Chitose Hajime/LÄ-PPISCH -- Wadatsumi no Ki（ワダツミの木）

 

When I first heard this song almost 20 years ago while living in Japan, I was scratching my head at it since I couldn't really figure out what genre it belonged to.

But man, was it getting a lot of attention on television and I gather radio as well (I was no longer listening to radio by that point)! I kept seeing it on the music ranking shows and although I was also not watching "Music Station" all that much, I assumed that she was appearing there and any other similar music performance programs.

What I'm talking about is Chitose Hajime's（元ちとせ）debut single "Wadatsumi no Ki" (The Sea-God's Tree) which was released in February 2002. The song was written, composed and arranged by the keyboardist of the ska band LÄ-PPISCH, Gen Ueda（上田現）, and at the time that I first heard the song, I thought that there was some very leisurely undulating reggae with the rhythm. But it was Hajime's voice that got my further attention with that distinct style and those brief falsetto moments in her delivery. Was she Okinawan?

Well, as it turns out, Hajime does hail from a smaller island but it's not Okinawa. Actually, she comes from Amami-Oshima, located between Kyushu and Okinawa and under administration by Kagoshima Prefecture. That distinct style of her singing is known as a form of shima-uta native to Amami-Oshima according to her own Wikipedia page. 

"Wadatsumi no Ki" became Hajime's biggest hit by entering Oricon right from the start at No. 19 and slowly heading up to No. 1 a couple of months after release. It went Triple Platinum and became the No. 3 song of the year, selling approximately 850,000 copies. The song also became a track on her debut album "Hainumikaze" (ハイヌミカゼ) from July 2002 (although she had released four indies albums prior). The album also hit No. 1 and ended up as the No. 16 album of the year, going Platinum and winning Best Album honours at the Japan Record Awards in 2002. As another feather in her cap, according to the local Nankai Nichi Nichi Newspaper via the J-Wiki article on "Wadatsumi no Ki", a newly discovered flowering plant native to Amami-Oshima was given the name of wadatsuminoki in tribute to the song.

In March 2008, songwriter Ueda succumbed to lung cancer at the age of 47, and in tribute to the keyboardist, his old band LÄ-PPISCH along with Hajime and other artists such as Tamio Okuda（奥田民生）and POLYSICS got together to cut an album "Sirius〜Tribute to UEDA GEN〜" which was released in September. Peaking at No. 45 on Oricon, the "Sirius" refers to what Ueda had supposedly said on his deathbed, "I will turn into the star Sirius and look over my family". One track on the album is the band's more subdued cover of "Wadatsumi no Ki".