Kanna Hatsumi -- Koi no Touch and Go（恋のタッチ・アンド・ゴー）

Another discovery of one of those old-fashioned kayo from the 1960s...well, the tail-end of that decade. Plus, it's an interesting one at that.

Back in 2013, I introduced "My Luxury Night"（マイ・ラグジュアリー・ナイト）, a nighttime jazzy ballad by the late Hatsumi Shibata（しばたはつみ）that had its fame in the mid-1970s. In the article, I mentioned that the singer had debuted under her 3rd stage name of Hatsumi Shibata in 1974. So, the Tokyo-born chanteuse did have an earlier incarnation.

And that was in the late 1960s when she was in her mid-teens. Under the name of Kanna Hatsumi（はつみかんな）, she debuted with "Otome no Kisetsu"（乙女の季節...A Young Lady's Season）in June 1968. But her second single is the subject of this article, "Koi no Touch and Go" (Touch and Go of Love) which came out in February 1969.

Taking into account the songs that I have heard Shibata sing in the 1970s, it was quite the revelation that as a teenager, she had been singing some of these go-go-boot-friendly tunes with the fuzzy guitar a decade earlier. I assume that she made some rounds on the music-variety shows on Japanese TV, so perhaps she could have been doing dances such as The Shimmy or The Swim while singing "Koi no Touch and Go".

I don't know how the song did on the then-embryonic Oricon charts, but it was written and composed by veterans Jun Hashimoto and Kyohei Tsutsumi（橋本淳・筒美京平）. There would be one more single released under Kanna Hatsumi before she released two singles under a new name, Manika Asa（麻まにか）from 1971~1972. Personally speaking, I think Hatsumi Shibata was the best pseudonym...especially since that was actually her birth name.