Koji Tamaki -- Ki-tsu-i（キ・ツ・イ）/Hen

 

These next two paragraphs are a bit of a reminder from "Den'en"（田園）but bear with me here. During those Anzen Chitai（安全地帯）heydays, I had that impression of amazing vocalist and songwriter Koji Tamaki（玉置浩二）as Japanese pop's answer to Mr. Spock: fairly tall, handsome, brooding and stoic. I wouldn't have been surprised if even the most ardent Anzen Chitai fans were a little afraid to approach Tamaki for an autograph due to the risk of being frozen or incinerated to death with those eyes.

But through the years of watching him and Anzen Chitai appearing on television for interviews a number of years from late in the 1980s, it turns out that Tamaki was quite the opposite. He was quite the gregarious and smiling fellow, always up for conversation and even acting a bit goofy. For a while going into the 1990s, he was also quite in demand as an actor. I only saw him in one Japanese drama during my life in the Kanto area and that was the 1996 Fuji-TV show "Coach"（コーチ）as the good-hearted if somewhat zany factory employee Mikuni who drove Atsuko Asano's（浅野温子）embittered and doesn't-suffer-fools-gladly executive Kubota when she had to come on down and straighten out a failing cannery in the wilds of Chiba Prefecture.

Well, the cannery, the show and the theme song, the aforementioned "Den'en" by Tamaki himself, were hits for everybody involved.

And it appears that Tamaki's goofiness may have gone a ways back in terms of television. He had a co-starring role in an early 1989 TBS show titled "Kitsui Yatsura"（キツイ奴ら...Trouble Guys） with actor Kaoru Kobayashi（小林薫）as they played perhaps a couple of good-time wise guys with money troubles. Just from the above video, Tamaki (and his fellow castmates) had plenty of opportunities to show off that incredible vocal talent, to boot.

The opening theme for "Kitsui Yatsura" was "Ki-tsu-i" (Trouble) which was also Tamaki's 2nd single as a solo artist, released in January 1989. "Den'en" may have been Tamaki's biggest hit but I think "Ki-tsu-i" as a slow bluesy rocker was one of many examples of how the singer-songwriter liked to do things sexy and slinky, this time with backing chorus AMAZONS, and the lyrics seem to intimate that a real intimate courtship is taking place on the dance floor (with whipping sounds?). As was the case with Anzen Chitai, "Ki-tsu-i" was created under the aegis of the tandem Goro Matsui（松井五郎）on lyrics and Tamaki on music, although for some reason for this particular single, Matsui was also given the nickname of O-Tsuki-sama（お月様...Lord Moon） while Tamaki got Nagareboshi（流れ星...Shooting Star）.

From 3:21 of the video above is the coupling song "Hen" which has nothing to do with a chicken but the fact that it's the romaji version of the Japanese word for strange. Yep, indeed it is strange, but I also recall that Tamaki sometimes liked to do a pretty melodic form of avant-pop, gathering all of the forces of his voice, musical instruments and the backup chorus.

"Ki-tsu-i" made it to No. 7 on Oricon and finished the year as the 64th-ranked single for 1989. It would actually make its album debut several years later on the compilation "Anzen Chitai/Tamaki Koji Best"（安全地帯/玉置浩二 ベスト）from August 1994.