Hitomi Yaida -- Komazawa Koen（駒沢公園）

 

That photo above was taken in Komazawa Olympic Park（駒沢オリンピック公園）back in the summer of 2009. It's located far on the other side of Tokyo so as nice as it was, I didn't go there very often. There was a picnic there with friends back then and that was where I met a family who lived nearby the park. I ended up teaching the mother and father (well, the father was very fluent so it was more like talking about politics with him) every other Sunday in their apartment. It wasn't too long though that my commute through Komazawa Park would end since the family moved to Futako-Tamagawa although I would continue to teach them for a while longer. The neighbourhood around Komazawa was quite young and trendy with some nice restaurants.

Singer-songwriter Hitomi Yaida（矢井田瞳）was someone that was quite the regular presence on the music video channels and music shows in the early 2000s, thanks to her catchy pop/rock tunes and dynamism. She was quite the barefoot princess of J-Pop armed with her guitar. But I realized that time really sped by when she showed up on NHK's "Uta Con"（うたコン）a few months ago to perform one of her latest tunes.

Yaida half-jokingly remarked that her "Komazawa Koen" (Komazawa Park), which is a track on her September 2022 12th original album "All Right"（オールライト）, wasn't a go-touchi song despite the title and the fact that the episode had been covering those traditional tunes before her appearance. In fact, "Komazawa Park" doesn't reference anything about the Tokyo park at all; it's all about a woman's realization that her daughter is growing up and asking all sorts of difficult questions. Yaida did mention that her creation was based on that coming-of-age situation with her own child. It's definitely a Yaiko song although it now contains some more wistfulness and less speed.