Toru Furuya -- Kanshou（感傷）

 

Knowing about the "Gundam"（ガンダム）franchise for decades but having only seen the first few movies of the original series, thanks to my anime buddy back in pre-COVID civilization, and then just tribute anime such as "Gundam Build Fighters", my impression of the main character, Amuro Ray, is that he really really needs a hug. It's truly amazing that he hasn't ended up in a hospital for all of the emotional ups and downs that he's been through.

Perhaps his seiyuu, veteran Toru Furuya（古谷徹）, has provided therapy through some of his singing. Yep, there have been some surprised folks on the fact that, yes indeed, he has jockeyed a recording microphone as well as the controls of a Gundam in his Ray character. And I only discovered his 1982 album "Sunny Side Street" within the last half-hour via the YouTube channel, New J Channel (and I'm glad that it has returned).

Specifically, there was one song from the album that caught my ear and that was "Kanshou". Only the romaji was up for the title and the Japanese term has a lot of different kanji and meanings attested to it, so it took quite the while to track down what it means. Fortunately, I was able to find an online image of the closeup of the original record with the listing of Side 1, and the kanji is actually 「感傷」which means "sentimentality". 

In any case, "Kanshou" was written by Masami Sugiyama（杉山政美）and composed by Masaki Iwamoto（岩本正樹）. The intro has Furuya singing somewhat haltingly as if he was channeling Ray, but then the City Pop melody flows in and for all genre fans, all is right again in the world. Nice touch with the Latin guitar, too. In fact, sometimes I think the song was inspired by Christopher Cross' "Sailing" and maybe Furuya's vocals have that touch of Goro Noguchi（野口五郎）.