The Genova -- Sakhalin no Hi wa Kiezu（サハリンの灯は消えず）

From Geography.name

 

Last Wednesday, I posted a 1962 song with the title of "Furusato wa Souya no Hate ni"（ふるさとは宗谷の果てに）, by Masao Kikuchi（菊地正夫）who would later take on the stage name of Takuya Jou（城卓矢）to even bigger success. Written and composed by Kikuchi's older brother, Jun Kitahara（北原じゅん）, the kayo kyoku was their paean to their birthplace, Karafuto Island, which had been taken over by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II and turned into Sakhalin.

Well, it looks like Kitahara's ardor for Sakhalin and perhaps Russia/the USSR in general continued forward for quite some time. Later in the decade, the songwriter took five young lads under his wing and whipped them into Group Sounds band The Genova（ザ・ジェノバ）. Led by bassist Shoji Sasaki（佐々木章二）, despite the band being named after an Italian city, their debut single in February 1968 was "Sakhalin no Hi wa Kiezu" (The Light of Sakhalin Will Never Die), once again which dealt with the love afar (well, not that far, geographically speaking) for the island or someone on the island. In fact, according to an Ameba blog, Kitahara would create a few more singles with that Russian theme in mind in what was called the Sakhalin Series.

Kitahara came up with the jangly melody while Kaoru Wakaki（若木香）wrote the pining lyrics. I noted some of that blog mentioning about Kitahara's rationale that Russian folk songs had been popular in Japan for a long time and so that particular sound would sell, but I never got any hint of underlying Russian music in "Sakhalin no Hi wa Kiezu". It struck me as being the usual GS song and it was a pretty successful one at that, selling approximately 100,000 records. But I don't know how long they lasted although the GS boom would fade out early in the 1970s.