Mikio Sakai -- Taisetsu no Kimi e to（大切な君へと）

 

It was exactly a month ago that I put up Miwako Fujitani's（藤谷美和子）"Dry Flower"（ドライフラワー）, a love ballad that was used for the intriguing short-lived late-night Fuji-TV program "OIOI TOKYO TASTE ROOMS". As you probably have guessed, I have an old affinity for the show as something stylish that helped me to sleep when I first began my long odyssey in Japan from the mid-1990s.

A pity, though, that I could only find two YouTube videos with complete episodes of "ROOMS" and I've already used both of them in KKP posts. However, I have found yet another ballad that was utilized for the show, and it's by a singer-songwriter that I had never heard of before. Mikio Sakai（酒井ミキオ）hails from Hokkaido and made his major debut in February 1994. His second single, the subject of this article, was "Taisetsu no Kimi e to" (To My Precious You) which was released in October that same year. 

The wintry romance feelings are there in the lyrics and the overall vibe of "Taisetsu no Kimi e to", and the arrangement feels like a typical 90s love ballad that could be used in a lot of dramas...especially, dramas on Fuji-TV at the time. In fact, Sakai provided songs as themes for a number of dramas, variety shows and anime. His most recent single came out in 2015.