Teruyo Mitani -- Zekkou（絶交）

 

Through the cavalcade of pop music from yesteryear, Little Peggy March's "I Will Follow Him" (1963) will always be a song whose music and lyrics of "I love him, I love him, I love him" I will remember better than the singer or the title. That insistent pushing melody is eternally memorable as one that I've associated with the old-style pop. And of course, the sweet bloom of puppy love and intrepid need to follow one's beloved idol everywhere and every time was adorable to the max back then, but now it's probably considered stalking.

It is "I Will Follow Him" that I was reminded of when I first heard Teruyo Mitani's（三谷晃代）November 1976 debut single "Zekkou" (Breakup), and I'm pretty confident that composer Juichi Sase（佐瀬寿一）must have had at least some inspiration from the 1963 hit when he came up with some of the main melody. Ironically, Kazuya Senke's（千家和也）lyrics are the absolute opposite of the message in "I Will Follow Him". A young woman goes ballistic on seeing her boyfriend with another woman and without that ring on his finger. Ouch! There will be no more following here. Motoki Funayama（船山基紀）arranged "Zekkou".

Mitani, who hails from Hokkaido, began attending a music school in 1975 and soon after, songwriters Senke and Keisuke Hama（浜圭介）, who were judges on the Fuji-TV audition program "Kimi Koso Star da!"（君こそスターだ!...YOU Are the Star!）, were searching for contestants for the show when they discovered Mitani and brought her into show business. Following the release of "Zekkou", Mitani came down to Tokyo in early 1977 and even attended Horikoshi High School, an equivalent of Beverly Hills High, but would only release another three singles and one studio album by the end of that year before her recording career ended. She would take on a few acting roles on TV and the big screen but her time in showbiz ended sometime in 1980. However, with the re-release of that lone album "Omoide no First Kiss"（想い出のファースト・キッス...The First Kiss I Remember） on CD in 2016, Mitani decided to revive her performances.