A major site for J-Entertainment news has just updated with this article about Yamapi’s popularity. Of course, a good time for me to use google insights to see if there’s any change.

On the worldwide view for the last 12 months we see a small drop in september and october, and ever since november his popularity is going up in terms of people searching for the keyword “yamapi” on the google search engine. See graph below.

Another interesting development is the enormous increase in Arab countries. Does anyone have an explanation for that? Perhaps an increase in fansubs?

For the homeland, I used the keyword 山下智久 since it would probably be the best keyword judging from the return results generated from other alternatives. The Japanese chart shows a huge spike in late August / September and a huge drop in October, which can probably be explained by looking at the worldwide view of this query.

Using the keyword 山下智久 worldwide generates a couple of news articles for the spikes, but the top 4 are Asian countries. The news articles are as follows:

a. Code Blue the sequel.
b. Kagami, the chicklet giving us the heads up that she’s getting her head down on Yamapi.
c. Ryo and Yamapi have the flu.
d. Scuba diving, a promise to an old friend (24hr tv).

Around the news getting out about the flu, search queries sky rocketed as expected. What surprises me is the whole Kagami ordeal. It’s the first time I’ve seen popularity drop when a Johnny is ‘rumoured to date’. “Fleeting fame, date a dame”, I once said. Perhaps that’s because it wasn’t really circulating as a rumour, but it was Kagami’s candid response to an interviewer’s question that made the number of queries drop significantly. Man, for someone trying to get into his pants her tactics might need some adjustin’. Whether the drop can be contributed to this news message fully, I don’t know. I just like to make jokes about it;) Truthfully? It just drops off to the same level of search queries that it was throughout the year. The flu thing and 24 hr tv were exceptional situations. On the other hand, considering this is the time Yamapi is doing many solo activities a drop to the same level is not really what we’re aiming for here. Hax0r, hax0r! (Just kiddin’, am I?). Let’s talk when he’s a little nicer to girls that have more than a double digit IQ.

Another interesting piece of information: the announcement of his solo con didn’t have any influence at all on the queries. I would have at least expected to find an article “Yamashita announces mini solocon” or something like that. Instead google contributes the spike starting from November to Code Blue the sequel. I’m actually not sure how google gathers these news messages and when they’re important enough to mention. But since Code Blue confirmed is already on it, I figure it was weird the Solocon/Single Release wasn’t.