NOVA -- Aishuu（哀秋）

 

I've mentioned this in past articles but when I began my 17-year-long stint in the Greater Tokyo Area, it was as an English teacher for the once-enormous NOVA Corporation. If I'm not mistaken, it started out in the Kansai region and then spread its schools all over the nation, after which it even got into other businesses such as tourism and real estate. The first place that I stayed at on arriving back in Japan in November 1994 was a supposed NOVA apartment in Shibamata, Tokyo. And of course, there were the cute and popular commercials such as the one above. "OH, YOU DROPPED A HANDKERCHIEF!" became a buzz phrase for a short while.

My time there was relatively short...just around 2 years but it was interesting. My immediate boss later became an acclaimed mystery author and I even taught the lady in the commercial above who proclaimed herself to be NOVA, aka no-ba, aka 野ば(ーちゃん), aka middle-aged woman in the field once she gained her fame since her payment was in NOVA tickets. Despite her grinning farm-working persona, she was actually quite the kind, adorable and very well-dressed lady who always sported black-and-white colours.

Remembering orientation in the fall of 1994 at NOVA Kanto HQ in Omotesando, the head trainer once declared that the company was too big to fail. Well, a few of us did wonder whether NOVA had extended itself too much into too many enterprises, and sure enough, over a decade later in 2007, the company crashed hard, everything closed down and the founder did a brief disappearing act before getting arrested. Ironically, I was in Omotesando between classes (long separated from the company) when I saw the banner at one of the newspaper kiosks fairly screaming out "NOVA HAS GONE BUST!". I decided to run out to the Omotesando branch and discovered that a big iron door was firmly shut on the entrance with a white sheet taped to it stating that the premises were closed until further notice.

However, even in my last few years in Japan, I did hear that NOVA under new management was making a phoenix-like rise out of the ashes and apparently looking at their Wikipedia page, it is back as an English-teaching entity once more. Perhaps it's a bit more humbler now.

Anyways, my apologies for getting out some of that huge chunk of my life, but when it comes to most Japanese people, that word NOVA will always spark the thought of the English-language school. But long before I was even employed by the company, I already had an association between NOVA and Japanese pop culture. 

There was a Japanese band that rather swam between the musical styles of Off-Course（オフコース）and H2O called NOVA, and I first heard them back on my old radio program "The Sounds of Japan" on CHIN-FM in the early 1980s. The duo seemed to specialize in those dreamy summery tunes and I was able to hear a couple of them but they haven't popped up on YouTube as of yet. In fact, I'd say that there are very few crumbs of online information on NOVA aside from an album that is up for auction and some reports of certain songs created by one of the two members on other J-Wiki sites.

Some months ago, though, I was very lucky to have found this one song by them called "Aishuu" from 1981 which translates as "Melancholy Autumn". As the title indicates, "Aishuu" isn't exactly summery but that certain dreaminess in the arrangement and vocals is what I do remember. The music was created by Kazunari Kido（木戸一成）, who I assume is one of the duo, and it took the search engines and some squinting at the liner sheet for the original 45" single to find out that the arranger was Masaaki Omura（大村雅朗）and the lyricist was Masako Arikawa（有川正沙子）.

Nope, these aren't the NOVA songs that I was looking for, but just to be able to track down even one song by these guys is enough for some personal celebration. My impression, and it's just an impression at this point, is that the duo were perhaps around for about a decade between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s, but if any of you NOVA fans are still out there, perhaps you can confirm things or add some more information.