Ginji Ito -- Ano Toki wa Doshaburi（あの時はどしゃぶり）

 

Yesterday, I was reading Rocket Brown's fine and detailed review of Ginji Ito's（伊藤銀次）"Deadly Drive", released on May 25th 1977. I usually don't put out the exact date of release but on that particular one, a little movie called "Star Wars" came out, and I just saw the highlights of the final episode of "Obi-Wan Kenobi" yesterday. The franchise as a whole is definitely flawed and disappointing to me (prequels and sequels), but that final episode was likely the most emotionally powerful of any of its entries.

Anyways, getting back to "Deadly Drive", I've covered a couple of tracks already: the light and mellow and dreamy "Konuka Ame" （こぬか雨）and the soulful and soaring "Kaze ni Narerunara"（風になれるなら）. Well, on reading Rocket's review, I decided to take a look at another track from the album, so here is "Ano Toki wa Doshaburi" (There Was a Downpour Back Then), written and composed by Ito. Contrasting with the other two tracks, this particular song has the singer-songwriter going into light salsa mode, and that's interesting since it seems that lot of the Japanese pop stars including Junko Yagami（八神純子）and Keiko Maruyama（丸山圭子）were also exploring a lot of the Latin side of New Music at around the same time.

I also found out another tidbit of trivia for "Ano Toki wa Doshaburi" from the August 1983 issue of the music journal "Music Steady"（ミュージック・ステディ）in which an article focused on Ito (via J-Wiki). Apparently, the song saw its genesis when Ito wondered about taking the Hachiro Kasuga（春日八郎）1957 enka "An Tokya Doshaburi"（あん時ゃどしゃ降り）which is a dialectal variant for "Ano Toki wa Doshaburi" and making it into a New Music tune. Admittedly, it is part of the reason that I wrote up an article for Kasuga's tune earlier this afternoon. However, I think, aside from the title, both songs are wholly different animals and Ito even points out that doshaburi, which means "downpour" or "heavy rain", has a much more figurative definition here since he meant it to signify "social upheaval".

On May 24th 2017, a 40th anniversary deluxe edition of "Deadly Drive" was released with two discs included with extended remixes of the original tracks. "Ano Toki wa Doshaburi" was no exception, so dance away!