Hiromi Ohta -- Minami Kaze （南風）

This is a summer song that still gets me giddily nostalgic every time I hear it....30 years after I'd first heard it. And it was the very first Hiromi Ohta （太田裕美）song that I listened to. It's just one of those tunes that bonks me on the head about why I got into this crazy field in the first place. "Minami Kaze"(South Wind) is just....fun. I wasn't quite sure how to classify it, though. Was it truly an aidoru tune? Ohta's voice seemed to have gotten a bit richer and deeper for this one, and the arrangements were a bit more attuned to West Coast Pop, but ultimately I kept it on the aidoru side instead of taking it to pop since Seiko Matsuda's（松田聖子）big hit, "Aoi Sangosho"（青い珊瑚礁）, also released in the same year, has some similarities in terms of sound.

"Minami Kaze" was written and composed by Kazuya Amikura（網倉一也）. He contributed to songs by other 80s aidorus such as Yoshie Kashiwabara（柏原よしえ） and Naoko Kawai（河合奈保子）, along with helping out on Ruiko Kurahashi's（倉橋ルイ子） debut song "Glass no Yesterday"（ガラスのYesterday) already listed on this blog. It went as high as No. 22 on the Oricon charts after its release in March 1980 as her 18th single.

The above video is from her performance on "Yoru no Hit Studio", a Fuji-TV music program.

"Minami Kaze" was also used as a commercial song for Kirin Orange Soda. Ahhhhh....brings back memories....of cute Japanese commercials.

Well, that was my spotlight on Summer kayo kyoku. But I'll still continue finding and highlighting these tunes as I remember them.