Koji Handa -- Yokohama Concerto（ヨコハマ・コンチェルト）

Perhaps along with Tokyo, Osaka and Sapporo, Yokohama seems to a favourite place when it comes to creating songs in the enka and Mood Kayo genres. And that isn't too surprising since the Kanagawa prefectural metropolis has been the happening place for decades as an international port.

Today, in my browsings through YouTube just to depressurize from another round of translations, I encountered this enka tune that I had never heard of before. Come to think of it, I had never heard of the singer before, either. This is Koji Handa（半田浩二）who trained under songwriter Daisaburo Nakayama（中山大三郎）and made his debut in 1988.

His second single is "Yokohama Concerto" (July 1990) which stands out to me. It first starts off with this flourish that sounds like I'm going to get something from "Wuthering Heights" before a snare drum rat-a-tats into a dramatic and bouncing melody (words and music by Nakayama). That melody has an underpinning of what sounds like a combination of "Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da" and perhaps something from Eurobeat. It certainly gets the blood flowing, and I thought that the karaoke videos would have shown something from a suspense movie to go with the beat.

Handa, who was born Masahiro Iida（飯田政弘）in Noda City, Chiba Prefecture in 1963, has so far released 27 singles up to July of this year, but it doesn't seem as if he has hit the big time as of yet. According to his J-Wiki profile, he's only made a handful of TV appearances. However, now that I've heard "Yokohama Concerto", I'd be interested in hearing some more from him.

Earlier today, I did hear about the Shindo 6+ quake that had hit Hokkaido. There was the resulting structural damage including a wide swath of power outages but I hope that the people there are coping as best as they can.