Mineko Nishikawa -- Mineko no Madros-san（峰子のマドロスさん）

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Noelle Tham has been our resident expert on "Kayo Kyoku Plus" on the older Showa era music for close to a decade now, so it was quite revelatory when I found out from her that the genre of enka only became known officially as enka in the early 1970s. The songs that I had known as enka from before that time had once been scattered among different genres before the great amalgamation took place, and then when everything was put under the enka umbrella, all those tunes were retrofitted as enka songs.

One such genre in kayo kyoku was madros kayo（マドロス歌謡）or "sailor pop" and sure enough, such songs were often about seamen shoving off to the great blue, leaving their loves behind. The Japanese predilection for gairaigo（外来語...foreign loan words） continued here as "madros" came from the Dutch or Flemish word for "sailor", "matroos". Some of the more famous singers sang madros kayo such as Takeo Fujishima（藤島桓夫）and his "Kaeri no Minato" (かえりの港) with the singer often putting on that old-fashioned sailor uniform.

I was watching another grand old episode of "Yoru no Hit Studio"（夜のヒットスタジオ）the other night when I came across enka singer Mineko Nishikawa（西川峰子）who I first wrote about back in 2016 with her 1974 hit "Anata ni Ageru" (あなたにあげる). She performed her own tribute to the sailors with "Mineko no Madros-san" (Mineko's Sailor) which was her 9th single from July 1976. A very happy-go-lucky enka song that fulfills the requisite of what an old madros kayo was, it's all about a sailor blowing a kiss to his girlfriend before heading out to sea. It was written by Yoko Yamaguchi（山口洋子）and composed by Kosho Inomata（猪俣公章）; there's nothing melancholy about this at all, and it seems as if the young lady is good with her boyfriend enjoying the marine life.

I'm not sure how well "Mineko no Madros-san" did on the charts but she did get her second invitation to NHK's Kohaku Utagassen to sing the song at the end of 1976.