Yuko Tomita -- Yokohama Kaze no Station（YOKOHAMA風のステイション）

 

I'm hoping that Yokohama has been able to enjoy sights like the above in the Minato Mirai 21 area. I always liked this part of the famed international port. Plus, hey, there's a lot of foodie opportunities there, too. I still remember that all-garlic restaurant in one of the towers. My friend and I were absolutely guaranteed of seats on the train back home.🧄

Well, it's time for another Yokohama-based song and this time, I have singer-songwriter Yuko Tomita's（とみたゆう子）February 1986 single "Yokohama Kaze no Station" (Yokohama Windy Station). Just judging from the cover of the fetching Ms. Tomita in her black party dress and the overall design, I figured that this particular song was also a track on her album from the same month "Moulin Rouge".

Last year, I covered Tomita's final track from "Moulin Rouge", "Silk-Hat-Club" which was this light and happy techno jazz tune, and it seems as if the synthesizers were out to party as well for this album. "Yokohama Kaze no Station" appears as the second track on the A-side and indeed the keyboards are in play here as well, but the style is more 1950s or 1960s pop love song (like the crystalline instrumental bridge, by the way) as sung by Connie Francis, thanks to Mitsuo Hagita's（萩田光雄）arrangement.

Sympathy Nervous -- Sympathetic Nerves

 

Recently, thanks to the success of "Project Hail Mary", I've been reminded of my latent fascination for exobiology. Seeing the adorable Rocky the Eridian have a fine relationship with Dr. Grace has made me wonder what life would be like on very different planets from Earth.

I doubt that Yoshifumi Niinuma（新沼好文）, the man behind the project known as Sympathy Nervous, was thinking about exobiology when he came up with the track "Sympathetic Nerves" for his self-titled album of 1980. Still, listening to this song which lasts almost ten minutes, it's hard for my roving imagination not to come up with the premise of two digital life forms interacting with each other; one's a rather large and belligerent fellow while the other guy is a small but pesky blip. Then again, I can also imagine this being a rather dark version of a soundtrack to any of the video games that were getting popular with teens like me back in the late 70s and early 80s like Pac-Man and Asteroids. One more theory is that "Sympathetic Nerves" may actually be good for your sympathetic nerves. Only ten minutes a day!😀

Momoe Yamaguchi -- Zettai Zetsumei（絶体絶命）

 

Japanese television loves to use its fair share of musical cues within programs such as variety shows. For example, if there is an instance where a couple of celebrities are about to come to a screaming match or physical blows (mostly joking...mostly), Tomoyasu Hotei's（布袋寅泰）famous "Battle Without Honor or Humanity" roars in like an oncoming storm.

Well, I think another song intro which is much older than Hotei's classic could have been another perfect shredding guitar cue, and I have to admit that I have to give myself another Gibbs slap upside the back of my head since I had unintentionally omitted it from the pages of KKP for years and years. When it comes to Momoe Yamaguchi's（山口百恵）"Zettai Zetsumei", her 23rd single from August 1978, I put it up there with her "Imitation Gold"（イミテイション・ゴールド）and "Playback Part 2" （プレイバック・パート２）as the 70s aidoru's songs of fury...as in "Hell hath no fury than a woman scorned".

"Zettai Zetsumei" can be interpreted as "desperate situation" or "stalemate", and both definitions can set the scene described by Yoko Aki's（阿木燿子）lyrics of irate showdown and her husband Ryudo Uzaki's（宇崎竜童）hard rocking confrontation music. You see, we have a love/hate triangle at a cafe somewhere in which at least one of the women has finally had enough of the status quo, and she and the other woman are giving the ultimatum to the guy they share. Who will win? Who will lose? And are there any sharp utensils nearby? You'd be surprised at how much damage a butter knife can do. 

Even the cover of the single has Momoe looking terrifying. She looks like she's saying "Oh, really? THAT'S what you're going with?". Ay, carumba! "Zettai Zetsumei" peaked at No. 3 and ended up as the 34th-ranked single of the year. It's also a track on the singer's September 1978 15th studio album "Dramatic"（ドラマチック）which went as high as No. 6 on Oricon.

Takajin Yashiki -- Tokyo（東京）

 

Takajin Yashiki（やしきたかじん）left quite the legend behind when he passed away about a dozen years ago, and evidently, anyone who has ever met him knew where he/she stood with him fairly quickly. Of course, there was the whole thing about him not liking Tokyo or Tokyoites, but as I mentioned in my first article on the late singer "Yappa Sukiyanen"（やっぱ好きやねん）, I think it was more that he disliked certain media corporations in Tokyo and their ways rather than a blanket hatred for the city.

Speaking of his signature "Yappa Sukiyanen" from 1986, which seems to be the one song of his that still gets performed by some of his friends such as Yoshimi Tendo（天童よしみ）, I was surprised to realize that his April 1993 20th single "Tokyo" was his biggest hit, according to the song's J-Wiki entry. I actually first heard it last night on the weekly episode of "Shin BS Nihon no Uta"（新BS日本の歌）, and my eyebrows soared up on seeing the title and who the singer was considering what I noted in the first paragraph. However, I reminded himself that Yashiki didn't have any particular axe to grind when it came to Japan's capital itself.

Written by Neko Oikawa（及川眠子）and composed by Akihiko Kawakami（川上明彦）, Yashiki seemed to grab onto the words and music like a football and run to the end zone with it. It's quite the Latin-tinged pop song of greatly regretting that lost love in Tokyo, although going through the Kansai dialect-friendly lyrics, I sometimes wonder whether the protagonist was actually heartbreakingly lamenting no longer being in Tokyo anymore. 

"Tokyo" got no higher than No. 52 on Oricon and initially, sales weren't all that brisk. However, over the next few weeks, the requests to radio stations started flooding in and pretty soon, Takajin got noticed once more not just in the Osaka area but all throughout the nation.

Fuyumi Sakamoto -- Rashomon（羅生門）

 

Frankly speaking, I can count the number of Akira Kurosawa（黒澤明）movies that I've seen on one hand. I've heard about a lot of them but I've only watched "The Seven Samurai" and his final work "Madadayo" in 1993. I've also seen clips from "Ran" and "Ikiru", but that's about it. I have yet to see "Rashomon" but its storytelling device has become so influential that I've seen it being used in TV shows ranging from "Happy Days" to "Star Trek: The Next Generation".

You can imagine my surprise then when on a recent episode of "Shin BS Nihon no Uta"（新BS日本の歌）, enka veteran Fuyumi Sakamoto（坂本冬美）appeared on the stage to sing a song titled "Rashomon". I wondered whether Sakamoto had been intending to pay tribute to the Kurosawa classic. 

Written by Souko Niimoto（新本創子）, composed by Keisuke Hama（浜圭介）and arranged by Kei Wakakusa（若草恵）, this was actually released as Sakamoto's 33rd single from June 2006. "Rashomon" launches with an intro that I thought was going to make this a classical/enka fusion thereby having this land into the genre of New Adult Music but then as the song goes on, the compass takes things into full enka. However one listens to it though, it is dramatic right down to Sakamoto's kobushi. As for the music video, I thought that this was more "Kill Bill" than "Rashomon" the movie. The song peaked at No. 29 on Oricon.

Plus-Tech Squeeze Box -- Kitchen Shock

 

For the purposes of this song, I had been searching for any bloopers from any of the famous cooking shows on Japanese television. I distinctly remember that there was one such program with former aidoru hosts Ikue Sakakibara（榊原郁恵）and Miyuki Imori（井森美幸）getting themselves into a pickle in the kitchen one time, but alas, I couldn't find it on YouTube. However, I can settle for the above video of a lady cheerfully admitting to carbonizing her gratin. Well, at least, it has one thing going for it...it sounds delightfully crispy.

A YouTube commenter noted that "Kitchen Shock" by the technopop unit Plus-Tech Squeeze Box has an intro that sounds as if it should have been made into a theme song for a cooking show on Japanese TV...perhaps a comedic one. But instead, this happy-go-lucky number of techno-Shibuya-kei skippiness was placed onto a December 2004 compilation titled "Contemode V.A. 2". "Kitchen Shock" itself doesn't appear on any of the unit's own albums.

The video below is from YouTuber Orange Glider who gives his take on what makes Plus-Tech Squeeze Box tick. Enjoy!

Wataru Takada -- Jitensha ni Notte（自転車にのって）

Norbert Nagel via Wikimedia Commons

 

The weather is improving so bicycles are coming out once again here in Toronto after a long winter. I'm sure the same thing is happening in Japan depending on the area.

But over there, I've heard that a rash of new bicycle regulations have come into force which could earn those unaware the dreaded blue ticket and fines. And according to NHK, there are probably many who are in the dark about how intricate some of those new laws are.

Coincidentally, on one of the NHK music shows, I recently heard a pretty rustic song called "Jitensha ni Notte" (Getting on the Bicycle). It was something that I hadn't listened to before so I looked into it. This was the May 1971 5th single by folk singer-songwriter Wataru Takada（高田渡）and it sounds like something that reflected a typical ride through a friendly town neighbourhood. It's short, sweet and the melody line during the singing of the verses reminds me of the old kids' song "I've Been Working on the Railroad".

Takada was born in Gifu Prefecture in 1949 in a family that had been rich due to their lumber merchant grandfather, but their fortune was wiped out because of a massive earthquake and stock market failures. After the death of his mother, Takada's father ended up taking him and his brothers to Tokyo with no particular destination in mind and they all lived in poverty in the Fukagawa district. In the 1960s, he would pick up the ukulele and start getting into folk music. His career would begin in earnest in 1968 and several singles and albums would be released. He passed away in April 2005 at the age of 56 from heart failure.