Akiko Wada -- Datte Sho ga Nai Janai （だってしょうがないじゃない）

For years, I have always seen Akiko Wada（和田アキ子） as the big Godsister of Japanese show business and as the singer of her trademark song, "Ano Kane wo Narasu no wa Anata"（あの鐘を鳴らすのはあなた）. With that booming Kansai dialect, she could hold the audience's attention or terrify any of her celeb kohai who crossed her.

But there was also this one mellow song that she released in the late 80s. "Datte Sho ga Nai Janai" (C'mon, Nothing I Can Do About It) was composed by Koji Makaino（馬飼野康二） and written by Masumi Kawamura（川村真澄） as her 47th single in April 1988, and it has Wada singing in a slightly woozy tone as the protagonist resignedly declares her fate as a lady going in and out of the one-night affairs, and probably in and out of the bars of Osaka. I could imagine the woman sitting slumped over the counter in some skyscraper bar way past midnight as she spills her guts to some other barfly. Being a City Pop fan, it's nice to hear Wada croon this one in that quietly velvety voice. Admittedly, I'm not a huge Wada fan, but it would be nice if I could discover some of her other past songs that had this sort of tone.

"Datte Sho ga Nai Janai" did pretty decently on the charts, getting as high as No. 25 on the weeklies and becoming a long seller for the next couple of years. It ended 1989 as the 94th-ranked single and sold a total of about 200,000 copies.