Toshihiko Tahara -- Harajuku Kiss（原宿キッス）

Marie-Sophie Mejan via Wikimedia Commons
Harajuku in the old days

Late last night, I received an email from my friend of some 30 years' standing that he and his wife were able to make it to Japan for their vacation. Having to go through an elongated immigration process at Haneda due to some malfunctioning fingerprint scanners wasn't great but at least, they got through it and they're now enjoying themselves in Tokyo. His wife decided to torture me by sending a photo of a sumptuous tonkatsu dinner they had up in the restaurant floors of electronics emporium Yodobashi Akiba.😱

Not sure whether my friends will be visiting Harajuku during their time there. As late as my last few years living in Japan in the late 2000s, I still saw a few remnants of folks twisting the day away by Yoyogi Park. However, I think the heyday for the Takenozoku（竹の子族）dancers was back in the 1980s when they would take over the space lining the park on Sunday afternoons.

Music wasn't one to let go of any opportunities in other aspects of the pop culture zeitgeist. In fact, Toshihiko Tahara（田原俊彦）released his 9th single "Harajuku Kiss" back in May 1982 to capture the feeling of the Takenozoku back then. The melody and arrangement by Kyohei Tsutsumi（筒美京平）and Motoki Funayama（船山基紀）respectively are familiar to me since I used to hear those horns over and over on repeats of "The Best 10" and other music shows or retrospectives. Tomo Miyashita（宮下智）was responsible for the lyrics.

"Harajuku Kiss" was a huge hit for Toshi-chan as it stayed at No. 1 for three weeks straight, and it would become the 23rd-ranked single for 1982. Its first placement onto an album was later in September when it became a track on "Best of Tahara Toshihiko"（ベストオブ田原俊彦）. It was also a No. 1 hit.