Hiromi Iwasaki -- Haru Oboro（春おぼろ）

 

To link up with Kaientai's（海援隊）"Start Line"（スタートライン）, this was the second of the two songs that I'd heard on "Uta Con"（うたコン）last night that was within the graduation season tribute. 

Hiromi Iwasaki's（岩崎宏美）16th single was "Haru Oboro". The term oboro has a couple of meanings on Jisho.org with the second one being "minced fish or meat that is seasoned and fried"; I of course rejected that definition out of hand although I do like that sort of food. The first meaning was more acceptable in that it was "hazy; dim; faint; vague", so perhaps the title means "Spring Haze". But the haze here may not be referring to any meteorological phenomenon but blurred vision due to an excess of tears.

Written by songwriting vets Michio Yamagami（山上路夫）and Kyohei Tsutsumi（筒美京平）, "Haru Oboro" struck me as being a bit different from some of the music that the talented Iwasaki was putting forth in the late 1970s. My image of her then was seeing her put forth a lot of that disco City Pop type stuff but "Haru Oboro" is quite a bit folksier and dramatic as a heartbroken young lady laments that her headstrong suitor has been rejected by her stern Showa Era father. I can easily see the old guy in a musty brown yukata sitting cross-legged and cross-armed on the tatami with a fierce scowl as the poor nervous fellow is breaking down inside and out.

Yup, I didn't really think that this was really a graduation-themed song although it is taking place in the spring, but looking at Hiromi-chan perform "Haru Oboro" above in that famously long hair and elegant fashion, I did get the impression that this was her transition from the disco aidoru stuff into the love balladry that she would take well into the early 1980s. The song would hit No. 15 on the Oricon weeklies and end 1979 as the 72nd-ranked single.