Natsuki Ozawa's Ronroba! Boogie Teens Television Appearance
Orignally Posted on 09/10/2022
I've recently stumbled upon something I can't really explain, if you're aware of the type of person I am, you'd know I have a strong fascination and love for tokusatsu, the Japanese genre of live action media that has a ton of special effects. It's a very broad definition so whenever I refer to it, I'm more or less referring to the super hero section of it, such as Kamen Rider, Ultraman and Super Sentai as those were my introduction to the genre. The driving force behind tokusatsu though, in terms of the super hero parts, is Toei, I bring this all up because it all seems to relate to each other in one way or another, as in 1989 Toei debuted a new show as part of their Toei Fushigi Comedy Series line up called Magical Girl Chukana Paipai, which the series is about some girl who has magical powers and fights people I believe, I'm probably wrong but it seems to be something in line of typical tokusatsu of that time, my best guess is Sukeban Deka mixed in with Kamen Rider. The show though is not that important, in regards to what I'm talking about, but actually about the main star of the 26 episode series, Natsuki Ozawa, I've been doing research on her ever since I've stumbled upon this 4chan thread discussing more obscure tokusatsu shows, in which the show was mentioned, as well as Natsuki Ozawa. It was brought up casually with the mention that she ended up becoming a JAV actress later on a decade late, JAV being short for Japanese Adult Video so that's how I'm gonna address it for the rest of this post. Upon reading that I was bewildered for perfectly obvious reason, there was a link posted on the board that was a blog post from 2010 that went over Ozawa's entire career up to that point, including the JAV portion, it was overall a pretty lenghty blog post and well informed, including pictures of her in movies and videos of her performing and television appearances, which brings me to write this specific blog post. There was a specific topic mentioned which intrigued me more than the rest of them which was this specifically:
The video of the interview isn't available, which is unfortunate but there's a few things that caught me off guard, where's the date? It's not specified in the date and the best thing I can go off was the wording of the post specifying that it was "before" she began doing work in the adult film industry, it's so vague, but it specifies it was after the two shows mentioned, Hana No Asuka Gumi and the aforementioned Magical Girls, but both were in the late 1980s so that's not really much help on my end. The mention of photo-books, which I can only assume would be gravure as it mentions AV beforehand but looking up for that yields results from past 2005, except one listing of a photo-book mentioned that said the year of release was 1993, which barely helps but it's better than nothing. Now let's look at the screenshot itself since doing research on the information provided didn't help much but confirm it was made after 1993, which I already assumed anyways just by the quality of the screenshot. The screenshot size is 720 x 576, with that information I'm gonna assume it was taken on a digital machine, which was mostly like a computer. The file name could help me some but to what extent I'm gonna have to figure out myself. The file name is "1-19_1-natsuki-ozawa-doing-a-tv-interview_xvid-avi_snapshot_05-19_2015-02-12_01-10-59", since this has all the technical information attached, it can give me some type of lead, it's showing that it was taken on May 19th, 2015 and that the file format is AVI, which could possibly help out later. I never considered it until writing but the text on screen could be a massive help as there seems to be a lot of information on it, unfortunately I do not know any Japanese to guess what it says so I'm gonna have to run it through a translator or two. The first translator I used, Yandex, didn't detect much text outside of the VTR, which came up as "After this treasure VTR grand duke fungus!!" which seems like absolute nonsense at first and probably is as looking up the English doesn't do any favors and the Japanese text has 2 results, neither of which have anything to do with the interview. The second translator I used, Google Translate, was able to translate much more of the picture, though it wasn't much. The VTR statement is different, and actually states "After this, the treasure VTR will be open to the public!!" which after searching still doesn't result in anything of note or relation. After looking at both sentences done by the translator, I noticed the kanji was different, Yandex says "この後お宝VTR大公菌!!" while Google says "この後、お宝VTRを大公開!!". This definitely helps more as it gives information, as searching this phrase in Japanese brings up a TBS page, but is another dud as it doesn't bring up the show mentioned in the original post. Although Yandex didn't help much with text detection, Google has helped a lot, as another block of text that's almost detected speaks about an idol wanting to escape fame, so by that it could be much much easier to track down when this was. Unfortunately since the full block of text wasn't translated, it was impossible to find anything on the internet about this, and all of that was about all I can find from the text from said screenshot. The next bet I have is searching the TV channel, which was fortunately provided, and the name of the show. The show's name is Ronroba! Boogie Teens and searching the English name doesn't help at all, but fortunately the name in Japanese but bring up shows from TBS which is the original channel that the interview came from, but a general search does not help much, and neither does looking up the show with her name included, which means I have to move on to the next result, Soulseek. That also doesn't yield any results either way so I have another option, Archive.org, if it had to be anywhere it'd be here. Looking up Natsuki's name in kanji is the only thing that has results though unfortunately nothing related, but instead there's a lot of Azumanga Daioh DVD scans. The name in English doesn't seem to help either so the next best option is YouTube. Searching "Ronroba! Boogie Teens Natsuki Ozawa" only results in A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie songs and nothing more, and searching Natsuki Ozawa only shows her music and the movies / shows she's been in.
I'm in a stump, I'm not going to lie to you when I say I expected to uncover some long lost interview so I can be the first to upload it to archive.org but unfortunately that wasn't the case, so it's up in the air it seems. If you have some interest in this, please be my guest and pick up where I left off, I'll be providing links to my sources. I feel like if I knew how to do better research I would've gotten some idea of what to do, but for now I'll post about it on a few reddits and see if I can get any word but for now it's just unconfirmed about this appearance.
SOURCES
Original blog post where the screenshot was found
4chan thread
Screenshot from appearance
Original Tags - interview, japanese television, lost, natsuki ozawa, possible lost media, research, television, television appearance, tokusatsu
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