Yuzo Kayama -- O-Yome ni Oide （お嫁においで）

Well, now that 2012 is coming to a close, I thought that since New Year's Eve is just about here, I might as well find something nice from one of my nearest and dearest Kohaku Utagassen, the 1981 edition. Over the past year, as a lot of you viewers know, I've been selecting a number of songs from that particular program. So, I've got one more here that I had also heard long before that Kohaku as a little kid.

In the 1960s, singer/actor/bon vivant Yuzo Kayama（加山雄三） was the "Wakadaisho"（若大将）, the dashing young man about town. Adept at various musical instruments and the art of love, he sent a lot of young women's hearts a-flutter. In June 1966, he released his 8th single, "O-Yome ni Oide"(Come, Marry Me), a jaunty and flirtatious proposal for any of the female listeners done in an inviting Hawaiian style. At the time, traveling from Japan to Hawaii must've been like traveling from Kansas to Oz, so the Hawaiian mood probably made the song even more enticing.

"O-Yome ni Oide"was composed by Kayama himself under a pseudonym and written by Tokiko Iwatani（岩谷時子）with singer-songwriter Setsuo Ohashi（大橋節夫）handling the arrangement and playing the guitar here. The song was created a couple of years before the Oricon rankings were born so no records on this of course, but the song was popular enough that a cute little 80-minute movie germinated in November 1966 with the same title. Of course, Kayama was the star.