Hi-Fi Set -- Doyou no Yoru wa Haneda ni Kuru no（土曜の夜は羽田に来るの）

  

As I mentioned for Junko Yagami's（八神純子）"Naze da ka Tsurai no"（何故だかつらいの）yesterday, one should never ignore the B-sides. By their nature as B-sides, yes, maybe there's a legitimate reason that they are on the flip side of the more prominent and possibly hit-worthy A-sides, but I have found that there have been quite a few diamonds in the rough.

Case in point: Hi-Fi Set's（ハイ・ファイ・セット）November 1975 hit single "Sky Restaurant"（スカイレストラン）isn't only one of the vocal group's trademark tunes but it's also one of Yumi Arai's（荒井由実）wonderful sets of lyrics, and it's one of the finest examples of 1970s City Pop. However, literally in the past fifteen minutes, I discovered the wonders of its B-side, "Doyou no Yoru wa Haneda ni Kuru no" (I Come to Haneda Airport on Saturday Nights) for the very first time.

Brought to listeners' ears by the same folks behind "Sky Restaurant": Arai, composer Kunihiko Murai（村井邦彦）and arranger Masataka Matsutoya（松任谷正隆）, "Doyou no Yoru wa Haneda ni Kuru no" (I'll just go on with just "Haneda" in any later references to the song) shares that same sense of wistfulness as its A-side sibling. Perhaps for any City Pop-loving musicologist, there can be a lot to dissect with all of the key shifts, that feeling of Motown, the string plucking, and the lovely harmonies of the Set themselves. Yuming's（ユーミン）lyrics relate the story of a woman who periodically stops by Tokyo's main airport, the final meeting time and place for her romance before the guy got on that plane and took off forever.

Even outside of the lyrics, "Haneda" has that certain wistfulness since in the following year or so, Haneda Airport had slowly found itself getting shoved off the main airport stage by the new Narita Airport in Chiba Prefecture which held sway as the No. 1 international hub for decades. But thanks to renovations several years back and the realization that it was far more convenient to head over to Haneda rather than Narita, Haneda is back in the spotlight. I've been lucky to partake in some of the benefits there during those last two visits to my old home away from home.

The Koedo section at Haneda Airport