An old friend of mine was once the liaison via the JET Programme between Kariya City in Aichi Prefecture and the city of Mississauga next to my hometown of Toronto which had me thinking about any sister-city relationships involving Toronto itself, notably with any Japanese cities. Well, strangely enough, Toronto does have such a relationship with Sagamihara City in Kanagawa Prefecture, not too far away from Tokyo.
One of my most notable students during my seventeen years living and working in the capital city area actually hails from Sagamihara, although I didn't know about the sister-city relationship at that time. She was definitely an Arashi-loving character who I met every Wednesday night at school; a lab technician in a hospital, she analyzed urine and fecal samples and we had a ball putting pet names such as "apple juice" and "fudge" on her targets, and joked about the fact that some patients were a little overzealous in their donations.
For the purposes of this blog though, I wanted to find out if there were any singers who came from Sagamihara, and I discovered that Seri Ishikawa（石川セリ）was one such person. It was just a little over a week ago that I had included her in The Works of Koji Tamaki（玉置浩二）Author's Picks article in which the Anzen Chitai（安全地帯）vocalist composed "Ai no Bunryo"（愛の分量）as a track on her 1985 album "Rakuen"（楽園...Paradise）.
Well, Tamaki came up with the music for another track on "Rakuen" which was "Mukashi Italia de" (Once Upon a Time in Italy). With lyrics by Masato Tomobe（友部正人）, this is a light technopop number arranged in a style of a 50/60s girl pop tune or even as a song from Italy at about the same time. Realizing that this is a Tamaki creation, it still makes me feel as if it were a Taeko Ohnuki（大貫妙子） number just from the whimsical nature and the synths involved.
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