Kye Eunsook & Keisuke Hama -- Kita Kuukou（北空港）

 

All these years, I'd known Keisuke Hama（浜圭介）as a composer of enka and Mood Kayo songs but according to his J-Wiki biography, he had been a singer under a number of stage names between 1964 and 1970.

Well, he came out of retirement, so to speak, to perform an enka/Mood Kayo duet that he himself composed with Kye Eunsook（桂銀淑）. In November 1987, the two of them released "Kita Kuukou" (Northern Airport), and it's an interesting one since as someone who has been accustomed to the kayo idea that airports were the setting for the end of romances and the beginning of a new chapter in life, "Kita Kuukou" is actually the reunion of a couple in Sapporo. 

Yep, Sapporo is up there with Tokyo and Yokohama as the ideal city for old-style kayo affairs and with the setting of Shin-Chitose Airport, the happy duo is now free to have a romantic night out on the town, maybe in the area of Susukino. The J-Wiki article for "Kita Kuukou" even mentions that a 2-metre tall stainless steel monument with the lyrics by Yo Yashiro（やしろよう）was put up on the 2nd floor at Shin-Chitose back in 2004 but with restoration work being done between 2010 and 2012, it was moved over to a food court on the 3rd floor.

The article also mentions that during recording, the duo wanted to capture that feeling of a Yujiro Ishihara（石原裕次郎）ballad, and when I first heard this one, I thought of that very person. Hama's delivery and that haunting background chorus nailed the feeling of a Tough Guy song, just like his classic "Brandy Glass"（ブランデーグラス）. "Kita Kuukou" managed to reach as high as No. 87 on the Oricon weeklies.