Riho Sayashi has come a long way since her days in Morning Musume and her stint as a supporting dancer for BABYMETAL. After launching her solo career in 2021, she made her major-label debut in 2025 with Too much!, an EP about pushing beyond her limits. Her latest release, OWN, which arrived on September 2, marks a shift in perspective. Rather than constantly striving for more, she’s learning to embrace everything that comes her way, including the mistakes.
Sayashi was just 17 when she left Morning Musume, determined to take charge of her own future. She went on to study dance in the US, spent years finding her feet as a solo artist and has more recently branched out into acting. Looking back, she says she’s finally reached a point where she can appreciate the uncertainty, the setbacks and even the times when things don’t go to plan.
With so many choices available to us, why does it still feel like there’s always a right answer? We caught up with Sayashi to talk about her new EP, how her approach to music has changed and what she’s learned about living life on her own terms.
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Riho Sayashi on Making Peace with Her Mistakes
Your new EP, OWN, is about embracing your mistakes. What inspired that idea?
Riho Sayashi：With Too much!, I wanted to push myself as far as I could and see what happened. The whole idea was to go a little overboard. On the cover, I’m wearing boxing gloves and throwing a punch, and there’s a song called “Tensei chu☆” about escaping everyday life and being reincarnated in another world.
Sayashi：But once I’d done that, I started wondering what should come next. I figured that if I was going to put myself out there and take chances, I had to be willing to accept whatever came of it, good or bad.
Rather than constantly trying to outdo myself, I wanted to slow down a little, take stock of where I was and move forward at my own pace. That’s the thinking behind OWN. It felt like the natural next chapter after Too much!.
And something that seems like a mistake at first might actually teach you something important. Sometimes it’s only because something didn’t work out that you realise what does work for you. I want to take all of that on board and make it part of who I am, rather than pretend it never happened. That’s really how the concept came about.
There’s an interesting progression across your recent releases. Symbolized (2024) seemed to close one chapter of your career, Too much! was about testing your limits, and now OWN is about making peace with everything you’ve experienced.
Sayashi：That’s nice to hear! I’ve always had a loose sense of how I wanted my releases to connect, but I hadn’t really thought about Symbolized in that way until you mentioned it.
Looking back, I feel like I’ve been keeping a diary through my music. Each release captures where I was at the time, without me trying to dress things up or be anything other than myself.
Born in Hiroshima, in 1998, Riho Sayashi joined Morning Musume in 2011 and left the group in 2015. She later moved to the US to study dance before launching her solo career through her own label, Savo-r, in 2021. Since 2024, she has also taken on leading roles in television dramas and theater productions. She made her major-label debut in 2025 and released OWN on September 2, 2026.
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From Following Expectations to Taking Control of Her Own Life
When you left Morning Musume at 17, did you feel like you needed to take more control of your own life?
Sayashi：Yeah, I think so. Being in the group, there were certain things I was expected to do and certain ways I was expected to be. And in a way, having those expectations was reassuring. They gave me structure and helped me grow stronger.
But as I got older, I started to realise that what I needed was changing, and so were the things around me. When I was 17 or 18, I remember worrying that if I didn’t change something about myself, I wouldn’t be ready for my twenties.
Maybe that’s what eventually brought me to this idea of owning my own life. What you need changes depending on where you are in life, so I’m always trying to adapt as I go. Looking back, I think what I’ve really wanted all along is to be able to see things from different perspectives and figure out what kind of life I want to build for myself.
Do you feel like things are finally falling into place?
Sayashi：More often than before, yeah. But I’ve also started to think that when things don’t work out, that’s part of life too. And it can actually be pretty fun!
I’ve learned to enjoy the unexpected. Pretty much everything I once thought I’d do has turned out completely differently [laughs]. And then there are these little dreams that pop into my head for a second, and somehow, years later, they end up coming true.
