Gosanke Imagined: "The Best 10" Sannin Musume（ザ・ベストテン三人娘）

 

Up to this point, I've been doing the weekly Gosanke（御三家...The Big Three） series of singing threesome conglomerations for a little over four months now, and they've all been officially given life by the media/fans. However, I'm kinda thinking that it might be time to put up some Gosanke or Sannin Musume（三人娘...The Big Three Ladies） as imagined by me so you can say that this will be KKP-homegrown trios. Therefore, I have the byline that begins with "Gosanke Imagined".

Well, my first attempt at "Gosanke Imagined" is a trio that has been in mind ever since that fateful Japan trip in the summer of 1981. It was following the trip though that one of my Japanese Language School classmates and fellow trip-mates had us over to her place for a small afternoon party which also consisted of repeated viewings of her "The Best 10"（ザ・ベストテン）and "The Top 10"（ザ・トップ10）tapes. And it was there that I saw the big hits for 1981 and among the singers that kept on showing up on multiple episodes were Seiko Matsuda（松田聖子）, Hitomi Ishikawa（石川ひとみ）and Hiromi Iwasaki（岩崎宏美）.

All of them began as aidoru but at the time that I saw these three ladies perform, I saw Matsuda and Ishikawa as the happy-go-lucky bouncy idol singers that impressed upon me the image of the 80s aidoru (although the latter was already in her early twenties). Iwasaki struck me as this pure female pop singer with the amazing vocal cords...it would take me a few years to learn that she had begun her career in the mid-1970s as an aidoru herself. However, these are the three that imprinted themselves into my pop culture-addled psyche as the first three female Japanese pop singers to launch my continuing odyssey into kayo kyoku and J-Pop.

Of course, with the imagined Sannin Musume here, there was also the very real Gosanke of the Tanokin Trio（たのきんトリオ）in that year. Anyways, let's see what else my imaginings can bring up in terms of trios.

Hiromi Iwasaki -- Sumire Iro no Namida （すみれ色の涙）

Seiko Matsuda -- Natsu no Tobira （夏の扉）

Hitomi Ishikawa -- Machibuse　（まちぶせ）