Yesterday, a couple of newspapers, tabloids, and websites picked up a blog entry of Takasu Mikiya, director of the beauty clinic, "Takasu Clinic", that lead to a lot of revived rumors about plastic surgery among the members of AKB48.

It should be mentioned that Takasu made this blog entry on January 5th, but reporters have only yesterday picked up on the story. �Takasu himself already posted a response statement today, pointing out the fabricated news and that the sudden buzz about his old post must be because of Itano Tomomi's recent solo debut.

Anyway, the post that put him under fire said that there are a lot of young women that approach his clinic with the demand to get the same face as Itano Tomomi. "Actually there have just been two such patients in Osaka today," he wrote. Takasu then went into the details of her face and why it is so easy for surgeons to fulfill their requests.

Another remark in his post probably helped it to receive even more attention: "There are a lot more girls with popular faces: Maeda Atsuko, Oshima Yuko, Shinoda Mariko, and Watanabe Mayu (listed in order of requests). However, they have by far the most difficult faces to model. Those four girls are natural beauties with bare faces that are no different to their faces with make-up. It's more easy when the patient already has a somewhat similar face, but most don't have a similar face, which makes it quite difficult for us."

Of course, it's easy to interpret that he is implying that Itano isn't a natural beauty, and that her face is easy to make for anyone because she had her face done.

In his statement today though, he tried to make clear that he never meant to imply such things.

He wrote, "The members of AKB are currently at the peak of their popularity and they wouldn't have the spare time for such a procedure. In Tomochin's case, the down time would take up to three to six months. People like them rather use eye tape and eye pieces to freely change the appearance of their eyes to a certain degree, e.g. double eyelids. Many people always think of plastic surgery first when seeing double eyelids, but that is a common mistake."

Further, he stated, "It's not just Tomochin. On the Internet there are a lot of rumors involving members of AKB48 and plastic surgery, especially Maeda Atsuko, Shinoda Mariko, Kojima Haruna, Minegishi Minami, and Watanabe Mayu. I don't think any of those girls have gone under the knife. Most of them debuted in their early teens and it's natural for them that certain features, such as their eyes and nose, change over time. Moreover, their faces become a lot thinner over the years, and they started to use more make-up than before. There is no need to say that they also started to use things such as eye tape. Of course, that is all just my opinion."

What is your opinion on the debate? �Are they all natural beauties or have they had work done? �Do you believe Takasu Mikiya's excuse that he didn't leave out Tomochin on purpose?

Source: Yucasee Media, Takasu Mikiya's Blog