Happy Saturday! I guess that folks in Japan are probably even happier and more relieved since they are coming to another long weekend with Marine Day on Monday. I can only hope that their tourism is getting a slightly bigger bump.
In the bigger picture then, we all have to plow ahead in this hopefully post-pandemic era. And this song might be one of the sample reflections of this. The Gospellers（ゴスペラーズ）performed "Hoshikuzu no Machi" (Stardust City) on a recent "Uta Con"（うたコン）, and it was another one of their tenderhearted ballads released as their 21st single in November 2002. Written and composed by two of the acapella group: Yoichi Kitayama（北山陽一）and Yosuke Yasuoka（安岡優）, the song leads the way to a brighter future represented by the titular Stardust City wherever that may be.
The ballad went Gold and went up the charts to No. 3, ending up as the 54th-ranked single for 2003. The Gospellers had a good run on NHK's Kohaku Utagassen (2001-2006) with "Hoshikuzu no Machi" being their second song to sing on the New Year's Eve special. The song was also used as the theme for the Fuji-TV dramatization of the Kazumi Yamashita（山下和美）manga "Tensai Yanagisawa Kyōju no Seikatsu"（天才柳沢教授の生活...The Life of Genius Professor Yanagizawa） which lasted for a couple of months in 2002. I have no idea what the manga is about and the Wikipedia entry for it is about as sparse as a desert, but from looking at the cover, it might be something along the lines of "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" as it involves a supposedly stern professor who's actually more of a softie on the inside (according to the much fuller J-Wiki entry).
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| From Wikipedia |
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