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| I'm crushing your head! |
The famous veteran songwriting tandem of lyricist Takashi Matsumoto（松本隆）and composer Kyohei Tsutsumi（筒美京平）have been responsible for a lot of kayo hits over a number of decades. Some of them are Hiromi Ohta's（太田裕美）"Momen no Handkerchief"（木綿のハンカチーフ）and Rie Nakahara's（中原理恵）"Tokyo Lullaby"（東京ららばい）from the 1970s, and boy band CCB's "Romantic ga Tomaranai"（Romanticが止まらない）which came out in the 1980s.
I was a bit surprised that the song hadn't been covered up to now since the singing of the title is one of the few things that continues to remind me of Nishida.
"Tokimeite" got as high as No. 7 on Oricon and was a track on Nishida's 4th album "Esprit" from October 1991. That album peaked at No. 24. Later that year on New Year's Eve, the bilingual singer also got her first of four invitations to come onto NHK's Kohaku Utagassen to sing the song itself.
Oh, how natsukashii! The song was also the theme for the TBS drama "Depaato! Natsu Monogatari"（デパート!夏物語...Department Store! Summer Story） starring Nishida and Masahiro Takashima（高嶋政宏）which was broadcast in the summer of that year. The video above at 52 seconds has a brief commercial for its 1992 sequel "Depaato! Aki Monogatari"（デパート!秋物語...Department Store! Autumn Story）. Strangely enough, the thumbnail at the very top has Nishida getting her cheeks squeezed by Masahiro's brother, fellow actor Masanobu Takashima（高嶋政伸）.
Hi, J-Canuck.
ReplyDelete"Tokimeite" is one of Nishida's standout singles, in my opinion, even if I rarely listen to it nowdays (debut abum "CLEAR" and single "Namida no PEARL MOON" are what I enjoy the most in her discography). Like you said, the way she sings the title is very catchy, and I never forget how it sounds, even if I spend a long time without hearing it. Also, now that you talked about, it's really strange that neither you nor I - since we're the most enthusiastic about this kind of aidoru in the blog - haven't covered it... until now, of course. In fact, there are some very nice singles released by her that we still need to cover. Maybe I'll do this homework someday.
And, as a side note, I just love those very early 90s dramas, but very few of them are subbed, unfortunately. Personally, even though I study Japanese language, it's still hard to understand something like a drama without English or Portuguese (these are rare, of course) subs. Curiously, though, I manage to understand Japanese reality shows kinda well.
Hi, Marcos.
DeleteYeah, it was pretty strange that neither of us had covered it before. I guess we had always assumed that one of us already wrote about it. :) But no worries now.
There's almost something quite innocent about the late 80s/early 90s dramas. My peak of watching them started from around 1991 when "Tokyo Love Story" came on, but by the end of that decade, my interest vaporized.