山下智久
As a Johnny's Jr., Kusano had also been in other Jr. subgroups including J2000, J-support, and K.K.Kity, before he was selected as one of the nine members to debut as NEWS in 2003 along with Tomohisa Yamashita, Takahisa Masuda, Shigeaki Kato, Yuya Tegoshi, Ryo Nishikido, Keiichiro Koyama, Hiroki Uchi and Takahiro Moriuchi.