Midori Hatakeyama -- Shusse Kaidou（出世街道）

 

The above is a photograph of an intersection in Asakusa and I believe that building on the left is the main tourist centre. I never visited the place since I was actually working and not touring in my old stomping grounds. 

Back in 2017, I posted a song called "Koi wa Kamiyo no Mukashi kara"（恋は神代の昔から）, originally recorded by enka singer Midori Hatakeyama（畠山みどり）that I'd first discovered on a charity kayo kyoku concert on NHK. Well, just by chance, the other day I managed to discover another Hatakeyama song performed on "Uta Con"（うたコン）that was released a little over six months following the singer's debut of "Koi wa Kamiyo no Mukashi kara".

"Shusse Kaidou" (The Road to Success) was the Hokkaido singer's 3rd single from December 1962 and I think it's been seen as her signature song. Created by the same duo behind her debut, lyricist Tetsuro Hoshino（星野哲郎）and composer/arranger Shosuke Ichikawa（市川昭介）, Hatakeyama sings this as a bokyo kayo（望郷歌謡）or a song of longing which means it shares a similarity with Hachiro Kasuga's（春日八郎）iconic "Wakare no Ippon Sugi" (別れの一本杉) as it relates the tale of someone who has to go to the big city away from their rural village to be able to make it in the world though it also means sad farewells and long separations. Considering that there had been a government-encouraged mass migration of people as young as junior high school graduates from the towns to the cities from the late 1940s to get the economy up and running fast again, such songs hit the heart hard.

NHK noticed that, too. In fact, Hatakeyama was invited onto the 1963 edition of the Kohaku Utagassen for her first appearance on the New Year's Eve special, her first of three appearances with the last two coming in 1964 and 1966. What has struck me about her singing was that she was all of 23 years old when she recorded "Shusse Kaidou" and yet her vocals sound like those of a much more veteran performer. I'm not an enka expert by any means but that voice is not green but darn oaken to me.

Hatakeyama is now 85 years old and her most recent 78th single came out in 2016. One other piece of trivia that I read on her J-Wiki profile is that she'd been once known as one of the more ravenous stock investors within the enka community during the financially crazed Bubble era in late 1980s Japan. At one point, she'd made 4.7 billion yen but then lost it all when the bubble finally imploded at the turn of the decade. She owed a lot of money but was somehow able to pay it all back over the years, vowing to never play that wild with her funds ever again. Perhaps this could be considered her road to wisdom?