The Center of an Era — 2006–2017: The Days Five Men Conquered Japan

We are ARASHI — 27 Years with the Storm, and What Comes Next [Part 2]

If you read Part 1, you know how the story begins: five teenagers mocked on a cruise ship, plummeting sales, empty arenas, a leader who turned off his phone and vanished. By 2005, ARASHI was a group that most industry observers had quietly written off.

What happens next defies every rule of the entertainment business.

Over the following eleven years, those five young men would dominate the Oricon charts with a ferocity unseen in Japanese music history, fill the National Stadium for six consecutive years, host the nation's most-watched New Year's Eve broadcast nine times, and sell over 43 million CDs and music videos — a staggering total that placed their video sales above every other artist in history. They did all of this not by reinventing themselves, but by deepening what they already were: five distinct individuals who functioned as something greater than the sum of their parts.

But this is not simply a story of triumph. At the very peak — in the summer of 2017, with every metric pointing upward and every seat in every dome filled — a quiet conversation in a hotel room would set in motion the end of everything.

"Hana Yori Dango" Changed Everything

The turning point has a precise date: October 2005, when Matsumoto Jun was cast as Domyoji Tsukasa in the TBS live-action drama "Hana Yori Dango" (Boys Over Flowers).

The source material was a cultural institution — Kamio Yoko's shojo manga, serialized from 1992 to 2004, with over 61 million copies in circulation. Adapting it for live-action was a gamble; the fan base was protective, and expectations were sky-high. Matsumoto's casting was met with skepticism. He was, after all, a member of a group best known for declining sales.

The skeptics were silenced almost immediately. Matsumoto inhabited the role of the arrogant, emotionally stunted heir of the Domyoji empire with an intensity and vulnerability that made the character leap off the screen. The first season averaged 19.8% in household ratings, with the finale reaching 22.4%. The tie-in single, "WISH," sold 309,000 copies — a dramatic recovery from the 140,000-copy nadir of the previous year.

But the real earthquake came with the sequel. "Hana Yori Dango 2 (Returns)," which aired in January 2007, averaged 21.6% with a finale that hit 27.6% — numbers that placed it among the highest-rated dramas of the decade. The theme song, "Love so sweet," sold 457,000 copies and would go on to become one of the most enduring love songs in modern Japanese pop culture. As of 2025, "Love so sweet" has accumulated over 210 million streams, making it the most-streamed ARASHI song of all time. It is still played at wedding receptions across Japan — a love song that has outlived the era that produced it.

Sakurai Sho would later name this moment with unusual precision. On the January 24, 2019 broadcast of "Sakurai Ariyoshi THE Yashikai," he said: "The turning point for ARASHI was clear. It was when MatsuJun appeared in 'Hana Yori Dango.'"

The Ripple Effect — Five Talents, One Storm

What made "Hana Yori Dango" so consequential for ARASHI — as opposed to just for Matsumoto — was that the drama's success functioned as a spotlight, and when that spotlight swung toward the group, what it illuminated was not one talent, but five.

Each member had spent the lean years building something independent, and now, with national attention suddenly focused on ARASHI, those individual foundations proved decisive.

Sakurai Sho had taken on one of the most ambitious dual careers in Japanese entertainment history. In October 2006, he became the Monday anchor for Nippon Television's "NEWS ZERO" — a serious, late-night news program. The idea of a Johnny's idol delivering the day's headlines was unprecedented and, to many, absurd. Sakurai proved them wrong. His preparation was meticulous, his delivery measured, and over the years he would cover elections, disasters, and international summits with a credibility that transcended the idol label. He held the position for nearly two decades, fundamentally redefining what an idol could be.

Ninomiya Kazunari had, in 2006, appeared in Clint Eastwood's "Letters from Iwo Jima" — a film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 79th ceremony. Ninomiya played a conscripted baker-turned-soldier with quiet, devastating naturalism. He was the first Johnny's talent to appear in an Oscar-nominated film, and the performance announced him as an actor of genuine range.

Aiba Masaki had been steadily building a reputation through "Tensai! Shimura Doubutsuen" (Shimura Zoo), where his gentle, slightly fumbling rapport with animals — and with legendary comedian Shimura Ken — made him one of the most likable presences on Japanese television. His appeal was warmth itself: uncomplicated, generous, and impossible to dislike.

Ohno Satoshi remained the group's most enigmatic member, his artistic pursuits drawing an increasingly devoted following that existed somewhat apart from the mainstream ARASHI fan base. But on stage, his dancing and vocals anchored the group's live performances with an effortless precision that the other members openly admired.

The result was something that had no precedent in Japanese idol history: a group where each member had established independent credibility in a completely different field — acting, journalism, variety entertainment, fine art, and music — and where all of those individual reputations flowed back into and reinforced the collective brand. ARASHI was not a group with one star and four backup members. It was a pentagonal structure, each face equally load-bearing.

Chart Domination — The Numbers That Rewrote History

The commercial explosion that followed "Hana Yori Dango" was not a spike. It was a permanent shift in altitude.

In 2008, ARASHI released "truth / Kaze no Mukou e," which sold 726,000 copies, and "One Love," which sold 564,000. These two singles occupied the #1 and #2 positions on the Oricon annual singles chart — a feat of total dominance. The same year, ARASHI performed their first concert at the National Stadium and launched their first 5-Dome Tour.

2009 was even more extraordinary. Three ARASHI singles claimed the annual top 3 positions simultaneously. Their 10th-anniversary best-of album, "5×10 All the BEST! 1999-2009," sold approximately 1.96 million copies. They made their first appearance on NHK's Kohaku Uta Gassen (Red and White Song Battle) and won the Oricon annual Artist Sales Award for the first time.

The records accumulated at a dizzying pace:

• 47 consecutive #1 singles on Oricon (from "PIKA★★NCHI DOUBLE" in 2004 through "Kite" in 2020), with a total of 54 #1 singles — the all-time record for any artist
• 9 annual Artist Sales Awards — the all-time record across all artists
• CD total sales of 43.438 million copies (3rd all-time among male groups)
• Music video/concert video sales of 16.839 million copies — #1 all-time across all artists, a record that stands unchallenged

In 2004, a staff member had laughed when five young men said they wanted to reach the top. By 2009, they owned it.

The National Stadium — ARASHI's Cathedral

If the sales charts told the story in numbers, the National Stadium told it in scale.

ARASHI first performed at the old National Stadium in Kasumigaoka on September 5-6, 2008. What began as a milestone quickly became a tradition. They returned every year for six consecutive years, from 2008 through 2013, performing a total of 15 concerts at the venue — more than any other artist in the stadium's history. In 2010, they filled the stadium for four days, drawing an estimated 280,000 people.

The National Stadium became synonymous with ARASHI in the public imagination. When other artists performed there, the comparison to ARASHI was inevitable. The venue was not just a concert hall for them; it was a cathedral — the place where the scale of their success became physically, undeniably real. Standing on that field, surrounded by 60,000+ voices, was the furthest imaginable distance from the half-empty regional arenas of 2003.

Their annual dome tours, spanning five major domes across Japan (Sapporo, Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and Fukuoka), grew proportionally. Each year brought larger audiences, more elaborate staging — increasingly under the creative direction of Matsumoto Jun — and a sense that ARASHI concerts were not merely shows, but events of national significance.

Television Royalty — Two Pillars and the Kohaku Throne

ARASHI's television presence during this era was as dominant as their chart performance, and arguably more culturally significant.

Their two flagship variety shows became institutions. "VS Arashi" (Fuji Television, April 2008 – December 2020) ran for 12 years and 8 months, a prime-time game show that pitted the five members against celebrity teams in elaborately staged physical challenges. "Arashi ni Shiyagare" (Nippon Television, April 2010 – December 2020) ran for 10 years and 9 months, a talk-variety format that showcased the group's chemistry with guests ranging from Hollywood actors to master craftsmen. The final episode of "Arashi ni Shiyagare" drew a household rating of 18.3% and reached approximately 40.13 million viewers.

Both shows were the direct descendants of those late-night programs from the lean years — "C no Arashi," "D no Arashi," "G no Arashi." The skills honed at 1 a.m. to audiences of thousands were now deployed at 9 p.m. to audiences of millions. The trajectory was the same; only the scale had changed.

But it was the NHK Kohaku Uta Gassen — Japan's New Year's Eve song battle, watched by tens of millions — that most dramatically illustrated ARASHI's place in the national consciousness. After their first appearance in 2009, they performed on Kohaku for 12 consecutive years through 2020. They served as the White Team's host (shirogumi shikaisha) for five consecutive years from 2010 to 2014 — the first time in Kohaku history that a group, rather than an individual, had been entrusted with the role. Individual members subsequently hosted: Aiba in 2016, Ninomiya in 2017, and Sakurai in 2018 and 2019. In total, ARASHI members were involved in hosting Kohaku 9 times. They performed as the ōtori (grand finale act) three times — in 2016, 2018, and 2019.

To be the last act on Kohaku is to be the last voice Japan hears before midnight. To host it is to be the face of the nation's most-watched broadcast. ARASHI held both roles, repeatedly, for over a decade. They were no longer merely popular. They had become a fixture of the Japanese calendar — as much a part of New Year's Eve as the temple bells.

In 2020, the 62nd Japan Record Awards created a new category — the "Special Honor Award" — explicitly for ARASHI. The citation read: "For sustained achievement in earning widespread public support and making extraordinary contributions to the development of music culture." It was, in effect, the industry acknowledging that existing categories were insufficient to describe what ARASHI had accomplished.

The Cultural Footprint — More Than Numbers

The numbers — the millions of CDs, the tens of millions of viewers, the hundreds of thousands at stadiums — are impressive. But they risk obscuring what made ARASHI's dominance qualitatively different from that of other chart-topping acts.

ARASHI did not dominate Japanese entertainment by excelling at one thing. They dominated it by being good enough at everything that there was no space they couldn't occupy. Matsumoto was a leading man in prime-time drama. Sakurai was a trusted news anchor. Ninomiya was an internationally recognized actor. Aiba was a beloved variety personality. Ohno was a serious visual artist. And together, they were the most commercially successful concert act in the country's history.

This breadth had a compounding effect. A viewer who tuned in to NEWS ZERO for politics might notice Sakurai and become curious about ARASHI. A Clint Eastwood fan who watched "Letters from Iwo Jima" might look up Ninomiya and discover the group. A parent watching Shimura Zoo with their child might develop affection for Aiba and buy an album. Each individual career was a doorway into the collective, and the collective, in turn, amplified each individual. It was a virtuous cycle that no competitor could replicate, because no competitor had five members with five distinct public identities of comparable weight.

For an entire generation of Japanese people — those who came of age between roughly 2005 and 2020 — ARASHI was not just a group they listened to. It was the background music of their lives. "Sakura Sake" played during exam season. "Love so sweet" played at their weddings. "Happiness" played when they needed encouragement. "A·RA·SHI" played at sports festivals. The songs were woven into the texture of daily life so thoroughly that hearing them today functions less as entertainment and more as involuntary memory — a Proustian trigger for an entire era.

This is what it means to be a "national" group, and by 2017, no act in Japan had a stronger claim to that title than ARASHI.

Ohno's Art — The Quiet World Beyond the Spotlight

While ARASHI scaled these commercial heights, Ohno Satoshi was building a parallel legacy in a very different register.

His first solo exhibition, "FREESTYLE," opened at Omotesando Hills in 2008. It sold out its first day's admission tickets almost immediately. Oil paintings, elaborate drawings, hand-sculpted figurines — the sheer range and quality of Ohno's work shattered the assumption that an idol's art could only ever be a novelty. Critics took notice. Fans who came expecting souvenirs left having encountered a genuine artistic vision.

A second exhibition followed in Shanghai in 2015 — a rare international venture. The third, held at Roppongi Hills in 2020, brought the cumulative attendance across all exhibitions to approximately 120,000 visitors. Ohno also designed the jacket artwork for the single "Kite" and choreographed concert routines, embedding his artistry directly into ARASHI's output.

For Ohno, art was more than a hobby. It was the space where the person he actually was — contemplative, solitary, drawn to the tactile and the visual — could exist without compromise. It was the counterweight to the public-facing demands of idol life, and it was increasingly where his heart lived. As the years passed, the tension between Ohno the artist and Ohno the idol grew harder to reconcile. In the summer of 2017, that tension would finally find words.

5×20 — The Greatest Tour in Japanese History (A Preview)

Before we reach that summer night, one more milestone demands mention.

In November 2018, ARASHI launched "ARASHI Anniversary Tour 5×20" — a 50-show, 5-dome tour designed so that every fan club member could attend at least one performance. The tour ultimately drew a total audience of 2.375 million people, making it the largest concert tour in Japanese music history.

The accompanying best-of album, "5×20 All the BEST!! 1999-2019," sold approximately 2.18 million copies — the first double-million album in Johnny's history — and was named the IFPI Global Album of 2019, meaning it was the best-selling album in the entire world that year. It was subsequently recognized by Guinness World Records.

The tour's final performance, on December 25, 2019 at Tokyo Dome, was broadcast via live viewing to 329 theaters across 617 screens nationwide — the largest live-viewing operation in the history of Japanese music. The concert film "Record of Memories" would later earn 4.55 billion yen (approximately $31 million) at the box office, making it the highest-grossing domestic live concert film of all time and the #1 live-action film of its release year.

To put 2.375 million in global perspective: Taylor Swift's record-breaking Eras Tour in 2023-24 drew an estimated 10 million across 149 shows over two years. ARASHI reached 2.375 million in 50 shows within a single country. Adjusted for Japan's population of 125 million, the equivalent in the United States would be roughly 6.3 million — achievable, perhaps, but in a single tour cycle with no international dates, from a group that sang entirely in Japanese. The scale of domestic devotion was, by any measure, extraordinary.

ARASHI had also been quietly expanding their international footprint throughout this period. In 2006, they performed in Taipei and Seoul — the latter being the first solo concert by a Johnny's group in South Korea. In 2008, they held a concert in Shanghai, another first for the agency in mainland China. In 2014, "ARASHI BLAST in Hawaii" drew 33,000 fans over two days and generated an estimated $20.7 million (approximately ¥2.25 billion) in economic impact for the state of Hawaii. The Netflix documentary series "ARASHI's Diary -Voyage-" was distributed to 190 countries beginning in 2019, and the group won the Weibo Awards for "Most Influential Group (Asia-Pacific)" in 2020.

These numbers speak for themselves. But they conceal a crucial truth — one that transforms the entire meaning of the tour. By the time 5×20 began, the members of ARASHI had already decided it would end.

The full story of what that decision was, how it was made, and what it cost, belongs to Part 3.

The Shadow at the Summit — June 16, 2017

The year is 2017. ARASHI sits atop every metric the Japanese entertainment industry can measure. CD sales have surpassed 40 million. Fan club membership is still climbing. Two prime-time variety shows air weekly to millions. The Kohaku stage is theirs for the asking. By any rational assessment, the machine is running perfectly.

But machines don't have hearts. People do.

On June 16, 2017, the five members of ARASHI were in Osaka, having arrived early for the next day's "Arashi no Wakuwaku Gakko" event at Kyocera Dome. That evening, a group message arrived from Ohno Satoshi.

"There's something I want to talk about."

"After work is done, I want everyone to come to my room. There's something I need to say."

The man who had tried to quit before ARASHI was even born. The man who had turned off his phone for two weeks after debut. The man who had spent 18 years as the group's leader — the quietest, most reluctant leader in the history of Japanese entertainment — was about to break his silence.

Four men walked into Ohno's hotel room that June night.

When they walked out, the clock that had measured ARASHI's ascent was ticking in a different direction.

Continued in Part 3: "Five Men, One Answer — 2017–2020.12.31: Until the Last Day"

Who is the artist or group that defined an era in your country? The act that was so ubiquitous they became part of the culture itself? Tell us in the comments — we'd love to hear your story.