Masayo Kawaguchi -- Salmon Pink (さあもん ぴんく)

During my latter years of life in Japan, there was a series of commercials for Rosetta Stone, some of which featured a friendly fishmonger in the Ameyoko shopping district in Ueno, Tokyo who turned out to be quite the cunning linguist (heh, heh, heh) thanks to his studies on the product. And to my surprise, it turns out that the pleasant-to-hear female voiceover at the end may indeed be the subject of this article.

Now, Masayo Kawaguchi（川口雅代）has an English website of her own which includes her profile (where I found out about her work with Rosetta Stone). However I will give fair warning to folks who want to check it out since when I went there twice, I got hit with some annoying scammy pop-ups (I'm not blaming Ms. Kawaguchi here). I will leave the address at the bottom of the article without an automatic link so you can do a copy-and-paste and try it out at your own risk.

As usual with these new discoveries, I was just browsing around YouTube when I came across a few of her songs so I tried a few of them starting with "Salmon Pink" which was written and composed by her. According to her J-Wiki entry, the Fukuoka-born/Tokyo-raised/New York City-residing Kawaguchi has been quite the polymath. She has been a singer and songwriter, an actress, a tarento, a DJ, and even a seiyuu. However, it seems as if the main hat on her has been as a freelance journalist.

"Salmon Pink" was a track on one of her two albums, "Salute - Go-Aisatsu"（SALUTE 〜ご・あ・い・さ・つ〜...Greetings） from 1981. It starts out with these warm Motown horns and then proceeds into some pleasant and mellow City Pop. Although I can't say that Kawaguchi had the strongest of vocals, I kinda liken it to 1970s New Music-era Taeko Ohnuki（大貫妙子）. However, I am intrigued enough that I will explore some more of her work. By the way, Kawaguchi was behind words and lyrics with Akira Inoue（井上鑑）arranging everything. Also, have a look at the first track on "Salute", "Fall In Love".

A very brief video of her introducing herself at New York's Rye Beach.

http://masshy.tripod.com/profile-e.html

Tried looking for something salmon-pink
but the best I could do were my bacon-wrapped pork
medallions.
They were delicious, though.