Perhaps knowing that City Pop is my favourite aspect of Japanese popular music, KKP readers may be wondering why I have yet to put up any Gosanke（御三家...The Big Three）, real or imagined, of City Pop singers male or female. The reason is that outside of Tatsuro Yamashita（山下達郎）and perhaps Makoto Matsushita（松下誠）, it's awfully hard to come up with a triumvirate that wouldn't have me bashing my head on the computer for not including this particular guy or gal. And if I'm fighting myself, I'm sure that there would be plenty of fans who would be pelting me with their two cents' worth.
However, there is an out of this potential trap although it still breaks one basic rule of the Gosanke. Instead of three, there are four men in this Gosanke so it really ought to be called a Goyonke（御四家...The Big Four）. This particular grouping which was apparently real has stuck itself into my head for years after first seeing it in the J-Wiki articles for each of the four singers mentioned (and it's been cited in one music-based Ameba blog, "Cobalt Blue"). And these guys are mentioned because they once belonged under the Toshiba EMI umbrella in the 1980s. Singers Yasuhiro Abe（安部恭弘）, Akira Inoue（井上鑑）, Junichi Inagaki（稲垣潤一）and Yudai Suzuki（鈴木雄大）were known as the New Wave Yon-nin Shuu (The New Wave 4).
I'm not particularly sure why Abe, Inoue, Inagaki and Suzuki were placed under New Wave considering what New Wave was all about in Western music in the 1980s. However, perhaps Toshiba EMI had thought that the four represented a truly new wave in adult contemporary music in comparison with the aidoru, enka and technopop that were also prevalent at the time. Regardless, I've placed 1982 in Labels since Abe and Inagaki were the last to debut in that year.
Yasuhiro Abe -- We Got It!
Akira Inoue -- Bartok no Kage（バルトークの影）
Yudai Suzuki -- Rainy Summer （レイニーサマー）
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