I've been a fan of Japanese popular music for 40 years, and have managed to collect a lot of material during that time. So I decided I wanted to talk about Showa Era music with like-minded fans. My particular era is the 70s and 80s (thus the "kayo kyoku"). The plus part includes a number of songs and artists from the last 30 years and also the early kayo. So, let's talk about New Music, aidoru, City Pop and enka.
Credits
I would like to give credit where credit is due. Videos are from YouTube and other sources such as NicoNico while Oricon rankings and other information are translated from the Japanese Wikipedia unless noted.
Much as singer-songwriter and actor Gen Hoshino（星野源）has been doing for the past several years, a few decades ago, Senri Oe（大江千里）was the guy making merry with the hook-laden Japanese pop songs. One can almost taste the Oe style in his songs whether they be for some other artist such as Misato Watanabe（渡辺美里）or for himself. The songs are so upbeat in an 80s West Coast AOR sort of way.
Case in point: the track "Dear" on his 9th album"Apollo" from September 1990 (well, the song was also his 20th single which had come out a few months earlier). It had been a long time since I listened to an Oe tune but listening to this one had me snapping my fingers and going "Yep...it's an Oe!".
I can just see him standing at the piano while pounding those keys as I listen to "Dear". He may be hitting the black-and-whites very cheerfully but the melody is just like me after a satisfying trip to the buffet table: smooth and content and happy. Helping out Oe on words and music was Nobuyuki Shimizu（清水信之）who arranged everything. By the way, "Apollo" hit No. 1 on Oricon.
Young Mr. Oe was quite the popular guy in commercials, I see. Wasn't aware of that. In the above video, his "Dear" was used to sell the Suzuki Cultus at 2:41.
It's been a while since I posted anything by the dynamic contemporary aidoru (or should I say song and dance?) group TOKYO GIRLS' STYLE（東京女子流）, and I was surprised to realize that it's been a dozen years since I put up their first KKP article for their "Partition Love". They have had the lasting power of any of the alphabet aidoru groups and Morning Musume（モーニング娘。）, but I've just read on their J-Wiki article that their show's going to be ending this year.
Their 35th and most recent single as of this writing was released in June 2025. "Doukasen, Flashback" (Fuse, Flashback) is a fairly smoking and funky tune which sounds like something that was arranged in a K-Pop vein. Written and composed by Umi Kinami（きなみうみ）, there is a certain nocturnal panther-like quality to this one. Strangely enough, I had been under the impression that there were a lot of members in TGS so to see just the four on the cover of the single was a bit jarring, but actually it's only been one member that had dropped out from the original five.
Interestingly for Reminiscings of Youth this week, this particular ballad had been mentioned years before I even decided to start the ROY series. When I wrote up Saburo Tokito's（時任三郎）"Kawa no Nagare wo Daite Nemuritai"(川の流れを抱いて眠りたい）back in 2012, I noted that it sounded just like Michael Johnson's "Bluer Than Blue".
"Bluer Than Blue" hit the record shelves and radio stations back in April 1978 and it's one of the first songs to stick in my head as perhaps a prelude to my opening up to music in general going into the 1980s. I hadn't heard of Johnson before and I haven't really listened to anything else by him since but "Bluer Than Blue" contains this beautiful combination of gently rolling piano and shimmering strings that frankly entranced the heck out of me any time I heard it at home or in the car. Randy Goodrum was the one who created this quiet masterpiece and perhaps I can thank him for planting the seed to enjoy AOR/soft rock ballads. I didn't really pay much attention to the lyrics but I'm rather glad that I'm putting this one up this week rather than next week which gets really close to Valentine's Day as a man tries and fails to rationalize his new existence without his old love.
As I said, I used to hear this on the radio all the time so I was surprised to realize that there had been a music video. In fact, this wasthe eighteenth videoplayed on MTV on its opening day of August 1st 1981. Wow! I know it was the debut day but I hadn't even thought that a video of a 1970s AOR tune would ever appear on the music channel. In Canada, "Bluer Than Blue" hit No. 6 while in the United States, it reached No. 12.
Well, let's see. What was up at the top of the charts on April 3rd 1978?
It is a whimsical Wednesday here on "Kayo Kyoku Plus", so to alleviate the usual things about Hump Day, the windmills of my mind rotated rather furiously. As a result, in addition to the internal hemorrhaging, I was able to realize that a fair number of the songs of note in our humble little blog often have titles containing variations of personal pronouns whether in English or Japanese or other languages. Here are just a few of them.
As I mentioned in my thoughts on the most recent Kohaku Utagassen, Japanese rock legend Eikichi Yazawa（矢沢永吉）made his third appearance on the NHK special for the third time (his other appearances were in 2009 and 2012), as he sang his new song before going for that "Kohaku B'z" shot and coming up to the main stage to perform his old hits.
That new song was "Shinjitsu"(The Truth) which was released in September 2025 as part of his 35th album "I believe" which hit No. 1. First and foremost, it's a love ballad and judging from the official music video below, it seems to be addressing the love between a couple that's been around for quite a while. Written by Yukinojo Mori（森雪之丞）and composed by Yazawa, I actually threw the YouTube link for the above video into one of those AI music analyzers which got me the result of folk rock. I know that the 76-year-old is a rocker at heart but I'm not quite sure that "Shinjitsu" would rate as a rock song...more of a pop ballad that sounds like it came from yesteryear; maybe it's even got some blues in there.
"Shinjitsu" was also used as the theme song for a Fuji-TV live-action drama adaptation of the novel "Saigo no Kanteinin"（最後の鑑定人...The Final Appraiser） that had its run between July and September 2025.
I don't think I'll be watching it but there's apparently quite a crazy moon in Markiplier's sci-fi-horror flick "Iron Lung".
That very pencil-thin segue is there to merely introduce musician/composer Himiko Kikuchi's（菊池ひみこ） "Crazy Moon" from her 3rd album "All Right". Considering that this album was released in 1982, I guess my file on Kikuchi is going back in time. Anyways, I don't have any expertise in time signatures so I'll have to quote YouTube commenter Antón Alonso - The IRL Bard: "Love this song because it starts on 11/8 and then goes to a nutty nasty 12/8 divided into 5 and 7 which is so good and then settles for the keyboard solo in a nice 7/8."
We both agree then that "Crazy Moon" is indeed a crazy moon...or since I'm in Canada, a crazy loon. It is a major jam session lasting nearly eight minutes that goes every which way with the drums, horns and keyboards. I'm not surprised that this has probably been a favourite at her concerts and Kikuchi looks so self-contained while hitting the keys.
As much as we Torontonians have been grumbling about how wintry this winter has been with a couple of major snowstorms hitting us in about as many weeks, I don't think we can really compare with certain northern areas of Japan this season. Watching NHK News this morning, Akita Prefecture for example has been walloped with metres of snow compared to the two-thirds of a metre that has collected on our sidewalks. And unfortunately, there have been some deaths due to the snow from elderly people falling off of roofs while trying to push off the heavy snow buildup. I'm hoping that both my area and much of the Tohoku area will see spring soon.
As such, I checked things online to see if I could find a go-touchi（ご当地）song regarding Akita Prefecture whether it be an enka, min'yo, Mood Kayo or just plain ol' kayo kyoku. I was able to find this min'yo titled "Chouja no Yama" that has connections with the prefecture although I couldn't track down either its year of origin or its songwriters.
However, this particular iteration of "Chouja no Yama" was sung by enka singer Kouhei Fukuda（福田こうへい）, who had started out in the min'yo genre. The song was a track on his May 2022 21st single "Furusato Dayori"（ふるさと便り...Messages from Home） which reached No. 15 on Oricon. It's quite the gentle traditional folk song but the title is intriguing since the word "chouja"（長者） can be translated into many English words of varying meaning. According to Jisho.org, it can mean: 1) millionaire, 2) one's superior; one's elder; one's senior, 3) virtuous and gentle person, 4) female owner of a whorehouse in a post town and 5) chief of a post town.
That's quite the myriad of responses. Personally, I'd like to think it can be translated as "The Mountain of the Virtuous" based on definition No. 3 but according to Kotobank, the first lyrics apparently refer to someone striking gold on a local mountain (so, "The Mountain of the Rich Man" perhaps) with the folks represented by the singers hoping to share in the bullion. However, Kotobank also mentions that it may have originated as a grass-cutting song through the farm work of the women in the area before it evolved into something to be sung for guests at the local onsen. If the song has a base in Akita Prefecture, it looks to be the Lake Tazawa area in Senboku City.
This YouTube video was posted about a dozen years ago by 28hb Seiichiro（28hb誠一郎）.
