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.
Although I still hear new enka singers and new enka singers making their debut on shows such as NHK's "Shin BS Nihon no Uta"（新BS日本の歌）, its city cousin Mood Kayo isn't something that I see and hear all that much unless the current crop of singers are covering the old classics from the 1960s. So it was with some surprise that I saw this fellow Hiroya Hama（浜博也）come on "Shin BS Nihon no Uta" the other day to do just that...sing a Mood Kayo. "Ichibangai Blues"(First Street Blues) is perhaps his latest single from August 2025.
Hama is singing solo but he's backed up by a female chorus and it's got that snazzy Latin swing in there so those old memories of Mood Kayo are coming back along with images of Akasaka and Ginza bars selling drinks by the thousands of yen. Nice to hear that someone is keeping the genre's torch burning. "Ichibangai Blues" was written by Ryusei Sameshima（鮫島琉星）and composed by Akihiro Ohtani（大谷明裕）.
The crazy thing is that I had never seen nor heard of Hama before. And yet, according to his J-Wiki profile, the man born as Hiroya Suzuki（鈴木浩也）has been singing since 1982. In fact, he was brought in that year to be the third vocalist for the veteran Mood Kayo group Masayoshi Tsuruoka and Tokyo Romantica（鶴岡雅義と東京ロマンチカ）. Leaving the group in 1994, he then began his own solo career.
It was a dozen years ago when I posted my first article on footloose-and-fancy-free singer-songwriter Yuko Kawai（河合夕子）with her "Tokyo-tique Girl"（東京チーク・ガール）from 1981. It was quite the summery and nostalgic pop tune from way back when in my kayo kyoku memories.
"Tokyo-tique Girl" was also a track in Kawai's May 1981 debut album"Little Tokyo"（リトル・トウキョウ）and also from there, I give you another song "1959 Omoide no Dance Hall" (The 1959 Dance Hall of My Memories). Written and composed by the singer with Masao Urino（売野雅勇）helping out with the lyrics, it's quite the interesting mix of reggae and Dixieland jazz within a matrix of New Music that had me thinking of Tin Pan Alley from the 1970s. Maybe it can also be considered to be an exotic kayoas well due to the mention of Singapore in there.
Hello, J-Canuck here. Once again, we have commenter and occasional contributor Fireminer with an article for KKP. Following the video, he'll take over.
Following the failed Cool Japan initiative, the Japanese entertainment industry has been emphasizing more on using manga, anime and games as vectors to popularize their products abroad. It’s no eureka moment but only an acknowledgement of reality. Foreigners have discovered and fallen in love with Japanese fashion, music, literature, etc. through those mediums for decades. But what about discovering American music through a Japanese game?
Many millennials can recall the period when rhythm games reigned in the 2000s. And while the second half of the decade was dominated by the likes of Rock Band and Guitar Hero, the first half was the time of Japanese rhythm games like Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution and Beatmania who brought contemporary Eurodance, disco fusion, trance, etc. into the home and no doubt familiarized many people with acts like Smile.dk, Captain Jack and E-Rotic.
A lesser-known but nonetheless celebrated Japanese rhythm game from the time was Elite Beat Agents on the Nintendo DS. It’s a follow-up to the Japanese exclusive Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan and put you in the shoes of government agents who cheer people so they can power through tough spots. It’s bizarre, colorful, upbeat and most importantly accessible to both rhythm game heads and casual gamers such as myself.
Elite Beat Agents' music left a strong impression on me, not least because of the music selection. Fit for a game helmed by Keiichi Yano (矢野慶一) of Gitaroo Man’s fame, Elite Beat Agents featured pop hits from nearly every decade since the 1970s onward. Here you can find Queen’sI Was Born to Love You and Stray Cats’Rock This Town next to Madonna’sMaterial Girl, Avril Lavigne’sSk8er Boi, and the subject of this article, The Jackson 5’sABC.
ABC is pure uncut bubblegum pop, ‘nuff said. And it works perfectly with the band. The yawp-like voice of young Michael Jackson (backed by his brother Jermaine) goes well with the funky and goofy kiddie-pop tune like hands and gloves. Then come the jubilant guitar and bongo that just radiate optimism. This is Motown, this is the 1970s. ABC is about the pure joy of discovering love, and it’s unadulterated joy you will get from it.
Now we move to Ken Hirai’s (平井 堅) cover of ABC from his 2003 album Ken's Bar, the first in a series of acoustic cover albums. You would think it wouldn’t have worked with the ultra-smooth Hirai, but it worked. Hirai works best for me when he is goofy, and though the cover is less silly than the original (every kid under 15 trying to tell you about love will be silly), it still sounds like a fun time. The falsetto and bongo liven the mood like they did with the original.
Ken’s Bar is also the name of a series of live shows whereas Hirai plays the role of a bar host who sings his favorite songs for his guests while they sip the wine he picks for them. It makes sense then for him to cover ABC like that. He has been doing these shows almost annually since 1998, and while COVID-19 brought a five-year absence, the show finally returned one more time last May.
Well, we started out today with some sad news so why not balance that with some happy news? The veteran technopop trio Perfume announced their hiatus earlier this year (to start from the end of 2025) so maybe it's not a surprise then that one of the three, Ayaka Nishiwaki（西脇綾香）, just announced her marriage to someone not involved in the entertainment industry. Many congratulations to the happy couple!💒Hopefully, when and if they do have a ceremony, a chip tune version of "Here Comes the Bride" with vocoder singing won't be happening but that's not my call.
In commemoration of the news, I wanted to cover another Perfume single but I've posted on a number of them over the years so I went all the way back....way, way back to their indies days in the early 2000s. In fact, I'm going with the very first single they released when they went with the hiragana form of their name（ぱふゅーむ）instead of the romaji they adopted later on.
"Omajinai Perori"(Lick the Trick) might come under the category of "Weird Early Installment", that trope on the website "TV Tropes" which describes the earliest episodes of a long-running TV series or other example of media culture where the characters or settings hadn't yet coalesced into the form that viewers have become accustomed to. For one thing, there was no Yasutaka Nakata（中田ヤスタカ）providing the technopop oomph to the songs, and for another, Perfume in this one sounds like a typical aidoru group, with none of that angular choreography.
Pappala Kawai（パッパラー河合）, the guitarist for the band Bakufu Slump（爆風スランプ）, was responsible for words and music. "Omajinai Perori" seems to be about the girls in one particular class quietly staking their claims to the new handsome teacher within their midst. I realize that the video was taken more than twenty years ago, but it's still a shock to see the Perfume members looking so young and jumpy back then...well, looking like proper high school students before they metamorphosized into the slinky techno princesses that everyone around the world has come to know.
We were all at the dining table away from the television although we could hear the NHK report. As soon as I heard "Famed for his performances in Akira Kurosawa's 'Ran' and "Yojimbo'...", we all knew that this was an obituary and it was for the master thespian Tatsuya Nakadai（仲代達矢）who passed away on November 8th at the age of 92.
Whenever I heard the name Tatsuya Nakadai, although I was never one to watch a lot of Japanese dramas either on the big screen or the small screen for a lot of my life, my image of him was one of thespianship on the level of Laurence Olivier whether it be in front of a camera or on the stage. He probably was at home doing either Shakespeare or jidai geki, and that slightly hangdog expression seemed to hide a lot of roiling emotions underneath. Speaking of Shakespeare and jidai geki, the only movie I saw with him in it was Kurosawa's"Ran"（乱）in 1985 (although I read that he did have an uncredited bit role in the legendary "Seven Samurai") which had some inspiration from "King Lear".
I have to admit that I have yet to see Kurosawa's other past classic "Yojimbo"（用心棒）, and that is indeed young Nakadai challenging grizzled Toshiro Mifune to a final duel.
Being someone who's in the music field rather than the acting one, I'm ill-equipped to give any sort of tribute to Nakadai; it's probably better reading his Wikipedia profile or any of the eulogies that will pop up on YouTube in the next several days by fellow actors such as his acolyte, Koji Yakusho. However, scrolling down the J-Wiki article regarding him, I did find that he had released four singles, three of which came out in 1958.
The last single to come out in that year was "Kosame no Chuushajou"（小雨の駐車場...The Parking Lot During a Shower） but I'm focusing on the B-side which is "Ginza Rock'n", all about having one swinging time in downtown Tokyo with the girlfriend. Written by Hisao Ohtaka（大高ひさを）and composed by Ryosuke Murasawa（村沢良介）, it's some rockabilly kayo but what is noticeable that Nakadai, although he was only around 25 at the time of recording, delivers the song in that recognizable baritone that has distinguished him throughout his long career. My condolences to his family, friends and many fans.
The above is a poster from the 1937 film "Espionage". I just hope the guy in the brown jacket wasn't searching for his gun. That would be rather embarrassing for a spy.
I've known the folk trio Alice（アリス）for sometimes coming up with some rousing stuff from their discography. But this 20th single from June 1981, "Espionage", also possesses some extra stuff such as an atypical synthesizer floating around in the intro, an Alfee-esque or even Queen-ish guitar solo near the end, and a boss key shift. All this is happening while vocalist Shinji Tanimura（谷村新司）is breathlessly singing about the lonely life of a spy who usually has to skip town in a hurry.
Tanimura was also responsible for words and music in "Espionage" which reached No. 15 on Oricon. The song was also included in Alice's 9th original album from July 1981, "ALICE IX ~ Muhon"（ALICE IX 謀反...Insurrection） which hit No. 3 on the charts and ended up as the 35th-ranked album of the year. "Espionage" has been categorized on J-Wiki as a folk tune but I've also thrown in the rock and New Music labels as well.
Well, it wasn't quite Snowmageddon, thankfully, but there was still enough snow falling yesterday and today to snarl up a lot of traffic. So, a lot earlier than usual in Toronto these days, we got our first major snowfall of the season. Does that mean a White Christmas? Not at all...after all, this is the city whose weather is predictably unpredictable.
I gather then that it was kismet that I encountered this song by the luminous Naomi Chiaki（ちあきなおみ）last night on the latest episode of NHK's "Shin BS Nihon no Uta"（新BS日本の歌）. It took a bit of doing but I believe I was able to track down the year of this ballad as 1988. "Fuyudonari" is a fair mouthful which literally translates as "Next to Winter" while Jisho.org gave me the definition of "late autumn that makes it seem like winter is coming". I will be happy to go with "Snowy Late Autumn" for conciseness.
Regardless, "Fuyudonari", which was written by Ou Yoshida（吉田旺）and composed by Masato Sugimoto（杉本眞人）, has some melodic connections with Chiaki's most recognized hit, "Kassai"（喝采）. I would say that it approaches enka through a pop ballad filter, as if David Foster had opted to give his skills a try on a traditional Japanese song. Under the circumstances, I'd be happy to apply New Adult Music here.
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