Otanjoubi Omedetou, Atobe Keigo!

This is the second year in a row to celebrate Atobe-sama's birthday on this blog. How time flies! It's been more than a year since I got obsessed with Tenipuri and started the blog due to my passion for this anime. Although the anime has ended this year, there's the OVA to look forward to next year and Hyotei is still in the Nationals against Seigaku at the moment. Besides, the movie this year focuses a lot on Atobe so I'm quite content to see him and hear Suwabe Junichi-san's voice. Since Atobe has not appeared yet for the Nationals arc and I guess he should be in Singles 1, we'll get to see him again but I was really hoping for him to have another match with Tezuka rather than Atobe possibly facing Echizen in the manga.

Somehow, it's been a pretty quiet year for Atobe-sama in terms of CD releases. I was thinking that he might have a birthday single or album this year but it turns out that Tezuka is the one releasing his birthday single for the first time. In fact, he only released one personal single, "Riyuu/E-kimochi" in March. If you take into consideration the 2 Rajipuri CDs he appeared on with Echizen & Tezuka respectively, that's only 3 titles. As compared to 2004 where he had a Valentine's Day single, "Believe In You" released on the same day as another Tezuka single, Atobe-sama is not exploiting his full potential in the CD market since Riyuu got a very high position in the Oricon Chart, being the 100th Tenipuri CD release. I'm hoping that he will kick off 2006 with a New Year album like Tezuka this year or probably a single for Valentine's Day or White Day. I bet many Atobe-sama fans are waiting to hear from him again.