Tsukasa Ito -- Kanashimi wo Uketomete（悲しみをうけとめて）

Gonna have to Gibbs slap myself up the head once more since in all these years writing on the blog, I had never included Tsukasa Ito（伊藤つかさ）. And yet, this is a name that I've seen several times on YouTube and other sources since starting "Kayo Kyoku Plus" back in 2012.

It's not as if Ito was ever a music superstar. In fact, she began her show business career in the early 1970s as a child actress way before she got in front of the recording booth mike in 1981 as an aidoru. Still, I've seen her name several times on YouTube so I had thought that something was already up on the blog about her. Regrettably, that hasn't been the case until now.

On her J-Wiki file, she's listed in the introduction as actress with no hint of her being a singer. However, this Tokyo-born celebrity was releasing records during her teens up to the mid-1980s, and one of her albums was the December 1984 "Osusume!"（オススメ！）and the track du article is "Kanashimi wo Uketomete" (Accepting the Sadness).

I can't remember the other songs that I've heard by Ito but from listening to "Kanashimi wo Uketomete", the aidoru label fits her pretty well since her voice tends to waver quite a bit during the refrain of this particular song. The actual arrangement is more interesting since overall it has that shiny and metallic synthesizer rhythm joined at the beginning, middle and end by a lonely Maynard Ferguson-esque trumpet. I'm not sure whether I've heard such a combination before in a kayo. In any case, Yuuho Iwasato（岩里祐穂）was the lyricist while Yukihide Takekawa（タケカワユキヒデ）of Godiego（ゴダイゴ）fame provided the music.

Actually, what finally got me to write about Ito was one of the City Pop channels that was playing another track from "Osusume!" titled "Henne"（へんネ！...Strange, Eh!）. Like "Kanashimi wo Uketomete", there was also that hint of synthpop in there which has made me wonder whether she was going the techno aidoru route on this album. I actually do like the album cover.