Risako Shitara -- Suteki na News（素敵なニュース）

 

Well, I have to confess over here on a mistake that was left hanging over one article for a little over three years. You see, back in November 2020, I wrote an article on the 1976 "Suteki na News" (Wonderful News) by the late Mari Yoshida（吉田真梨）. I had been having trouble tracking down who the songwriters were and unusually, JASRAC wasn't all that helpful either but seeing the familiar names of songwriting siblings Etsuko and Takao Kisugi（来生えつこ・来生たかお）there with no singer listed, I naturally credited the mellow melody from what I heard to the Kisugis, especially since Takao had already been quite active in his singing career back in those 1970s.

Now, I was doing some maintenance on the blog earlier this morning when I was checking through the articles for any dropped videos and saw that the video for Yoshida's "Suteki na News" had been taken down. Of course, I start searching for any other videos featuring this particular song but I kept getting a song with the same title but different singer...to be specific, a model and tarento, really, by the name of Risako Shitara（設楽りさ子）who had recorded it in 1990. Plus, I saw Etsuko and Takao Kisugi attached to this one and so I naturally assumed that this young Shitara had done a cover version of the Yoshida original. However, Shitara's "Suteki na News" sounded nothing like the 1976 version, so I began sweating a bit and went down to town to find out the truth. 

And the truth of the matter is that though it took a bit of time, I realized that I had been wrong about the songwriters for Yoshida's "Suteki na News" all along. By searching for the record itself in Yahoo Images and blowing up the liner notes by 50%, it turns out that a couple of French songwriters had created the original French pop song with lyricist Machiko Ryu（竜真知子）actually providing the Japanese lyrics. Of course, I made any corrections on the original article and noted the error at the very bottom of the article.

As it is, Shitara's "Suteki na News" was never released for sale and it was simply used as a promotion song for a Sanwa Bank (which was my old bank in Japan) commercial back in 1990. But indeed, this "Suteki na News" was taken care of by the Kisugis with Akira Inoue（井上鑑）handling the summery and relaxing arrangement paired with Shitara's whispery vocals.

The above video here has who I presume to be Shitara in a series of Sanwa Bank ads although "Suteki na News" isn't included. She was born in New York City and raised in both Dusseldorf, Germany and Fujisawa City in Kanagawa Prefecture. Along with doing her fair share of commercials, she has a short filmography, almost all in TV, and released two singles and five albums between 1988 and 1993. Shitara has been married all these years to Japanese soccer legend Kazuyoshi Miura（三浦知良）.