Sayuri Ishikawa -- Natsu, Ureshii ne/Osaka no Onna（夏、うれしいね・大阪のおんな）

 

Summer has come back with a blast here today as the heat and humidity have soared once more. The Canadian National Exhibition, one of our local examples of late summer festivities, will be wrapping up its time over the Labour Day weekend. I'm sure that even now the Japanese summer festivals are still being held throughout the nation, although I think the bulk of them got their time last month. All that yukata-wearing, food-noshing, fireworks-viewing and sparkler-holding stuff have become so ingrained into culture that even anime franchises would be lacking if they didn't have a summer festival episode.

I'm covering an entire single by enka singer Sayuri Ishikawa（石川さゆり）but I'm beginning from the coupling song. "Natsu, Ureshii ne" (Summer's Fun) is an enka/pop tune celebrating the season. Written by Satoshi Tarumi（垂水佐敏）and composed by Masato Sugimoto（杉本真人）, it's a traditional-sounding jaunty song centering around the quintessential scene of romantic couples in their summer garb making the rounds at the festival at night. 

The above video has a number of commercials for mostly Kincho insect repellants, another symbol of summer life in Japan. At 1:00, one ad uses "Natsu, Ureshii ne" as the jingle.

The A-side, so to speak, was Ishikawa's 67th single from July 1995, "Osaka no Onna" (Woman of Osaka). This is definitely solid enka written by Osamu Yoshioka（吉岡治）and composed by Chiaki Oka（岡千秋）, and the lyrics perhaps tell of a story of a woman working at a bar in the titular metropolis falling for one of her customers and quixotically hoping that the magic elixir of sake will change his attitude into a more accommodating one toward her. Well, there are such things called affairs. I didn't see any indication that "Osaka no Onna" was ever used for any commercial dealing with a sake brand, but on second thought, perhaps taking into consideration the lyrics, it was a good thing that it wasn't used in that way.😅