Yukiko Okamura -- Soyokaze no Melody（そよ風のメロディー）

 

I'll be honest here. As was apparently the case with a lot of young people back in the 1980s, when I first saw the above record cover with nothing more than a quick glance at the kanji name, I'd thought that this was aidoru Yukiko Okada（岡田有希子）. But looking hard at the young lass looking back at me, I realized that despite a small resemblance to Miss Okada that this wasn't Yukiko Okada but Yukiko Okamura（岡村有希子）. There was merely a one kanji character difference. Actually, she looks like a mix between Okada and a former colleague of mine back in Tokyo.

Born Kae Watanabe（渡辺佳枝）in Yamaguchi Prefecture, the future 80s aidoru had attended the Fukuoka branch of Masaaki Hirao's（平尾昌晃）Music School where she became friends with singer Yasuko Kuwata（桑田靖子）. She was then scouted by a director of a record company when she was participating in the 1981 Nagasaki Kayo Festival. Making her debut as an aidoru a few years later in 1984, I have no idea why and how Watanabe got her stage name of Yukiko Okamura but I think the decision backfired on her and her management somewhat since she was often mistaken for Okada. Whenever she made appearances at promotions or mini-concerts, Okamura felt the exquisite pain of being yelled at with a "NO!" as in "Nope, that's not Yukiko Okada!" by disappointed Okada fans, according to the J-Wiki file on her.

Releasing a total of five singles between January 1984 and July 1985, the B-side of her September 1984 third single "Ame Agari no St. Germain"（雨上がりのサンジェルマン...St. Germain After the Rain）, "Soyokaze no Melody" (Breezy Melody) was written and composed by Masami Koizumi（小泉まさみ）with arrangement by her and Tadashige Matsui（松井忠重）. Okamura has a crisp and clear voice of pretty high tones paired with a typically early 80s aidoru melody that includes an Eiichi Ohtaki-friendly（大滝詠一）guitar twang.

Following her time as an aidoru, when she had already changed her name to Kae Okamura（岡村佳枝）for her final single, she provided some image songs for anime up until 1989 before going away from the mike permanently. She then returned to her birth name of Kae Watanabe and eventually became a radio personality at a station in her hometown of Shimonoseki. Her daughter, Mayu Okamura（岡村真由）, is a former tarento with her son-in-law being outfielder Takero Okajima（岡島豪郎）for the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles in Nippon Professional Baseball.