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.
I've had this one on the back burner for a while, so I thought it was time to bring it to the light. It's another obscure song and apparently for Toshiko Tamamushi（玉虫俊子）, this was her one-and-only single to ever come out. There are some sites that talk about the obscurity of "Ochibazaiku (Watashi wa Ima)"(The Craft of Fallen Leaves ~ Me as I am Now) from December 1982 but I couldn't find any information about who the singer was and where she came from.
And that's too bad since I think her vocals are pretty good. Written by Uichi Ohwada（大和田宇一）and composed by Tatsuya Ogino（荻野達也）, "Ochibazaiku" strikes me as being an old-fashioned kayo kyoku most likely about heartbreak (autumn is the perfect season for that when it comes to the Showa Era music) that sounds as if it had been made a decade earlier and it also has a bit of Gallic flavour infused. At the same time, the first several seconds of the song reminds me of Mizue Takada's（高田みづえ）"Ai no Imagination"(愛のイマジネーション）that came out the previous year. Tamamushi has been referred to as an enka aidoru or an enkadol but I really don't get that vibe through this one song. She was apparently just a young lady with that one tune to her name.
Narita Airport out in Chiba Prefecture was the air hub that I mostly used during my adventures in Japan between 1981 and 2011 before Haneda Airport in Tokyo itself got its second wind and became my new arrival/departure terminal when I was visiting Japan in the 2010s. Haneda may have become the new shiny place but I will still cherish ol' Narita for that kaiten sushi restaurant and the massage chairs in the lounge.
So, coming across Spoozys leader and singer-songwriter Jun Matsue's（松江潤）"JAL Narita Hatsu"(JAL Departure from Narita), I felt all sorts of nostalgia. Written and composed by the singer, it's not just my old memories of using the actual airport that's fueling my nostalgia but the fact that for a song that belongs in his April 2005 album"GO GETTER", it sounds awfully like old-school City Pop with that certain groove and horns that could belong in a Tatsuro Yamashita（山下達郎）tune from the 70s or 80s. In fact, I had to make sure that the song was indeed from the mid-2000s rather than from an earlier decade.
My trip to Sapporo would have been perfect for this song. However, as it turns out, I departed Tokyo for Hokkaido from Haneda Airport and it was an ANA flight, not JAL.
Earlier today, just purely by accident, I found out that the late jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi would have celebrated his 98th birthday today (he passed away in 1976 at the age of 47). He does have a file here on "Kayo Kyoku Plus" since my love for "Peanuts" and he's basically been the guy for "Peanuts" soundtracks. In fact, I can say with confidence that Guaraldi was the first piano player that I'd ever heard as a baby because of his fabulous work on "A Charlie Brown Christmas", the legendary Xmas animated special.
Speaking of "A Charlie Brown Christmas", I hadn't known until recently that this special and perhaps the entire "Peanuts" mass media franchise can thank their existence because of a documentary about the popular comic strip "Peanuts" that had been planned to air back in 1963 simply couldn't come to fruition due to financing woes. "A Boy Named Charlie Brown" was to have been the title for this documentary (the title was then used later for the 1969 feature film) by Lee Mendelson.
And yet, Guaraldi did come up with a 1963 soundtrack called "Jazz Impressions of A Boy Named Charlie Brown" that contained the iconic "Linus & Lucy" which would become the theme for the overall "Peanuts" franchise and included in the soundtrack for the Christmas special a couple of years later. For years, I'd assumed that "Linus & Lucy" was the Charlie Brown theme and not the song titled after Chuck's best friend and biggest thorn in his side respectively. So, you can imagine when I finally found out the truth, I remarked that this would be a typically Charlie Brown development...the most famous song in the round-headed kid's world doesn't even have his name attached to it.
In fact, it wouldn't be for many more years that I discovered that there was a "Charlie Brown Theme" by Guaraldi. By that time, I was living in Japan and getting into jazz so picking up a few Guaraldi and "Peanuts" albums was becoming normal. Upon this discovery, I also found out about its inclusion in the 1963 soundtrack for the unaired documentary. Getting to hear it, it starts out sounding as if the jazzman had been imagining how Charlie Brown has lived his usual life: ambling laconically his way to and from school as Guaraldi plays with his keys. Then, the pacing and complexity amp up some more as Chuck handles his alternately contemplative and frustrating relationships with Linus, Lucy, Snoopy and everyone else in his world. It all reaches a surprisingly triumphant climax before the tune settles back down to the main ambling melody. Afterwards, I assume that Chuck hits bed or the bath to commiserate about why he can't talk to the red-haired girl or throw a decent pitch in baseball.
The fact that the documentary project failed ended up galvanizing Mendelson and a lot of other parties who loved "Peanuts" to get even more intense about getting something on the air, and they finally pulled it off in 1965.
Not sure what the situation is regarding the huge billowing mass of forest fire smoke that's been coming down into Southern Ontario for the past few days. Apparently, some winds were supposed to give us some respite from the smaze before returning tonight. Well, so far, I've got the window open but I haven't exactly been coughing up my lungs yet, so maybe this is a good development.
Anyways, I have another song by Tokimeki Records. Up to now, I've collected a small group of their songs which have been covers of some of the City Pop classics. But this time, the unit has come up with an original tune "Tsuki wa Mirror Ball" (Under the Mirror Moon) which came out in June. Still, as usual, a featured female vocalist is on the mike and her name is Mai Zaitsu（財津マイ）. I couldn't find out anything at all about her although she's been depicted as an anime character thus far in Yahoo Images. Her voice is nice and smoky alongside the Neo-City Pop showing some of that nocturnal bouncy rhythm (maybe good for the car stereo). The only other question that I have about the singer is whether she is a relative of Tulip singer-songwriter Kazuo Zaitsu（財津和夫）.
For some reason, I'd been under the impression that actress-singer Teresa Noda（テレサ野田）had already been on KKP but apparently not; this is her first appearance on the blog, so I bid her welcome. Maybe it was something about the name or a similarity in album/single covers.
Anyways, Noda hails from Okinawa as the daughter of a second-generation Japanese-American man and a Japanese woman (according to her J-Wiki profile, she had been far better in English than Japanese). She made her debut as an actress in the early 1970s and it would be another several years before she began recording those singles she released with the first one coming out in 1977. Incidentally, she's had a number of different stage names during her career including her real name of Tamaki Saionji（西園寺環）.
Her third and final single under the name of Teresa Noda to date is "Tropical Love" from May 1979 which was created by the golden duo of lyricist Kazumi Yasui（安井かずみ）and composer Kazuhiko Kato（加藤和彦）with Ryuichi Sakamoto（坂本龍一）behind the arrangement. I'm not sure if it would be considered City Pop, but it does have those disco strings and a strong reggae beat. Noda does have a resonant and attractively creamy voice here.
It was a few weeks ago when I was quietly thrilling over the fact that both Canada and Japan had made it out of the group stage of the World Cup and heading into the knockout rounds. Well, as it stands now, both nations did eventually get knocked out and in a few days, we get to watch Argentina and Spain duke it out in the final match.
I noted this when I was writing about the fusion band Early Byrds for the first time in late June. Had never heard of these guys before and there's not a lot of information on them aside from their relative time of duty and the number of albums released. But "Galaxy Special" with Kyoko Kimura's（木村恭子）vocal assistance was indeed something quite special and vacation-friendly which got my attention.
Speaking of their albums, there is their July 1982 work "Morning Reflexion" which comes across as quite clever in the naming. On it is the track "Step Emotion" (not sure what that title even means) which was created by Early Byrds member Hiroshi Nakanishi. No Kimura on this tropical fusion cocktail of a tune, but there's still plenty of scatting from male and female voices and it's still worthy of a margarita or two while listening to it.
Amaterasu is a name that I've been hearing since I began university in the mid-1980s. I've heard about her in lectures within my Japanese Studies major and read about her in books on religion and mythology in Japan. In Shintoism, she is known as the sun goddess and the mythical ancestor of the Imperial family.
But enough of the professorial lecture from me. This is "Futari no Amaterasu" (The Amaterasu of Two), the latest single by Tomita Lab（富田ラボ）that was released last month, and according to the good folks at the Otomo website, it's "...an urban pop song focusing on the inner workings of people whose days shift under the influence of the weather". Man, considering the weather that Toronto and Tokyo have been wrestling with over the past few days, I'm hoping that our collective inner workings are hanging on for dear life.
With vocals provided by Yo from the duo Natsudaidai (about whom I posted about back in 2024), it's a cute and blippy tune whose modern arrangement may actually hold an old-fashioned melodic vibe of optimistic American sitcom spunk theme tunes, along the lines of "That Girl" and "The Doris Day Show" from the 1960s. Not sure if Tomita Lab had meant it to be so, but that's how I'm taking it. Then as we approach the grand finale, things go all techno jazzy harmony. Maybe "Futari no Amaterasu" should be looking for a cute Japanese rom-com somewhere. While Tomita took care of the music, Sasuke Haraguchi（原口沙輔）provided the lyrics.
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