You Ishihara -- Hakka Tabako（薄荷煙草）

 

Happy New Year's Eve! Perhaps some of you are getting ready for the biggest party of the year at homes or hotels. Hopefully, you'll have a find time tonight as the countdown progresses towards the end of 2025.

I have a bit of a mystery here. There's barely anything on this singer named You Ishihara（石原祐）who has been referred to as the "Female Julie"; basically she was seen as the woman version of Kenji "Julie" Sawada（沢田研二）, the flamboyant artist who was once the lead singer for the Group Sounds band The Tigers. And that's basically the only thing I could glean from a brief blurb on the Takechas website.

The only other thing there was that the famed songwriters, lyricist Yu Aku（阿久悠）and composer Katsuo Ono（大野克夫）who had also created magic for the real Julie, including "Casablanca Dandy"（カサブランカ・ダンディ）, was also the duo behind Ishihara's possibly one-and-only 1978 single "Hakka Tabako" (Hakka Cigarettes). Quite the downtown kayo kyoku with the spirited strings and guitar in addition to the nice and sharp horns, although Ishihara doesn't look anything like Sawada (she kinda looks as if she had graduated from the Takarazuka Academy), the comparison is probably more with the plaintive balladeer-like vocal style that Sawada possesses. To be honest, I can also compare her to similarly husky-voiced Momoe Yamaguchi（山口百恵）. Not sure whatever became of her.