Arashi -- Sakura Sake（サクラ咲ケ）

 

Happy Monday to you! As it stands right now, although we're just a little over a week away from Spring arriving, I've got a feeling that Spring didn't get the memo at least for our area. It's still feeling plenty cold out there and there are still some sizable snow mountains. However, it does appear that Tokyo may be getting into cherry blossom season a little ahead of schedule with some of the familiar pink blooms beginning to open up. I can imagine that the full O-Hanami season may indeed be returning to places like Ueno Park after a few years of the pandemic.

Returning to last Tuesday's episode of "Uta Con"（うたコン）which had a relative treasure trove of new songs for me to explore, the Johnny's group Naniwa Danshi（なにわ男子）made their first appearance on the program, I believe, and they performed a cover of their senpai group Arashi's（嵐） old hit, "Sakura Sake" (Bloom, Cherry Blossoms).

I still miss the fellows en masse following their breakup a few years ago, although former member Jun Matsumoto（松本潤）has been showing up as the star of this year's NHK weekly jidai geki, "Dou Suru, Ieyasu?"（どうする家康...What Will You Do, Ieyasu?）. Anyways, "Sakura Sake" was Arashi's 14th single from March 2005 and it's an appropriately upbeat tune to hint at the shedding of the winter clothes and the laying out of the blue tarp under the cherry trees for the annual O-Hanami parties (which would often instigate the shedding of the regular clothes, thanks to copious amounts of drink). Written by Takeshi Aida（相田毅）and composed by Arata Tanimoto（谷本新）, there's something of a 1980s West Coast AOR-rock beat in this one.

"Sakura Sake" went Gold as it was another No. 1 hit for Arashi. According to an Oricon-organized Cherry Blossom Song popularity poll done for 2013 and 2014, the song ranked in at No. 2, just behind Naotaro Moriyama's（森山直太朗）"Sakura"（さくら）.