Southern All Stars -- Kamisama kara no Okurimono（神様からの贈り物）

 

I remember in the days of those PBS hard-sell campaigns for contributions on TV so that we could still get our episodes of "Doctor Who" and "Sesame Street". It was basically Goldie and Mike in Buffalo New York stating, "We love you all but no money, no Doctor, no Big Bird" and then they waited for the signups via phone.

In Japan, there were no special campaigns. You have a television, you live in Japan, you pay NHK monthly. No ifs, ands or buts. I know that things are different now, but when I was living in Ichikawa, there was always a fellow who came up to the apartment to collect that monthly NHK fee of 3,000 yen. To be honest, I have been viewing much more NHK here on TV Japan and now Jme over the past dozen years that I ever did in Japan. It was more of the private networks such as TBS and Fuji-TV that I was watching than NHK...NHK for me back then was the news and the weekly I-Go program, so you can imagine that I was somewhat grumbly about the NHK fee.

Singer-songwriter Keisuke Kuwata（桑田佳祐）and his Southern All Stars（サザンオールスターズ）had their own axe to grind with the quasi-governmental TV network for many years. It was in the first year of "Kayo Kyoku Plus" when I posted the band's "Chako no Kaigan Monogatari"（チャコの海岸物語）that I mentioned the feud that had exploded between them and NHK which lasted for many years with the cold war even including counterprogramming by SAS against the New Year's Eve special, the Kohaku Utagassen. 

But starting from a few years ago, it looks like hatchets have been buried and the Southern All Stars did pop up on the Kohaku again. And certainly, I couldn't have imagined this happening in the 1980s or 1990s, but the band actually showed up to do a special with one of the major announcers of the network to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the network. I saw the special on Friday night and it was rather weird to see Kuwata dressed up like an old Showa era guy in a Showa era living room including an old-fashioned dial and knob television set humbly giving accolades to NHK for providing the kayo kyoku and J-Pop over the decades which also included footage of just about every single that SAS had performed on the network's music programs. Talk about mellowing out. But it was pretty much "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" with SAS coming on board the network celebrations while being able to show off the tracks from their 16th and latest album "Thank You So Much" which was released on March 19th.

So far, the track that has stood out to me is "Kamisama kara no Okurimono" (A Gift from God) which is being used as the theme song for the 100th anniversary of NHK events. It, like the album, is a reflection of Kuwata's appreciation for all of the songs and singers who have come before to influence his own works and how much he loves Japan. For me, it's a very upbeat and nostalgic-sounding tune that seems to have plugged into the early 1970s Motown soul sound. I've got a feeling that Keisuke and the gang will be showing up on the 76th edition of the Kohaku later this year...it's just too tempting, unless SAS decides to flip the script (among other things) again.