Sayuri Ishikawa -- Kakurenbo (かくれんぼ)

Well, these are some pretty rare videos so I'm hoping that the powers-that-be will allow them to stay on for at least a little while.

For those who are Sayuri Ishikawa（石川さゆり）fans, you will know that she had initially been groomed to debut as an aidoru in 1973 by Columbia Records with her catchphrase being "The Columbia Princess". This was her debut single "Kakurenbo" (Hide and Seek) which was released in March of that year. The song was about a woman reminiscing about the titular game back in her hometown when she had hoped that she would be found out by the IT boy on whom she had a major crush.

She was all of 15 when she released "Kakurenbo" and although she may have been branded as an aidoru back then, the song itself sounds quite enka perhaps due to the arrangement and her vocals. With lyrics by Michio Yamagami（山上路夫）and music by Kosho Inomata（猪俣公章）, there was some serious musical backup for the teen Ishikawa, but according to the J-Wiki article on the singer, she struggled to gain fame especially since at the time, the girls of the Hana-no-Chuusan Trio（花の中三トリオ）...namely Momoe Yamaguchi（山口百恵）, Masako Mori（森昌子）and Junko Sakurada（桜田淳子）were making huge inroads with their own aidoru careers. Perhaps there was some confusion among the public at large as to how Ishikawa was to be categorized: was she an aidoru or a very young enka singer?

With that catchphrase for her and "Kakurenbo", I guess that there was that hope that people would be attracted by that countryside innocence, although I think there were many aidoru who probably fit that description. It would take almost 4 years and 14 more singles before Ishikawa had that breakthrough with one of enka's great standards "Tsugaru Kaikyo Fuyu Geshiki"（津軽海峡・冬景色）. After that, she never needed to look back.