Yomeiriland -- Love Kogai Connection（ラブ郊外ネクション）

 

The area of Toyocho（東陽町）in East Tokyo is quite familiar to me. Located halfway between my home station of Minami-Gyotoku（南行徳）in Ichikawa City and downtown Tokyo on the Tozai Line of the Tokyo Metro system, it used to be somewhere I went to early Monday morning to teach one of my friends at his office there. I used to take the Tozai at just before 7 am and even then, there was a crush of commuters, but it wasn't nearly as bad as the peak of morning rush hour when laws of physics were regularly destroyed. My friend's lesson was at 8 am but since I wanted to avoid the breaking of the Pauli Exclusion principle on the subway, I got there several minutes early so I was able to have my breakfast at the nearby McDonalds. Their Sausage McMuffin was surprisingly oily.

But it wasn't just early morning in Toyocho for me. Late night was also a time that I got to know Toyocho Station, and that was because the last couple of runs of the Tozai Line before finishing its duties for the day would end at that station. Of course, I tried my best to get those subways that still went all the way to the regular terminus of Nishi-Funabashi Station（西船橋）in Chiba Prefecture, but around midnight, it was Toyocho or bust. And as such, after having my night with buddies, I sometimes missed those necessary runs into my residential province. Therefore, there was always a long but steadily moving line of commuters waiting for a taxi. I got my cab and paid the extra 5000 yen for the ride home from Toyocho.

Now, why all this hubbub about this particular area? Well, I've written about the female rapping group Yomeiriland（嫁入りランド...Wedding Land） a couple of times with the first time being their contribution to the way-crazy "Space Dandy" anime back in 2014, and then the second time just earlier this year for "Shiawase ni Narou yo"（しあわせになろうよ）. As I've mentioned then, there isn't a whole lot of information on this group; there's their Twitter account, Ameba blog and Facebook page, all of which seem dormant and have been so for at least a few years. But one new piece of information from their Ameba account is that Yomeiriland had been based in Toyocho.

Although they may have decided to break up, they have left their music on various platforms including YouTube and I first discovered their "Love Kogai Connection" (Love Suburban Connection) there via the modestly named The Worst Channel. The song was uploaded in 2018 but apparently its earliest existence was 2013 according to Soundcloud. In any case, "Love Kogai Connection" is a fun and catchy rap with all of the members getting in on the act, and with the arrangement including good beats, some disco and a sitar reminiscent of early 70s soul.