Arisa Mizuki -- Days

It seems recently that actress Arisa Mizuki（観月ありさ）has been playing some tough-as-nails roles in various TV dramas such as elite detectives. Plus I barely remember her in her first role as an innocent teenager caught up in some very dark forces in a Thursday night Fuji-TV drama back in my final year on the JET Programme, if I'm not mistaken. However, if there has been a franchise character for Mizuki, it would be Izumi Asakura（朝倉いずみ）, the slightly dotty and happy-go-lucky nurse in the seasons of "Nurse no O-Shigoto"（ナースのお仕事...A Nurse's Work）, also televised on Fuji-TV.

Never caught onto the series myself but with all those commercials, even I got the impression that Mizuki was playing some sort of Sailor Moon type.

For each of the seasons of "Nurse no O-Shigoto", Mizuki supplied the theme song, and for "Nurse no O-Shigoto 2", her contribution was "Days", a down-home pop tune written and composed by Mitsuru Igarashi（五十嵐充）from the band Every Little Thing. As I mentioned for my last article on Mizuki, she certainly developed her singing skills by the end of the 1990s. It's quite heartwarming and has me thinking about my own days working and living in Japan at that time.

Released as Mizuki's 14th single in November 1997, "Days" reached No. 14 on the Oricon weeklies and made it onto her second BEST collection, "FIORE II" which came out in December of that year. That album peaked at No. 69.