(cover version)
Just goes to show how much time has flown by when a song and band that I saw as one of the Nouvelle Vague of Japanese popular music now looks so quaintly nostalgic. Case in point: Jitterin' Jinn's debut single, "Everyday".
I actually first encountered the song when its commercial came on TV showing the Betty Boop-like Reiko Harukawa(春川玲子） singing/nearly yodeling this strangely rockabilly tune. It was only a couple of months after I'd started putting up stakes in Gunma, so I quickly got a taste of what Japanese music was starting to change into. There was a lot more rawness coming from the new talent...not any of the studio-produced aidoru or pop singers, but folks who looked and sounded as if they came straight from their busking piece of ground outside the subway stations.
Written and composed by Jinta Hashi（破矢ジンタ）, the guitarist for the group, "Everyday" is Reiko's lament about a lost love in the big city as she studiously pretends to forget about it while she and the listeners know the real truth of the matter. It is also a track on Jitterin' Jinn's first album, "DOKIDOKI" which came out in November of that year and peaked at No. 5 on the Oricon weeklies.
I wasn't charmed enough by the song that I went out and got that particular single but I have gone out and bought "Natsu Matsuri" （夏祭り...Summer Festival) and one other single by the group. However, I am happy that I've got YouTube to tide me over until I grab that BEST compilation.
By the way, as for the derivation of the name, during the band's amateur days, Harukawa and the gang went by "The Snufkin", after the character on Tove Jansson's "Moomin", but since going pro with that name would mean sending hefty royalty payments to Europe, they went with something a bit more creative. "Jitterin'" came from that old dance "The Jitterbug" while "Jinn" was brought on board from the age-old story of "Aladdin". I gather that the statute of limitations no longer applied to the latter tale.
It's Snufkin.
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