Tomoko Hori -- Seaside Hotel 805（シーサイドホテル８０５）

I've stayed at a few seaside hotels...well, more like bayside hotels but the water was still salty. One establishment was the Portopia Hotel in Kobe. The JET Renewers' Conference was held there in 1990 and all of us JETs who were planning to go onto another year of teaching were obliged to go there. It was a pretty luxurious place in a city that I thought resembled more like a metropolis in California than Tokyo. Mind you, within half a decade, the largest city in Japan would undertake a major urban project which begat Odaiba.

I actually bookmarked this song several months ago but have decided to put it up tonight. As much as there are a lot of City Pop songs that have been unearthed over the years and are still yet to be discovered by me, there are also a lot of aidoru tunes in the 1970s and 1980s that have remained unknown, and churlishly speaking, perhaps some of them should be left unknown. But that is of course a matter of personal opinion.

However, I did pick Tomoko Hori's（堀智子）"Seaside Hotel 805"（シーサイドホテル８０５）because I had never heard of this 70s aidoru and the song itself had that nostalgic hippy-skippy melody that screamed bell-bottomed pants and big hair. I could find barely anything about Hori but this page shows the 6 singles that she released in the mid-70s including this debut single which came out in August 1975. The cover of her made me think that she was auditioning for the main role in a live-action version of "Cutey Honey".

Written by Ou Yoshida（吉田旺）and composed by Koichi Morita（森田公一）, "Seaside Hotel 805" not only feels like a happy 70s kayo with that loopy electric guitar and strings but there is a 1950s/1960s sax in there and the overall music has me thinking girls dancing in their go-go boots from the previous decade. No idea how Hori's aidoru career went but I'm glad that I could find some of these tunes that perhaps even many Japanese of a certain age (namely mine) had forgotten or not even known about.