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The above is a very old piece of correspondence to Miss Mellie Ryan that is apparently at the Riley Birthplace and Museum in the state of Indiana, United States. The museum is where 19th-century poet James Whitcomb Riley was born and raised.
I was also born and raised in a time when pen pals were a thing. When I was on the JET Programme between 1989 and 1991, my friends back in Toronto and I exchanged letters on our situations in Japan and Canada. Since it took a week for a letter to get from Japan to Canada, the fastest that I could get a reply to my letter was most likely around three weeks, taking into consideration the time for my friends to write out their end of the correspondence. Things are obviously much more lickety-split now for most people and areas.
Back in 2023, I wrote about relative wunderkind singer-songwriter imase and his "NIGHT DANCER" with its groovy urban contemporary feeling. I liked it so much that I even went out on a limb and predicted that he would end up on the Kohaku Utagassen before too long. Well, I'm still waiting for that Nostradamus wish to come true but until then, I discovered that he and Japanese pop legend Yumi Matsutoya（松任谷由実）collaborated on a song together which came out in the last couple of weeks at the end of May.
"Buntsuu" (Correspondence) is a song about a couple of people getting to know each other through some form of the title and hoping that they can do a face-to-face in the near future. With both Yuming（ユーミン）and imase also working on words and music together, it's a lovely duet that has had some commenters noting that it's a mix of the old kayo kyoku (or perhaps New Music of Yumi Arai's time) and current J-Pop. I can also hear some of that bossa nova, a genre that Yuming has known for quite a long time since "Ano Hi ni Kaeritai"（あの日にかえりたい）. Plus the laidback groove was rolled out by Tomita Lab（富田ラボ）in the arrangement and he's quite the expert at that. I remember Yuming and Tomita Lab collaborating on something themselves a couple of decades earlier.
Yuming is pretty versatile, isn’t she? This is a bit different than the type of genre I would expect from her. But then again, she was always pretty flexible!
ReplyDeleteI am also old enough to have also lived in a time when people still wrote letters and sent postcards. Back then, everything took time, so I guess it was all normal. Taking photos and developing film could take up to a week, and if you were lucky, 24 hours. I also remember that getting a new pair of glasses took a few weeks to a month. Some computers took time to boot up, and programs took time to load. Ordering books or anything else for that matter took time. The convenience of the modern world is great, but I think we may have lost part of the excitement of anticipation.
However, I do not miss the cost of overseas phone calls nor do I miss expensive calling cards.
Hello, Brian. Yes, I think once she became Mrs. Matsutoya, the sky was the limit for her and her music.
DeleteI certainly remember those days of depositing film at the shop and waiting three days for development. Getting CDs was once a 6-week wait from sending the mail order form from "Eye-Ai" to finally getting them in the mail.
When it came to phones, I remember having to learn the terms "station-to-station" and "person-to-person".