Welcome to the first full week of May 2025 at "Kayo Kyoku Plus". It's comfortably cool outside here in Toronto and I didn't need to wear a jacket so perhaps spring is here to say. I am knocking on wood as I write this, however. As well, Japan is spending its last two days of Golden Week.
Found this one via a recent episode of "Uta Con"（うたコン）during their new segment of going through the time vault by year. For that segment, the target was 1970 and an early Johnny's Entertainment aidoru group Four Leaves（フォーリーブス）got its first appearance on NHK's Kohaku Utagassen at the end of the year.
"Ashita ga Umareru" can be directly translated as "Tomorrow will be Born" but according to the bottom-left cover of the single, it's been stated as "Our Tomorrow". In any case, this was Four Leaves' 8th single from July 1970 and as I mentioned above, this was the song performed by the guys in their first of seven appearances on the New Year's Eve special. Written by Shigeo Sanpei（三瓶茂夫）and composed by Tomohiro Kajisawa（梶沢知弘）, it's a pretty rousing tune with the familiar groovy arrangement of blasting horns, racing guitars and thundering drums of those days. Lyrically, it's about a man reaching adulthood and realizing his very mixed emotions about a perhaps former flame doing the same while remembering that one time when they were alone in that lodge in the woods. I gather that they weren't playing shogi.😘
Unfortunately, I couldn't find that Kohaku footage of Four Leaves, but I was able to find a plethora of concert scenes in the above video. "Ashita ga Umareru" scored a No. 23 ranking on Oricon.
I'm so used to seeing Four Leaves as a young group, so seeing that footage of them much older was a shock. Also, considering how dominant Johnny's/Starto is normally, seeing one of their singles not reaching the top is surprising. Those were the early days.
ReplyDeleteThose were indeed the early days. Maybe those No. 1s started coming in from the 1980s with groups such as Shonentai and Hikaru Genji, and individuals like Masahiko Kondo.
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