Mari Natsuki -- Chinatown（チャイナタウン）

 

The above is a photo of Amausaan Uji Matcha located in downtown Chinatown in Toronto. It served up various matcha tea desserts and drinks. I went there with a friend around a year ago to try it out; it had apparently been open for a year by the time we got there, and I was surprised that it was empty although it was a weekday and classes at U of T (only 10~15 minutes away on foot) were well under way. The mille-feuille matcha cake was pretty good although the toilet seat in the men's washroom was pretty much unhinged.

Well, I found out that it's now permanently closed. Was it because the matcha hadn't been good enough for the students or was it COVID-19? Whatever the case, Amausaan now joins the growing group of restaurants that have been kicked to the curb because of the pandemic. I heard a couple of days ago that Furama Cake & Desserts Garden in the same neighbourhood will be closing down within a few days after about 30 years. I haven't visited that place in decades since a lot of that time was spent in Japan but I believe that I did enter the place a few times during university days. Rather sad sign of the times when longstanding shops have to give up the business. Well, if I can do so, I hope that I can go back to some of those other places with friends to dine once more.

Come to think of it, I probably haven't visited downtown Chinatown in nearly a year. Perhaps the Amausaan trip was the last time. When I was in my twenties, it was pretty much a given that my friends and I would visit the area at least a couple of times a week due to its proximity from the university and the fact that it had great food often at starving-student prices. But Chinatown was just that...a much-appreciated area of scrumptious dim sum and Japanese records.

For some reason, Japanese pop culture's take on the various Chinatowns treated the area as if it were a mystical and wonderful foreign land of strange goings-on. There have been several songs pinpointing the neighbourhood such as Yasuha's（泰葉）classic City Pop "Fly-Day Chinatown"（フライディ・チャイナタウン）, along with ones by Yuming（ユーミン）and Naoko Kawai（河合奈保子）although I can't come up with the titles right now.

Veteran bon vivant Mari Natsuki（夏木マリ）has also given her contribution to the Chinatown ethos with "Chinatown", her 13th single under her stage name. She was actually born Junko Nakajima（中島淳子）and had even released a couple of singles in the early 1970s under her real name (will have to check those songs out soon enough). But getting back on track, "Chinatown" was released in April 1978, and it's a mix of straight kayo and that exotic kayo that had been the thing in the late 1970s. In fact, I'd say that "Chinatown" partially reminds me of Mayo Shouno's（庄野真代）"Tonde Istanbul"（飛んでイスタンブール）, although it really only took a relatively short train trip even back then from Tokyo to head over to Yokohama's Chinatown. No planes needed.

"Chinatown" was written by Yoshiko Miura（三浦徳子）and composed by singer-songwriter Masaki Niwa（丹羽応樹）. At this juncture, this would be my first Natsuki song in her early days although I did write an article about one of her much later tunes from 2013. As I said, I will tackle her earliest songs under her real name (provided that they exist on YouTube) but would also like to check out some of those other kayo under her name of Natsuki.