Comedy duo Saruganseki have announced that they are going to break up at the end of this month. Ariyoshi Hiroiki and Moriwaki Kazunari (both 29), who first met as high school students, are to go solo after a ten-year career together. They became an overnight success in 1996 when the hit variety show Dempa Shonen featured their hitchhiking adventure across Asia and Europe. They were left in Hong Kong with just ¥10,000 and instructions to make their way to London any way they could. The country cheered them on over the course of several months until they reached their goal (photo), but people were shocked to learn that they had secretly been given airline tickets for certain legs of the trip. It was one of several scandals that hit audience figures and eventually brought the show off the air.
• Takamura Luna, a member of the Showa-era pop group Golden Half, died yesterday of cancer in Hawaii. She was 54. The group, made up of five half-Japanese girls, became very popular in the early 1970s through their appearances on the hit Drifters comedy show “Hachiji Dayo!” Luna had an American father and Japanese mother.