Yukako Hayase -- Shima no Dekigoto（島の出来事）

 

Well, it looks like a few hours earlier, YouTube took a technical tumble for some reason which meant that videos couldn't load although the live streaming ones like Japan's "Weathernews" eventually could come up after about 5~10 minutes. The worldwide reaction was perhaps equivalent to this scene below.

I did go through an hour of this but then after catching a couple of favourite programs in succession on TV Japan, I returned to the computer to see that things were back to normal. No casualties aside from one's wits.

Back to the show then. Actress/singer Yukako Hayase（早瀬優香子）was someone that I first heard about half a decade ago when I first came across her YouTube video of her eclectic debut single "Sartre de Nemurenai" （サルトルで眠れない）from January 1986. I've heard at least one more song after that, and my impression was that Hayase was one of the more intriguingly quirky singers that I've had the opportunity to experience.

Then for tonight, I give you a track from her 3rd album from June 1987 "Polyester"（ポリエステル）, "Shima no Dekigoto" (The Island Incident). Listening to this one, I couldn't easily categorize it but ultimately I think it can straddle the line between straight pop and New Wave, and of course, there is some of that tropicality (my own made-up word). The New Wave part is because there is one part in "Shima no Dekigoto" that reminds me of one of the first songs of the genre in Japan that I ever heard, "Sumire September Love"（すみれ September Love） by the band Ippu-Do（一風堂）, although the synthesizer seems to be a little more subdued when compared to "Sartre de Nemurenai". Still, the whimsy and Hayase's kittenish vocals are very much intact.

Makoto Yano（矢野誠）, Akiko Yano's（矢野顕子）first husband, composed the song while Hayase herself wrote this one (as she did for three of the other tracks on "Polyester") under a pseudonym（千石花土根）that I couldn't quite transcribe immediately. Thankfully, I gather that the name of the YouTube channel is indeed the romaji reading of that nom de plume: Hatone Sengoku.

Anyways, to my fellow YouTube viewers, let us all take some nice cleansing breaths.