Hibari Misora -- Edokko Sushi（江戸っ子寿司）

 

Unfortunately, I was given the news that another famous person in Japan succumbed to COVID-19 earlier this morning at the age of 81. He wasn't a comedian or an actor but actually a chef named Toshiro Kandagawa（神田川俊郎）. I hadn't heard from him for years but back in the 1990s when Fuji-TV's original "Ryori no Tetsujin"（料理の鉄人...The Iron Chefs） was captivating viewers within and outside of Japan, Kandagawa was a fairly frequent guest and gadfly who bumped heads and philosophies with the Iron Chefs themselves and even beat them in the Kitchen Stadium.

As I remember him, he was a feisty competitor known for his strict adherence to classic Japanese cooking styles according to his Wikipedia entry, and I was struck by the commentary that he had been seen as the equivalent of the heel in wrestling matches. Still, I'm hoping that much of the boisterous competition that was shown between Kandagawa and Iron Japanese Chef Rokusaburo Michiba（道場六三郎）was kept within the Stadium and that they were friendly in real life. I can only imagine what Kandagawa's feelings about Dragon Rolls and some of that neo sushi must have been, though (I'm perfectly fine with those).

I couldn't find anything on his J-Wikipedia article about anything that he liked in kayo kyoku, but in tribute to him and also to a new friend I made on Discord earlier today who has a liking for enka and Mood Kayo, I decided to find something appropriate. Of course, I'm uncertain whether Kandagawa was a Hibari Misora（美空ひばり）fan, but I have discovered "Edokko Sushi", which, honestly speaking, I only became aware of today.

A 1958 single written by Yaso Saijo（西條八十）and composed by Gento Uehara（上原げんと）, it's lightly sung in the higher register by Misora as she talks about the joy of making the sushi for the regulars in the restaurant, presumably Tokyo because of that first word in the title: Edokko. According to the Wikipedia entry, Edokko can be defined in two ways:

1) One who was born and raised in Edo/Tokyo to parents who both were also born and raised in Edo/Tokyo. (If one parent was not born and raised in Edo/Tokyo, then the child would not be a true Edokko, and was called madara ["mottled"].)

2) One who was born and raised in Edo/Tokyo to a family lineage spanning back three or four generations in Edo/Tokyo.

In any case, I would like to make certain that Kandagawa was actually born in Kyoto, the other former capital of Japan. My condolences to his family.