Well, it's not 100% percent. It's jittery in terms of uploading videos and images but with a couple of attempts (think about starting a car on a cold cold morning), the Gmail and Blogger issues are beginning to get resolved so at least I could get this particular video up.
Masachika Ichimura（市村正親）is an actor/singer on stage and screen as well as a seiyuu. But I also think that I've seen him enough on television variety shows that I can also think of him as a tarento as well. He's married to actress/singer Ryoko Shinohara（篠原涼子）and has a distinct hawkish visage along with a flamboyance that rather rivals that of another actor/singer Takeshi Kaga（鹿賀丈史）who was the Grand Chairman of the Kitchen Stadium on Fuji-TV's legendary "Ryori no Tetsujin"（料理の鉄人）back in the 1990s. I only discovered recently that he has also portrayed The Engineer on the Japanese version of "Miss Saigon" as you can see above.
For someone who has lent his vocal talents on the stage, his discography is surprisingly sparse. Ichimura put out only two singles in 1982 with one album coming out on the same day as that first single. His second single featured here is "Hotel Blue" which was released in November, and it's got some songwriting muscle behind it with Keisuke Yamakawa（山川啓介）on lyrics, Kyohei Tsutsumi（筒美京平）on melody and Mitsuo Hagita（萩田光雄）taking care of the arrangement. It's a fairly spicy and snazzy metropolitan number with some post-disco added, and Ichimura's vocals back forty years ago sounded somewhat similar to those of singing superstar Kenji "Julie" Sawada（沢田研二）. To be honest, in a way, Ichimura's smiling face on the cover makes him look like Julie's brother!
Hmmm...this time, getting the video here was back to normal. Oh, I hope that means the Gmail crisis is finally over.
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