

From 970,000 to Rock Bottom — The "Unsellable" Years

ARASHI's debut single "A·RA·SHI" was released on November 3, 1999, strategically timed as the theme song for the FIVB Volleyball World Cup broadcast in Japan. The timing was everything: the song was on television constantly, and sales reflected it. First-week sales hit 557,000 copies, and the single eventually accumulated roughly 973,000 — agonizingly short of a million, but a spectacular opening act. The song was written with lyrics by Kikuchi Tsunetoshi, credited as J&T — a name that would gain an unexpected footnote when his son, Kikuchi Fuma, later debuted as a member of the group timelesz.

For 21 years, "A·RA·SHI" would remain the group's best-selling single, until "Kite" surpassed it in 2020 with 1.147 million copies. But those 21 years included a long, dark middle chapter that the debut numbers did nothing to foreshadow.

The decline was swift and merciless:

The album numbers were equally grim. "How's it going?" in 2003 scraped together just 116,000 copies. To put that in perspective: their debut single had sold more than eight times that amount.

The consequences went beyond spreadsheets. Concert tickets for regional arenas — not Tokyo Dome, not even large halls, but mid-size arenas in the provinces — couldn't sell out. The unsold seats were given away free to fan club members of other, more popular Johnny's groups and to Junior fans. The group's first standalone variety show, "Nama Arashi LIVESTORM" on Fuji Television, dragged along with ratings in the 1% range — a number that, in Japanese broadcasting, essentially means nobody is watching.

Fan club membership sat at roughly 150,000 as of 2006. That sounds respectable until you learn that at its peak, the ARASHI fan club would exceed 3.39 million members. In 2006, they were at one-twentieth of that ceiling, and the ceiling was invisible.

In 2001, a souring relationship with their record label, Pony Canyon, led to the creation of a private label called J Storm, and the group's entire early catalog went out of print. It was a protective move by Johnny & Associates — a sign that the agency still believed in ARASHI even when the market didn't — but at the time, it felt less like a fresh start and more like a retreat.

Perhaps the most painful anecdote from this era involves the 2004 24-Hour Television charity broadcast. The five members stood on stage together and said to each other, with audible conviction: "Let's make our dream of getting to the top come true." According to multiple accounts reported years later, staff members within earshot laughed. Not with them. At them. The idea that these five — with their shrinking sales and empty arena seats — would ever reach "the top" struck the professionals around them as genuinely funny.

They were not laughing by 2009.

Why They Didn't Quit — Late-Night Television and the Slow Build

What kept ARASHI alive during the lean years wasn't a single breakthrough — it was an unbroken chain of small commitments.

The first of these was television. ARASHI's initial standalone show, "Mayonaka no Arashi" (Midnight Storm), debuted in October 2001 on Nippon Television. The origin story is endearing: the five members had been asked by the agency what they wanted, and they answered, "We want an ARASHI TV show." The result was a late-night slot — far from prime time, but it was theirs. The show ran until June 2002 and featured an ambitious cross-country road trip format that built a small but devoted viewer base.

What followed was an unbroken relay of late-night variety programs, each inheriting the audience and production know-how of the last: "C no Arashi!" (2002–2003), "D no Arashi!" (2003–2005), "G no Arashi!" (2005–2006), and "Arashi no Shukudai-kun" (2006–2010). All aired in Nippon Television's late-night block. None were hits by conventional metrics. All of them were training grounds.

It was in these shows that the five members developed the interpersonal chemistry, comedic timing, and audience rapport that would later power "VS Arashi" (12 years and 8 months on air) and "Arashi ni Shiyagare" (10 years and 9 months). The foundations of a television dynasty were laid at 1 a.m., broadcast to audiences that could be counted in the low hundreds of thousands. But those audiences were fiercely loyal — and they were growing.

Individual Careers — Building in the Shadows

Each member was also carving out something of his own during this period, though none of their solo efforts generated the kind of attention that would lift the group as a whole.

Matsumoto Jun earned his first notable acting credit in 2002 with "Gokusen," a school drama in which he played a delinquent student opposite Nakama Yukie. The role showcased his intensity and screen presence, but at the time, audiences associated him with the character ("Gokusen's Sawada Shin") rather than with ARASHI. He was becoming a recognizable face — just not yet a face that could sell concert tickets.

Sakurai Sho was performing a daily balancing act that few could have managed: attending Keio University's Faculty of Economics — one of Japan's most prestigious programs — while maintaining a full idol schedule of rehearsals, recordings, and performances. He graduated in 2004, establishing a precedent that would later define his career. The media initially mocked him as a "flashy Keio boy" playing at being an intellectual, but the degree was real, the discipline was real, and the "intellectual idol" brand he built would eventually lead to his appointment as a regular news anchor on Nippon Television's "NEWS ZERO" — a role that no one from the idol world had ever held before.

Aiba Masaki faced a medical crisis in March 2002 when he was hospitalized with a pneumothorax — a collapsed lung. For a stretch, ARASHI operated as a four-member group, an early and sobering reminder that "five together" was never guaranteed. Aiba's recovery was complete, and from 2004 he became a regular on "Tensai! Shimura Doubutsuen" (Shimura Zoo), a long-running animal variety show hosted by the legendary comedian Shimura Ken. The gentle, slightly clumsy warmth Aiba displayed on the show became a cornerstone of his public persona — the member who made everyone feel at ease.

Ohno Satoshi, despite — or perhaps because of — his ambivalence toward the spotlight, channeled his creative energy into art. In 2004, he was chosen to design the charity T-shirt for 24-Hour Television, and for the first time, the wider public glimpsed the artistic talent that would later fill galleries and draw over 120,000 visitors across multiple solo exhibitions. His paintings, sculptures, and figurines revealed a rich interior life that coexisted uneasily with the demands of idol performance. Art became Ohno's way of being present in the public eye without being consumed by it — a compromise between the person he was and the role he'd been assigned.

None of these individual threads, taken alone, was enough to reverse the group's commercial decline. But cumulatively, they constituted something more important than any single hit: proof that the five members of ARASHI were not interchangeable parts of an idol machine. They were individuals — an actor, a scholar, a natural entertainer, an artist, and a quiet observer — who chose, day after day, year after year, to remain a group.

The Fans Who Stayed

There is one more element of this era that statistics don't capture, and it may be the most important of all.

Fans who were there in those early years — the ones who joined the fan club when it was 150,000 strong, who traveled to half-empty arenas in Nagoya and Sendai and Fukuoka — remember something that no chart can record. They remember five young men performing with complete commitment, as though the twenty-third row was the Tokyo Dome. They remember encores played with the same energy whether the audience filled the venue or left it two-thirds empty. They remember handshake events where the members looked them in the eye and said thank you, and meant it.

That era of struggle is what forged the bond fans would eventually call "the ARASHI miracle." The group didn't survive in spite of the hard years. They became who they were because of them. Every record they would later break, every dome they would later fill, every chart they would later top — all of it traced back to the simple, stubborn decision not to quit when quitting would have been the rational choice.

The Offer That Changed Everything

In the autumn of 2005, a single drama offer arrived. It was addressed to Matsumoto Jun. The project was a live-action adaptation of a massively popular shojo manga by Kamio Yoko — "Hana Yori Dango" (Boys Over Flowers). Matsumoto was to play Domyoji Tsukasa, the arrogant young heir of a wealthy dynasty.

At the time, nobody understood what this one role would mean. Not the producers at TBS. Not the casting directors. Not the manga's devoted readership, who were skeptical of any live-action version. And certainly not the five members of ARASHI, who had spent the previous half-decade watching their sales charts trend steadily downward.

This single drama — its broadcast, its sequel, and the cultural earthquake it triggered — would alter the trajectory of ARASHI and reshape the landscape of Japanese entertainment for the next fifteen years.

But that is a story for Part 2.

Continued in Part 2: "The Center of an Era — 2006–2017: The Days Five Men Conquered Japan"

In your country, are there artists or groups who endured years of struggle before finally breaking through? Share your story in the comments — we'd love to hear how resilience plays out in music cultures around the world.