Girls’ Genearation will be participating in this year’s edition of Japan’s most prestigious New Year’s Eve special music program, NHK’s ‘Kohaku Uta Gassen’ (commonly known as Kohaku) or ‘Red and White Song Battle’.
At 4pm JST on November 30th, NHK made an official announcement of the list of participants for the 2011 Kouhaku event through a press conference. Girls’ Generation and Kara were grouped in the red team alongside AKB48 while TVXQ will be in the white team together with Japan’s SMAP.
NHK Kouhaku is a special show that divides 50 most popular music artists of the year into competing teams of red and white. The ‘red’ team is composed of all female artists (or groups with female vocals), while the ‘white’ team is all male (or groups with male vocals). The honor of performing on Kōhaku is strictly by invitation, so only the most successful J-Pop artists can perform.
This is the first time Girls’ Generation and Kara were invited to the event. However for TVXQ, this will be their 3rd participation. Sooyoung, Jessica, Tiffany, Taeyeon, Yuri and Seohyun attended today’s press conference. At the press conference, Sooyoung said, “Being able to participate in Kouhaku Uta Gassen, just like our seniors, Boa and TVXQ in the past, is really a great honor to us. We hope to deliver great performances like our seniors”.
The inclusion of 3 Kpop groups in Kohaku this year is indeed an indication of the rise of the new Korean wave.
Credit: mtstarnews.com/wikipedia.com
Tags: Girls' Generation, Japan, Kohaku, NHK, SNSD
