Tatsuro Yamashita -- Ni-sen Ton no Ame（2000トンの雨）

 

Yes, wouldn't it be wonderful to be gaze up at a blue sky filled with fluffy white cumulus clouds and marvel at the futuristic city all around us? Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case for Okinawans since they are being inundated with precipitation right now according to the NHK report that I saw earlier this morning. 

I wouldn't be surprised if they felt as if two thousand tons of rain were falling on Naha right now, although the actual amount is more along the lines of several millimetres. Still, it's a lot of water per hour. And attempting to segue into this article's song, we have Tatsuro Yamashita's（山下達郎）"Ni-sen Ton no Ame" (2000 Tons of Rain) which was originally the final track on his December 1978 album "GO AHEAD!". Written and composed by Yamashita, it had actually begun life as the instrumental ending theme for the mid-70s early evening phone request radio show, "Denrick '75"（電リク'75...Phone Request '75）, on Nippon Cultural Broadcasting, before it got expanded into a full song with lyrics.

If I were asked by a City Pop newcomer for an example of a Tatsuro Yamashita ballad, I could recommend "Ni-sen Ton no Ame". With the seeming lyrical theme of loneliness in the big city (and yeah, metric tonnes of rain can do that to one), it's got Tats' soaring vocals, solid backing vocals by him and Minako Yoshida（吉田美奈子）along with Motoo Okazaki's（岡崎資夫）tender sax solo (although the video below is a karaoke version). Despite the theme of rain in the song, the overall feeling in my ears and head is that the rain is breaking and the shafts of sunbeams are beginning to bring some hope into the proceedings.

In June 2003, Yamashita released his 38th single which was a new vocal version of "Ni-sen Ton no Ame" (which you can hear in the purple video on top). Used as the ending theme for the Shochiku supernatural romance "Ren'ai Shashin ~ Collage of our life"（恋愛寫眞...Photos of Love）, this version is a more stripped down affair focusing on Tats' vocals while a piano pounds out the chords. The trailer below for the movie is using the original version, though. Meanwhile, the 2003 self-cover is a track on his 12th album "Sonorite" which came out in September 2005 to a No. 2 ranking.