From Nagoya to the Philippines: A Former Idol’s Journey to Form a Seven-Member Group

The new place is on a mountain at an altitude of 1600 meters.

Igarashi Sayaka, who graduated from SKE48 in 2022 and is currently active as a talent, is showcasing her impressive F-cup figure in the latest issue of Friday magazine. However, she has an unusual background of being born in Saitama and raised in the Philippines. Let’s explore Igarashi’s surprising past, which has sparked a significant response since the release of her essay.

Igarashi was born on September 19, 2001, in Saitama Prefecture. Her life took a dramatic turn when she was 12 years old.

“In the winter of my sixth-grade year, I was told something shocking by my parents.

The new place we would move to was on a mountain at an altitude of 1600 meters. I was informed that we would be relocating to the Philippines as a family the following year.

I couldn’t fully grasp it at first, but I remembered that my father had often talked about his dream of leaving his job and living abroad, and I had been taught English more than necessary since I was little, so I understood it was not just a joke, even at 12 years old.

The next day, I told my friends about it, but most of them thought it was a joke. Shortly after, the date for our flight was set, and both I and my friends realized that this was becoming a reality.

I still vividly remember my graduation day; it was a beautiful sunny day with cherry blossoms fluttering around.”

 

After graduating, Igarashi moved not to a local middle school but to the town of Baguio in the Philippines. At an altitude of 1600 meters, this place is famous as the only tourist destination in the Philippines where a jacket is necessary due to the cold.

While struggling with English, she adapted to life in the Philippines and, at 13, became hooked on anime and started cosplaying. By the age of 16, she decided to audition for “MNL48,” the Filipino counterpart to AKB48. However,

“I was a peerless beauty who could speak Japanese, and I couldn’t help but think that the MNL48 auditions were held just for me.

The first round of auditions was suddenly based on voting, and for some reason, my ranking quickly rose, putting me well within the range of passing the auditions.

At the time, I had so much confidence that I didn’t question it at all, but looking back now, it’s a mystery who would vote for such low-quality and embarrassing selfies.

After the voting ended, I was wondering why I hadn’t received an email when I came home from school and saw a shocking video.

The official video had been uploaded, featuring the top 200 who passed the voting energetically dancing to ‘Koi Suru Fortune Cookie.'”

Digital photo collection ” Soka Igarashi has F-cup!　vol.2 just before the deadline! Hayaka Sensei ” is now on sale!

While working part-time at a maid cafe.

Unexpectedly, she was not selected. However, Ms. Igarashi was undeterred and set her sights on becoming an idol. She formed a seven-member group with other Filipino girls who had also failed the audition, commuted by bus to the capital city of Manila, seven hours away, and began her idol activities. In her essay, she vividly describes her memories of those days.

I got ready on Friday after school and took the night bus to Manila.

The bus was not what Japanese people imagine.

The buses that traveled between Baguio and Manila were sarcastically called “running refrigerators” by the locals.

The air conditioning was so effective that even the driver had to wear a thick jacket, the bus was cramped, the chairs were so uncomfortable that you would think they were assembled from cutting boards, and the straight backrests could not be folded down.

And every once in a while there was a big hole in the chair.

Igarashi thought that he would go on to a university in the Philippines and find a job, but in the summer of his 18th year, he again experienced a major turning point. During summer vacation, while back in Japan, she tried her first part-time job at a maid cafe in Akihabara. I bought a lot of CDs so that I could propagate SKE48.

He told me that he had bought a lot of CDs and was handing them out to proselytize, but then, as if suddenly remembering something, he opened his mouth and said to me, “Ah!

Oh,” he said to me! SKE48 is having an audition for the 10th term right now, would you like to apply?

I had not told him about my idol activities in the Philippines, so I was surprised that such a coincidence could happen, but I later thought that this might have been inevitable.

Ms. Igarashi, who is showing off her “melting F-cups” in Friday, which is now on sale, is trying to carve out a new path as a “gravure idol who writes essays.

You can read a special interview with Ms. Igarashi in the article, “I didn’t sleep a wink before the deadline… ‘Behind the scenes of writing’ as revealed by an ‘F-cup gradol’ whose essays are the talk of the town!