Sasuke 32 Official Announcement!
「SASUKE2016」開催決定！出場者募集！！！
Today we finally got the announcement we were waiting for. Back in an early episode of the Unofficial Nico Nico Show we found out that Sasuke 32 was confirmed. Today we get the official announcement on the TBS website that it will happen in 2016 and they are now taking applications! In fact it is in the title! The official application is out in Japan (in Japanese). Director Masato Inui 乾雅人 is returning to direct another tournament. Sasuke 32's airing is officially slated for "Summer" SASUKE 2016夏 (similar to last year).
TBS created a page for Sasuke 32nd Annual Meeting on their Sasuke Rising website and updated the Sasuke TBS Facebook (after almost a year asleep LOL) along with their official Twitter. There was quite a bit of confusion when "Sasuke Rising" title first came out for Sasuke 28-29. I only note this because there's a lot of new people during this cycle (new from watching ANW and with the UK getting "Rising" soon) and there will be some confusion. To help explain it further though for those who are still confused, in the past we only had "Sasuke" at the title all the way up to Sasuke 27. After the bankruptcy of Monster 9 however, the title changed to "Rising" delineating when the tournament was under full TBS control over a year and a half later. I like to think of it as BM9 and AM9 (Before Monster 9 and "After" Monster 9). They now have removed "Rising" from a lot of the text online (note the official title photo just above this paragraph) and also at the taping of the tournament itself. They have also changed both their Twitter and Facebook (removing Rising and substituting with TBS) but they still have it on the main TBS site URL since that page has been reused yearly to keep everyone updated. I doubt that will ever change since people have that page bookmarked. That said, all the text on everything else is back to just the yearly text and numbers just like in the past. Whoot!
Sasuke 30 Tokyo Auditions with Director Inui (Standing on left) ©Kikaku
Along with the official Application is the announcement of Sasuke Auditions. Sasuke 28 auditions were held in 2 different cities in the country (Sasuke 30 auditionsand Sasuke 31 was the same). Seems for budgetary reasons they are doing that again for Sasuke 32. The cities are set for Tokyo and Osaka (same as before). Also same as last time, they are projected to take place sometime during the month of April (seems by the application it will be late April). Deadline for applications is April 8! And as a final note, it is unknown at this time how international competitors will be handled (if at all). If I find more concrete information on the subject I'll post. No further information from Sasuke World Cup has been announced either. However, if you live and work in Japan, that option to enter auditions is still open (which is a relief). All the information should be in the application. In the meantime, efforts for me to return to Japan to actually cover the event (better than last time I promise) will be underway in the next month or so.