Jun Miyazaki -- Shin-Romantic/Second Virgin（新･ロマンチック・セカンド･ヴァージン）

 

When it comes to the 1980s aidoru, I've usually split it down in the middle: the early 80s aidoru with folks like Seiko Matsuda（松田聖子）and Naoko Kawai（河合奈保子）were the ones with the short hair, frilly dresses and the summery and breezy puppy-love songs while the late 80s were often populated with ladies with more divergent styles such as Miho Nakayama（中山美穂）and Shizuka Kudo（工藤静香）. Although depending on the singer, the melodies could retain that happy-go-lucky feeling, some of the other music also tended toward areas such as dance music with brassier arrangements and sassier attitudes.

So, what to make of Jun Miyazaki's（宮崎純）"Shin-Romantic" (New Romantic) and "Second Virgin"? She was another one of those aidoru that came and went like the wind in terms of output with only two singles under her name, both coming out in 1988. The debut single "Shin-Romantic" with its B-side of "Second Virgin" was out in May of that year.

The A-side is the more interesting of the two. "Shin-Romantic" is a pretty snazzy number so I thought it was a bit of a pity that it probably didn't do all that well perhaps (never heard of Miyazaki until very recently). Written by Ikki Matsumoto（松本一起）and composed/arranged by Shunichi Tokura（都倉俊一）, the melody is cloaked in all sorts of synthpop decoration to keep things hopping. Considering the release date, I would say that Miyazaki's debut was going for that late 80s dance pop with all of the needed bells and whistles. In the way that KKP collaborator Marcos V. compared Morning Musume's（モーニング娘。）"Koi no Dance Site"（恋のダンスサイト）to Dschinghis Khan's "Dschinghis Khan", "Shin-Romantic" seems to hail back to Boney M's "Rasputin" in the refrain. On the other hand, "Second Virgin" at 3:42, (sorry but that video has been taken down) which was also handled by Matsumoto and Tokura, seems to hail back to the the early 80s aidoru period when the happy 1950s pop tune was providing some inspiration to the singing teenyboppers back then.

As for Miyazaki, I could only find out from Idol.ne.jp that she was born in Kanagawa Prefecture in 1972, and aside from those two singles, she had also done some acting as well.