Yujiro Ishihara -- Akai Hatoba（赤い波止場）

 

Last week on "Uta Con"（うたコン）, several minutes were devoted to the songs of Yujiro Ishihara（石原裕次郎）, The Tough Guy, so I got to hear a number of tunes that already have representation here on the blog. Timing is everything so of course, this special segment was featured only a few weeks before his birthday on December 27th which would have been his 90th birthday.

The song "Futari no Sekai"（二人の世界）was sung live on the NHK stage that night and I thought about covering that one...except that I had already done so back in the summer of 2017. Well, I looked around for some other Ishihara tune and came across this one, "Akai Hatoba" (Red Quay), in his discography that had its own J-Wiki article. One reason is that this Ishihara entry was also the name of a September 1958 crime movie starring The Big Man himself. It was the 1950s so he was still playing the lean and mean young punk getting into yakuza trouble. All I can say about the above nightclub scene is that apparently it didn't take too long in the postwar era for hedonism to return in full bloom.

The theme song "Akai Hatoba" is an intriguing one. Written by Yoichi Nakagawa（中川洋一）and composed by Hajime Kaburagi（鏑木創）, it's still years away from Ishihara's crooning Mood Kayo tones, although the aforementioned "Futari no Sekai" did come out in 1965 as one early example. Furthermore, it's also not the jazz-rock stomp of his classic "Arashi wo Yobu Otoko" (嵐を呼ぶ男）that oozes danger. "Akai Hatoba" strikes me more as an uptempo kayo march which seems a bit odd when put up against that nightclub scene of tawdriness and immorality, although that is the only scene I've witnessed of the movie. Nakagawa's lyrics have Ishihara singing about how happy in love he is while traversing the port which in the movie is supposed to be Kobe. I wonder whether Ishihara's character of Jiro remains that happy by the end of the movie.