Considering that January 30th is the anniversary for the blog, I think this song is pretty appropriate, and it just happened to fall into my lap.
On last week's edition of NHK's "Uta Kon"（うたコン）, one of the guests performed this happy tune titled "Arigato no Uta" (The Thank You Song), and I found out that it had been originally performed by none other than Kiyoko "Cheetah" Suizenji（水前寺清子）. Listening to the original single (her 33rd) from May 1970, the song fits Suizenji's onscreen and onstage personality: brassy, cheerful and larger-than-life. Hiroko Ohya（大矢弘子）wrote the lyrics while Gendai Kanou（叶弦大）provided the music.
I was in grade school when the second "Arigato" series aired in Hawaii in the early 1970s. Was one of my main Japanese TV favorites before tokusatsu henshin heroes took over later in the decade. The third series also aired here.
ReplyDeleteI'm currently watching a new drama co-starring Ishizaka Koji, who played the love interest for Suizenji in all iterations of "Arigato." This led me to go search a few topics online and came across a (to me, anyway) wild and wacky fact about "Arigato no Uta" from the J-wiki site: the song was a lyrical rewrite of an old Suizenji song called "Sawayaka no Uta." It's almost identical, save for a few line changes. I'm still tripping out over this.
Anywell... I don't believe we ever got this song on any vinyl release. I was able to get a 8-cm CD single released in the late eighties. I'm sure the song is recognized by Generation X'ers like myself who were saturated by all the J-pop culture here in the islands at the time.
Hello, Saburo. I never got to see the "Arigato" series myself. All of my knowledge about Suizenji was through her music and appearances on music shows.
DeleteI'm quite envious that living in Hawaii, getting all that access to Japanese music wasn't too difficult. Not so much the case here in Toronto back in the day.