Noriko Hidaka -- Image Ihan（イメージ違反）

 

All these years and a lot of Norikos later, and yet I had never put up an article involving Noriko Hidaka（日高のり子）. Good heavens! Cats and dogs are indeed living with each other.

Born in Tokyo, her name has been that of a veteran seiyuu and narrator, and I know that she's had a lot of plum roles, but when I think of Noriko Hidaka, I always go first to her performance as plucky Jean in the 1990 anime "Nadia, The Secret of Blue Water"（ふしぎの海のナディア）.

And most recently, Hidaka has been the narrator for the hit anime "Komi Can't Communicate"（古見さんは、コミュ症です。）. It's been as a narrator that I've known her for in the last several years since she's helping out in that way through a number of NHK programs. 

Noriko has also acted on screen and stage since 1977 when she first went by her birth name of Noriko Ito（伊東範子）before changing her family name to Hidaka. That all came about in 1980 at the time of her debut as an aidoru singer when she became the campaign girl for the Kagawa Prefecture amusement park, Nio Sunshine Land（仁尾サンシャインランド）. At that time, there was actually another aidoru with the same name of Noriko Ito, albeit written in hiragana（いとうのりこ）*, and so having tried out a few stage names for size, that upcoming gig with Nio Sunshine Land had her go with Hidaka since its kanji, which literally means "sun high", could represent the feeling of "the sun rising high into the sky".

In April 1986, Hidaka released her 2nd album "Minami Kaze ni Fukarete"（南風に吹かれて...Touched by the Southern Breeze） which brings us to one of the tracks, "Image Ihan" (Image Transgression). The title might sound ominous but the song by lyricist Emi Kanda（神田エミ）and composer Ryo Matsuda（松田良）is anything but. I'm not sure whether Hidaka was still considered an aidoru by the mid-1980s, but although there are some very cute aidoru elements in the arrangement, I'm still placing this in the Pop category. Indeed, "Image Ihan" is very pleasant to listen to for its French-like lilt through those synthesizers. Probably if I were to consider it an aidoru tune, it would be reflective of how a number of those songs in the late 1980s took on more sophisticated arrangements in comparison with the summery and super-perky songs of the early 1980s.

YouTuber Yuri Gilherme has provided a video of Hidaka's other characters including Jean from "Blue Water" so enjoy her walk down Memory Lane.

*According to Hidaka's J-Wiki file, she did take on that hiragana name of Noriko Ito earlier in her high school years when she sang the theme for the anime "Futago no Monchicchi"（ふたごのモンチッチ...The Monchicchi Twins）.