Haruomi Hosono -- Peking Duck（北京ダック）

 

As Larry mentioned in his Akina Nakamori（中森明菜）article last night, indeed it is Chinese New Year, so I'd like to wish everyone a Happy New Year. Sorry that my photo of the tiger above didn't come out too well. I have a number of friends who have been celebrating over the past couple of days.

The timing couldn't have better since last night, I decided to go on a small shopping spree and get some CDs which includes the compilation album "Yokohama Fantasy"（横浜幻想）, a 2004 collection of Yokohama-themed kayo. It even has its own J-Wiki article and there I found a song having to do with one of the most famous neighbourhoods in one of Japan's premier port cities, Chinatown.

Now, nikala first wrote about Haruomi Hosono's（細野晴臣）3rd single "Peking Duck" when she contributed her article on Tin Pan Alley's "Yellow Magic Carnival". I just wanted to add some of my own notes to this April 1976 song by Harry who wrote, composed and arranged this playful ditty about a couple in love perhaps taking a walk through the rainy neon-filled streets of Chinatown, an area that I've also had a number of opportunities to visit. The music and arrangement has that mix of 1940s nightclub and 1970s contemporary style.

I also discovered a request through Reddit's translator community to give "Peking Duck" a go but there was also some confusion about what Hosono was trying to say, which I think was in a more metaphoric sense when it came to that duck. Hopefully, there wasn't a real duck attempting to flee a blaze in the area which would make the song considerably more tragic than the cheerful music. Instead, that fire could have been more representative of the regular hullaballoo in Chinatown, although perhaps that poor duck was indeed real as it jumped into the young lady's bosom to escape the cleaver.

The top video has the album version from Hosono's 2nd studio album "Tropical Dandy"（トロピカル・ダンディー）that came out in June 1975 (it hit No. 50 on Oricon). Meanwhile, the later single cut from 1976 above has even more of the Latin jazz orchestra flavour with former Happy End bandmate Shigeru Suzuki（鈴木茂）on the electric guitar, Hiroshi Sato（佐藤博）on the piano and clavinet, and Motoya Hamaguchi（浜口茂外也）on percussion.