Mari Watanabe/Yosui Inoue/Yoeko Kurahashi -- Tokyo Dodonpa Musume （東京ドドンパ娘）

I was watching NHK's "Kayo Concert"（歌謡コンサート）program as I do most Tuesday nights on TV Japan, and the theme of the week was "passionate kayo". Well, one of the singers came on to do this somewhat jazzy number which sounded like a slightly slowed-down old boogie, and the title caught my eye: "Tokyo Dodonpa Musume". "Tokyo"was a given, and "Musume" I knew as "daughter" or just plain "girl". However, that middle "Dondonpa" got my curiosity going, so I decided to do a bit of searching on my usual sources of YouTube and Wikipedia, and I found the original version which was sung by 18 or 19-year-old Mari Watanabe（渡辺マリ）, her 2nd single. It was written by Tetsuo Miyagawa（宮川哲夫） (who later gave lyrics to Yukio Hashi's haunting "Muhyou"), and composed by Yoichi Suzuki（鈴木庸一）.

With the end of the Second World War, jazz and Latin music started flooding like a young river into Japan, and using the analogy of the old 49ers in California, the gold from the panning here brought about the genre of Mood Kayo into the clubs and bars of Tokyo. What I didn't know was that there was also a birth of a smaller genre called Dodonpa in the 1960s. I came across a couple of explanations for the derivation of the genre on J-Wiki, but I actually liked what one kind person answered on a Goo Q & A in Japanese: that it was a Latin rhythm, rumba, given the Japanese kayo kyoku arrangement. There is also a story that Philippine bands performing in Kyoto helped to give rise to Dodonpa via the mambo. Dodonpa is onomatopoeic...I took a listen to some of the other songs of this genre, and they all have that same sort of brass "buh-boom-POW" phrasing. To me, Dodonpa also incorporates some of that Big Band Swing from the 30s and 40s.

"Tokyo Dodonpa Musume"(Tokyo Dodonpa Girl) started off all things Dodonpa, and the single ended up selling over a million records. It also seems like everything ended at that song since despite Dodonpa songs getting created and released, even one by Hibari Misora（美空ひばり）, none of them ever hit the heights that Watanabe's magnum opus did.

Forty years later, Yosui Inoue（井上陽水）gave his own dynamic version of "Tokyo Dodonpa Musume" with an assist from a cool organ in 2001 via his album of covers titled "United Cover", which peaked at No. 2 on Oricon.

Yoeko Kurahashi（倉橋ヨエコ） has been a name that I've seen a lot in the CD stores back in Tokyo but never really explored. Actually, I was trying to find stuff by one of my favourite unsung singers, Ruiko Kurahashi（倉橋ルイ子）, but I often kept seeing Yoeko's tab. After hearing her 2002 cover of "Tokyo Dodonpa Musume", though, I think I will explore a bit more about her since she's been labeled as a singer of "jazz kayo". Also, the official music video for the cover is a pretty nifty 50s-style motif done in a Monty Python animated style (unfortunately, that's been taken down so Madonna has come in to lend a hand).

This is Hibari Misora's contribution to the dodonpa fad, logically titled "Hibari no Dodonpa"（ひばりのドドンパ...Hibari's Dodonpa). It comes in at the 56-second mark.