Friday was the final full day of my time in Tokyo. Met up with Dan one last time and did some more shopping around in the big city. Before meeting up with my congenial host from the past weekend, Rob, and some of the others, Dan and I went over to the Shinjuku Station branch of Tower Records. It just so happened that on the 7th floor where the J-Pop stuff was located, there was quite the yelling and shouting.
It turned out that yet another aidoru group was making its presence felt in a Tower Records. This time, it was the 5-girl unit Rock A Japonica（ロッカジャポニカ）and they were actually there performing what I assume was their latest single. The audience was quite the lively mob, being proactive and reactive to what was happening on stage. Of course, I couldn't take any photos lest the Tower Records staff and group's representatives started swarming me with crossed arms (it's happened to me once before).
To give a taste of what Rock A Japonica is like, this is their 2nd single from July 2016, "Kyōka Shock!" (Teaching Song Shock!), a high-speed tune which reached No. 5 on Oricon.
Was getting a tad noisy so we went up another floor to ease our ears. I was surprised to find a small but noticeable display of City Pop in one corner, and as you can see in the above photo, there was even a listening post for Taeko Ohnuki's（大貫妙子）"Sunshower" and Takako Mamiya's（間宮貴子）"Love Trip". That latter album was a real shock since for the past decade, I had always understood it to be one of the rarest and most obscure releases that I had ever known about in contemporary Japanese music although it is one of the classics of the genre in my estimation.
Perhaps its popularity on YouTube might have gotten the attention of a few Tower staffers...or perhaps this blog (heh, heh). Whatever the case, I'm glad that Ms. Mamiya has been getting her due at last.
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