Yoko Aso -- Weekend no Koen Douri（ウィークエンドの公園通り）

 

It's usually been the case when I read the more ravenous of City Pop fans' comments of how they wished they could have been in Tokyo back in the late 1970s or 1980s, I often counter that the fans themselves are lucky because they have access to all of this wonderful City Pop material in one go without having to wait for months or years on end for the variety of such songs. However, I have to admit that whenever I hear music such as this, it does make me wax nostalgic for the time of half a century ago in cities such as Tokyo and Osaka as to what urban life was like back then (although I know that during the early 1970s, Japan underwent some hardship due to the Nixon oil shocks).

Yup, there's nothing like bossa nova to act as world music's version of a creamy salve for whatever ails me, and there's plenty of that in Yoko Aso's（麻生よう子）"Weekend no Koen Douri" (Park Avenue on the Weekend). A song about falling in breezy love, I'm pretty sure that the title refers to Koen Douri in Shibuya, Tokyo rather than Park Avenue in New York City, although I think the song is perfect for both settings. By the way, the photo at the top is indeed that of Koen Douri back in 2009. I don't know what the avenue was like in the early 1970s but maybe from the song, perhaps it was already quite the stylish place to be and to be seen.

"Weekend no Koen Douri" was written by Haruo Hayashi（林春生）with music by Hiromasa Suzuki（鈴木宏昌）, and it was a track on Aso's 2nd album "Gozen Reiji no Kane/Touhikou"（午前零時の鐘 / 逃避行） from December 1974. The cheerful blend of bossa nova and sunshine pop reminds me a bit of what the band NOVO was doing at around the same time.

I've walked up and down Koen Douri a number of times when the department stores Parco and Marui were there. For trivia's sake, I discovered that the street got its name from the fact that the Shibuya Parco had opened there in 1972. Parco is the Italian word for "park". The store closed down temporarily for a few years beginning in 2016 due to the need for renovations, but it was back open as of November 2019.