Mie Nakao -- Hana no Sadame （花のさだめ）

Well, rather glad that I am here tonight since I had quite the load of text to translate for much of the day today. It's nice to get back to writing what I like.

I've come across my fair share of new and wonderful songs over the years of doing this blog but once in a while, a few of my commenters have also introduced me to some of those new names and songs. I got that opportunity again earlier today before work when Stevie contacted me about a tune that he'd fallen for on a video of 1960s kayo kyoku that was performed in movies.

(Sorry but the video has been taken down.)

At about 7:13 of the above video, young and virile Wakadaisho Yuzo Kayama（加山雄三）enters a room to see an all-female band playing with the lead singer going go-go. It just happens to be Mie Nakao（中尾ミエ）whom I've seen all the time on variety shows but up to now had only known one song by her, "Kawaii Baby"（可愛いベイビー）, a cover of a Connie Francis hit from the early 1960s.

Well, some years after that, she came out with a single from January 1968 titled "Hana no Sadame" (Fate of a Flower) which is mis-named in the description below the YouTube video as "Koi no Sadame"（恋のさだめ...Fate of Love）. And it looks like Nakao was channeling more Nancy Sinatra back then.

Stevie had wanted to find the full version of the song and so he asked for my help. I took a look at her discography on J-Wiki and although I couldn't find a "Koi no Sadame", I did find "Hana no Sadame" and did a cut-and-paste on YouTube. Voila! It turned out to be the full version. And crazily enough, I started enjoying it myself. I guess there's something about a 60s Japanese teenybopper doing a more mature and fairly rockin' pop song with a fuzzy guitar intro that gets my attention. So I'm just as indebted to Stevie now.

"Hana no Sadame" was written by Rei Nakanishi（なかにし礼）and composed by Masaaki Hirao（平尾昌晃）. I'm not sure how it did on the then-embryonic Oricon charts but I'm sure if any of the kayo shows want to pay tribute to the psychedelic/go-go boot music of the late 60s, well, this song can certainly be a candidate. In a way, it reminds me of how Hibari Misora（美空ひばり）did her own go-go thing with "Makkana Taiyo"（赤な太陽）some six months earlier. Peace, man!

Will have to do some more perusing of that top video.