Frank Nagai -- Osaka Roman（大阪ろまん）

 

Welcome back to the blog, Frank Nagai（フランク永井）! It's been a few years since the kayo crooner has been posted up on "Kayo Kyoku Plus" with the most recent one being his "Tokyo Cachito/Roppongi Waltz"（東京カチート・六本木ワルツ）. I wrote on those two back in March 2019.

This time around, though, Nagai's taking on the other big metropolis of Osaka when he sings "Osaka Roman" which came out in 1966. With lyrics by Tsuneo Ishihama（石浜恒夫）and music by Tadashi Yoshida（吉田正）, I've always been a little unsure about the definition of roman in Japanese, especially with its depiction in hiragana（ろまん）within the title; usually it appears in katakana（ロマン）. My guess is that the songwriters wanted to emphasize the softness of the situation through the more rounded hiragana when compared with the harder and more angular appearance of katakana.

Sure enough, Nagai trills his way through what I think is a form of kayo lullaby regarding the third-most populous city in Japan. Going through Ishihama's lyrics, my take is the roman here refers to the one definition of romance instead of other meanings such as story or romanticism. This might be something that an Osakan is cooing to his girlfriend while on the verge of proposing. He's setting the stage that he's ready for the highs and lows of marriage and that she's exactly the one to spend life with.

The melody by Yoshida is another one of those examples where I'm not sure whether the song belongs solidly in enka or Mood Kayo. As I mentioned, there is that place namedropping in "Osaka Roman" including sites such as Dotombori and Kitahama along with the languid underlying cha-cha rhythm, both aspects of which can be part of Mood Kayo. On the other hand, there's something enka about the main melody that hints at the heart-on-one's-sleeve love within a couple in the Japanese countryside; it's just been arranged with the saucy horns of the other genre.

Regardless, "Osaka Roman" is an intimate love song of the city for those young couples from back in the day. With Nagai also using examples of Kansai-ben in his singing, the song is most likely considered to be a go-touchi song（ご当地ソング）of the area along with some other kayo that I've listed in that Author's Pick over a month ago. Incidentally, this isn't the velvet-voiced singer's first tiff at an Osaka-based song. Noelle Tham has written up an article on his 1964 "Osaka Gurashi" (大阪ぐらし).