Momo (Sumiko Yamagata) -- Sora ni Aou yo（空に会おうよ）

Just in the last month, I have made a couple of references to the Tsukuba Expo in 1985 through Futurepop band The Aprils（エイプリルズ）and enka singer Kouhei Fukuda（福田こうへい）. Never made it to a world exposition; I was too young for Montreal's Expo '67 and there wasn't any way I was going to make it to Tsukuba since even back then, a part-time job wasn't going to pay for my airfare and accommodations to Japan. Perhaps I might make it to the 2025 Expo in Osaka. Who knows?

Anyways, I actually found a song that has a direct connection with the Tsukuba Expo, and there are a couple of big names attached to it and one that is a bit surprising to me. To be specific, the song was the theme for a presentation at the Sumitomo Pavilion within the world's fair.

The Sumitomo Pavilion, which had the overall theme of  "Love for Mother Nature, Hope for Humanity", had something called the Fantasium, a complex which showed a 3D movie titled "Daichi no Uta"（大地の詩...Earth Song） featuring a cute girl in overalls with her sheepdog. From looking at the thumbnail above, it seems to have been rather "Heidi".

The theme song was "Sora ni Aou yo" (Let's Meet in the Sky), and as soon as I heard it, I figured that it just had to be a Ryuichi Sakamoto（坂本龍一）concoction. That adorable technopop arrangement screamed "THE PROFESSOR!" at me, and indeed it was his wife at the time, Akiko Yano（矢野顕子）, behind the lyrics. As for the surprising part, the singer Momo（モモ）turned out to be 1970s folk/New Music singer Sumiko Yamagata（やまがたすみこ）whose vocals would have immediately won her a singing role in a Studio Ghibli movie if one had been offered to her.

Sakamoto has come up with some very interesting stuff over the years, and one observation that I've gotten of his works is that whenever he set to work on songs for the kiddies or light pop singers, The Professor can whip up stuff that is half cool technopop and half toy store fun. It's like listening to computer music at FAO Schwarz. "Sora ni Aou yo" fits that description and I think that he's done the same for "Computer Obaachan" （コンピューターおばあちゃん）and Mari Iijima's（飯島真理）"Blueberry Jam". Back in the 1980s, if you wanted a song about Christmas and robots, Sakamoto was the guy!