Fumiko Sawada -- Chotto Harukaze（ちょっと春風）

 

I can imagine then-aidoru Fumiko Sawada（沢田富美子）and her father having THE talk about her career in entertainment. Pere Sawada would have sat his daughter down and told her that the geinokai is fraught with uncertainty and there's no telling how long or how short her career as a singer would be. Finally, he encouraged her to have some sort of backup plan. Then Fumiko would say at the age of 19 that she's been investing in real estate and that she would end up owning multiple buildings in the tonier districts of Tokyo. He would then conclude everything by saying "Uh...never mind". 

But none of us are here to discuss Fumiko Sawada the property mogul. We're here to check out Sawada the aidoru, as brief a career as it was. The way that I found out about the mogul part was when I wrote up her 1986 single, the cover version of WHAM!'s smoky "Where Did Your Heart Go?", under the stage name of Maria Sakurai（桜井真里亜）. And up until today, that was all I had on Sawada but then I found this early single by the Nagoya native which had been posted onto YouTube very recently.

"Chotto Harukaze" (A Little Spring Breeze) was her 2nd EP from April 1981. Listening to this appropriately breezy and cheerful ditty and knowing the year of release, I kinda figured out pretty quickly who the songwriters were. They were lyricist Yoshiko Miura（三浦徳子）, composer Yuuichiro Oda（小田裕一郎）and arranger Masaaki Omura（大村雅朗）, all folks who had worked together less than a year earlier on the similarly breezy "Aoi Sangoshou"（青い珊瑚礁）for Seiko Matsuda（松田聖子）. I think that the three even added in a bit of Olivia Newton-John's "Xanadu" for good measure. I think the song is a perfectly delightful aidoru tune but I don't know how strongly it did on Oricon although the fact that her discography had only lasted from 1979 to 1982 (eight records) with a four-year break before her cover of the WHAM! song probably meant that the singing part of her variegated career (she was also acting, modeling and DJ'ing) wasn't the most predominant.