Yutaka Kimura Speaks ~ Japanese City Pop Masterpieces 100: Happy End -- Juu-ni-gatsu no Ame no Hi（12月の雨の日）

 

Number: 041

Lyricist: Takashi Matsumoto

Composer: Eiichi Ohtaki

Arranger: Happy End

From Happy End's 1970 album "Happy End"

"Juu-ni-gatsu no Ame no Hi" (A Rainy Day in December) is a signature song by Happy End（はっぴいえんど）bringing together for the first time Takashi Matsumoto's（松本隆）lyrics of his impressions of a rainy day in Roppongi and Eiichi Ohtaki's（大滝詠一）melody. It basically means that this song is the first step for City Pop. The words "wind" and "city" have already popped up within the lyrics. The season of the "wind rising" called pop music has arrived in Tokyo.

The above comes from "Disc Collection Japanese City Pop Revised" (2020).

Hi, J-Canuck here. Unlike the last Yutaka Kimura Speaks and Happy End article of "Kaze wo Atsumete"（風をあつめて）that I put up last August, "Juu-ni-gatsu no Ame no Hi" is a song that I hadn't actually covered on my own. I have to say that it is an impressively atmospheric tune about a person doing some people watching after a rain. Although there is no mention of Roppongi in Matsumoto's lyrics, I can imagine that person may be hanging out in the famed Almond Café at the southwest corner of the main intersection in the area.

I found Kimura's observation that this particular song represents the baby steps for City Pop which would get popularized several years into the 1970s. There's more of a folk rock arrangement than the usual thumping bass and smooth groove in the City Pop that we know and love, but again going back to Matsumoto's lyrics, "Juu-ni-gatsu no Ame no Hi" does speak to life and living in the city, namely Tokyo, back in the day. As for readers who may not understand the last two sentences of Kimura's feelings above, the two words of "wind" (kaze) and "city" (machi) that appear in the lyrics seem to have become the legendary words for the band since they would also be used for their 2nd album in 1971, "Kazemachi Roman"（風街ろまん...Wind City Romance）. In that album, there is that overarching concept of the winds of change blowing through the city...the city where the Happy End members grew up as they witnessed these changes. Kimura's final sentence lifts one lyric directly from the song to make his point that Japanese music itself was undergoing massive changes.