Samの英語チャンネル

Boy, they really do like doing everything together.

Although they went out on a bittersweet note in the midst of the pandemic, legendary boy band Arashi decided to boy disband at the end of 2020 to pursue their own projects. Undoubtedly, for some members one of those projects was a chance to settle down and start a family.

▼ Their final concert had to be held without an audience due to pandemic restrictions.

Kazunari Kinomiya got a jump on his bandmates by tying the knot back in 2019 and celebrated the birth of his first child last March. Now, on the offical Arashi fan club website it has been announced that members Sho Sakurai and Masaki Aiba have also wed!

By that I mean, they each married another person, not…you know, each other.

And herein lies the problem. Simultaneous wedding announcements aren’t all that common, and with two notorious heartthrobs getting taken off the market being big news, entertainment journalists rushed to get the headline out. As a result, we ended up with this:

▼ Headline: “Sho Sakurai & Masaki Aiba Announce Marriage”

It’s something that could have been swiftly clarified in English by using the plural “Marriages” instead, but since Japanese doesn’t usually use plurals the ambiguity was about as thick as you could get. This naturally resulted in a lot of confused comments online.

“Whaaaaaat!!!”
“Wow! Now there’s a power couple!”
“I always wondered about those two…”
“That’s normal journalistic style when the partner is an ordinary person.”
“At first I thought, ‘Wow, they’re really getting into the freedom of their post-idol life.’”
“Why would they announce it at the same time? Who does that?”
“I wonder if the writer did that intentionally to get clicks.”

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Cynical logic would dictate that it was an intentionally suggestive wording, but as the hours went by you could almost witness the headlines evolve. It was like watching the mass media’s thought-process in real-time as they searched for a way to properly phrase this news.

▼ Headline: “Sho Sakurai and Masaki Aiba Announce Double Marriage”

▼ Headline: “Sho Sakurai and Masaki Aiba Marriage Announcements at Same Time”

Some articles seemed to let a little personal frustration leak out into the headline.

▼ Headline: “Sho Sakurai, Masaki Aiba marry, make unconventional double announcement”

▼ Headline: “Sho Sakurai and Masaki Aiba, each marry with ordinary women!”

I’m sure their respective brides were thrilled with that last headline in particular. However, as someone who often has to fold complex stories into a pithy headline, I can sympathize with the media on this one too. Sometimes I just wish all news was cats getting Guinness World Records.

Source: Itai News
Top image: YouTube/ARASHI
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Source: SORA NEWS24