Kenji Haga -- City Alone（シティ・アローン）

 

Kenji Haga（羽賀研二）is a long-standing tarento on Japanese television whom I've seen go through all sorts of trials and tribulations, and certainly a lot of his media exposure was due to his romantic relationship with fellow tarento and model Anna Umemiya（梅宮アンナ）beginning from the 1990s. What I hadn't known until I was well into doing the blog was that he basically got his start as one-third of the Ii Tomo Seinen Tai（いいとも青年隊...The Ii Tomo Youth Brigade） , the first group of song-and-dance men to perform on Fuji-TV's long-running noon time variety show "Morita Kazuyoshi Hour - Waratte Ii Tomo"（森田一義アワー・笑っていいとも....The Kazuyoshi Morita Hour: It's OK To Laugh) . Apparently back then, he used to put on the glasses to show off that intellectual beefcake look.

Eventually with his rising profile in the geinokai in the 1980s, one of his powers-that-be probably gave the order "OK, Kenji, you gotta cut a record!" as usually was the case with any entertainer. And indeed, Haga released a number of singles between 1982 and 2004 but with only two albums in 1984 and 1985. The first album was "Kouha Bigaku"（硬派美学...Hardline Aesthestics） and the glasses-less Haga looked all of fourteen years old (he was well into his twenties) on the cover. Maybe it was a Hiromi Go（郷ひろみ）syndrome or something.

Anyways, one of the tracks on "Kouha Bigaku" is "City Alone" (and the above version seems to have been truncated). Haga appears to have taken on that bespectacled dandy-esque character from the top video when he recorded this one. His vocals sound a bit like crooning Yosui Inoue（井上陽水）while the City Pop melody by Kingo Hamada（浜田金吾）provides the atmosphere of the big, bad and lonely if fascinating metropolis. Yumi Yoshimoto（吉本由美）was the lyricist here.