Keiko Fuji/Hachiro Kasuga -- Hashigozake（はしご酒）

 

Even though I (luckily) didn't go all that crazy with the barhopping during those seventeen years in the Tokyo area since my friends weren't all that heavy into the drinking, I did get my education in the imbibing of alcohol while I was living in Gunma Prefecture for two years on the JET Programme. Whenever there was some sort of major event on the school calendar such as Sports Day or the end-of-year parties, teachers, the PTA or the town staff would get together at a restaurant for dinner before hopping to a couple of karaoke bars and the like in places like Numata City. I did have my share of the booze when I was in university but I really got to "learn" about beer, sake and shochu although somehow my liver remained intact.

It should then come as no surprise that I learned the expressions hashigo（はしご）and hashigozake（はしご酒）fairly quickly and placed them into my mental lexicon of Japanese. The first expression means "ladder" but both of them in the pop culture vernacular refer to barhopping or pub crawls. Yep, my first few experiences with the teachers and town hall staffers going out on the town did feel like going up a number of rungs on the ladder since it increasingly felt like gravity was tugging on me hard as I was dragged to the next watering hole.

And thus, we come to "Hashigozake" (Barhopping), Keiko Fuji's（藤圭子）26th single from November 1975. Fuji, having been the female kayo expert on all things bar-related, seemed like the perfect person to sing this story of a guy going to his favourite drinking establishments in Tokyo's shitamachi district. The J-Wiki article for "Hashigozake" even lists the various neighbourhoods which are given the shoutout by Fuji: Kinshicho, Kameido, Hirai, Koiwa, Oshiage, Kanamachi and my beloved Asakusa. Aside from Hirai, I've been to the other areas though not necessarily for drinking.

There are a few things that distinguish "Hashigozake" from other Fuji songs. For one thing, although that famous cigarette-and-whiskey voice still holds court, I don't think that this particular single which hit No. 43 on Oricon is the usual morose enka/Mood Kayo about a permanent resident of Shinjuku spending days and nights as a barfly. There is something that feels more upbeat because the song is really about what a lot of folks in Japan have been doing for decades. Another thing is that "Hashigozake" ended up being Fuji's final performance on NHK's Kohaku Utagassen in 1975 after a total of five appearances on the show.

Now, I usually would have already mentioned the lyricist and composer by this point but even within that, I did need an extra paragraph. The lyrics were provided by Nana Hazono（はぞのなな）which is the pseudonym for Yurio Matsui（松井由利夫）who would later become the mentor for one enka prince of the 21st century, Kiyoshi Hikawa（氷川きよし）. As for the melody, once again a possible pseudonym might be in play here, too. The name「赤坂通」does read as Akasaka Douri, aka Akasaka Avenue which actually exists in Kobe. However, checking things online, I couldn't find any songwriter that could be connected with that name. According to Jisho.org though, 「通」can be read as a first name in several ways including Ikariya or Kayo, but no light was shed on the identity. It could mean that any compositionally-inclined staffer at the RCA label responsible for the production of the song could have come up with the music.

A song this amiable has most likely been covered many times, and one such cover was recorded by kayo legend Hachiro Kasuga（春日八郎）for a 1978 album "Asakusa Ninjou"（浅草人情...The Asakusa Way）. "Hashigozake", by the way, has been recognized as a go-tochi（ご当地...regionally referential） kayo for Tokyo.