Hideki Saijo -- Halation

 

One night on Friday June 24th 2011, I decided to take a long walk around downtown Tokyo to get some pictures of the concrete jungle. I have to say that one of my proudest photos is the one above that I shot in the Daimon neighbourhood, not too far away from Ginza. If I'm going to do a City Pop article, this will be one of my go-to pictures to flick up as a thumbnail.

This is my fifth article for today and usually I cap it off on Fridays to four but since I've got my second wind (thank you coffee), a number of Hideki Saijo（西城秀樹）fans have been giving me their accolades recently on Twitter (thank you fans), and I put up a City Pop article involving his good buddy Goro Noguchi（野口五郎）just now, I figured that the least I can do is get another Saijo City Pop tune up here.

Now, the topic of this article is his song "Halation" from his July 1985 album "Twilight Made...Hideki" (the source of the last piece I did on Saijo), and I have to make a bit of a tangent here for purposes of definition since I'd never heard of this word before reaching Japan years ago. But it's popped up in my country of heritage via a number of shows including the original "Sailor Moon" (I think it was one of the Sailors' powers) and I could never understand this rather arcane word. At first, I'd assumed that it had something to do with the word "inhalation", and knowing how George Lucas liked to name his Dark Lords of the Sith by chopping off the prefix "in-", I first thought that Darth Halation was an evil being who really had problems with breathing. But such was not the case at all.

In fact, the official definition of "halation" is: the spreading of light beyond its proper boundaries to form a fog around the edges of a bright image in a photograph or on a television screen.

OK, so if I've got this right, it's basically the effect of a halo around something or someone that really stands out like a saint or a person that you have a major crush on. Years of wondering have come to an end...which is why I cherish this blog so much.

Returning you to your regularly scheduled article, "Halation" sounds like the beginning of a wondrous trip through Tokyo (day or night...doesn't matter) in Saijo's convertible with the top down of course. It just has that engaging and smoothly propulsive beat connected with some tight horns and that needed sax solo. I could even peg that certain guitar riff from someone in the genre I know and indeed it is Fujimal Yoshino（芳野藤丸）behind the music and arrangement with Yumi Morita（森田由美）taking care of the lyrics. I think Yoshino is also helping out on the background chorus.