Mitsuru Hara & The Elite Men -- Koko wa Tokyo Roppongi（ここは東京六本木）

 

Earlier today, a friend and I were talking about Roppongi（六本木）, one of the party-hearty neighbourhoods in Tokyo. In recent years, a couple of major commercial complexes have gone up in the area: Roppongi Hills and then Tokyo Midtown. But before all that, Roppongi was still a very active area with its share of fun and vice centering around old Roppongi Avenue which you can see above. There are a lot of hostess clubs, dance emporia and restaurants among other establishments, many of which I cannot probably afford to enter still. However, when I was living in the Tokyo area, my friends used to hit some of the more reasonable restaurants such as the local branches of the Hard Rock Café and Tony Roma's. Plus, I used to frequent the bookstore near Roppongi Station and there was the Wave CD shop (before it got demolished years back to make way for Roppongi Hills).

When I was looking up some information on the history of Roppongi, I was fortunate enough to have found this English-language page regarding the neighbourhood and some of the more famous folks to have frequented it such as saxophonist Sadao Watanabe（渡辺貞夫）and actress Mariko Kaga（加賀まりこ）. They've given their stories of their fun times in Roppongi and it seems as if the lot of them (who kinda made their own version of The Rat Pack back in the 1960s) enjoyed an Italian restaurant as one of their hangout joints there called Chianti which still exists.

Well, all this Roppongi talk got me thinking about whether I could still find a Roppongi-themed kayo out there. My impression is that for some reason, the number of such songs tends to pale when compared with the even ritzier area of Ginza and the former youth haven of Shinjuku. However, it didn't take too long to track one down.

I found this nice and light tune called "Koko wa Tokyo Roppongi" (Here is Roppongi, Tokyo) which was released by the vocal group Hara Mitsuru to Elite Men（原みつるとエリートメン）back in June 1970; however, they were also kind enough to refer themselves in English as Mitsuru Hara & The Elite Men. According to their J-Wiki bio, the group was into bossa nova but "Koko wa Tokyo Roppongi" sounds a bit more Caribbean to my ears with a touch of Bacharach or Tijuana Brass. The lyrics were provided by Kazutoshi Takao（高尾一利）and the music was taken care of by Hideo Ohira（大平秀夫）.

Lead vocal Mitsuru Hara was actually born Mitsuru Hirata（平田満）and he's known under another alias on J-Wiki, that of singer-songwriter Takeshi Kousai（幸斉たけし）. "Koko wa Tokyo Roppongi" was the first and last single for The Elite Men after which they soon broke up. But Hara was back up on the horse in 1971 with Hara Mitsuru to Chanel Five（原みつるとシャネル・ファイブ）which lasted for a few years until he opted for a solo career in 1976. As for the rest of the original group, there was the aforementioned lyricist and co-vocalist for the song, Hideo Ohira who took on the stage name of Jiro Ohira（大平次郎）during his time as an Elite Man, electone player Saburo Yanagihara（榊原三郎）and drummer Makoto Koide（小出誠）who likewise took on an alias, Shiro Koide（小出四郎）.

Ahhh...the Gas Panic!