Shinobu Nakayama -- Makenaide, Yuuki（負けないで、勇気）

 

Yup, my friend and I got to watch "Fantastic Four: First Steps" after our tonkatsu lunch. Having a tonkatsu lunch with all that protein and carb (rice) can get a guy at my age pretty sleepy within an hour so it was saying something that my eyes were absolutely glued to the screen as Reed, Sue, Johnny, Ben, Herbie and Franklin were saving the day out there. No rapid metabolization of all that food at all which means that I did enjoy the movie and strangely enough, it's the first MCEU movie since "Avengers: Endgame" in 2019 that I would be willing to see again.

So I thought perhaps an aidoru song titled "Makenaide, Yuuki" (Don't Give Up, Courage) would be an ideal one to talk about after catching the FF on screen. And that song belongs to Shinobu Nakayama（中山忍）who's coming onto KKP for the very first time. She is the younger sister to the late Miho Nakayama（中山美穂）so we've got another sister tandem next to the Iwasakis, Hiromi（岩崎宏美）and Yoshimi（岩崎良美）.

I knew about Shinobu for quite a while after Miporin's hits had been hitting the airwaves so I was surprised to find out that the former had only released eight singles and three albums as an aidoru between 1988 and 1990, although she would eventually lead a very long life in the acting industry thereafter. Her third single was indeed the aforementioned "Makenaide, Yuuki" which was released in May 1989. 

Miporin may have gotten the royal jelly treatment from producers such as Toshiki Kadomatsu（角松敏生）to come up with some of those dance-friendly hits, but Shinobu, at least from what I can hear from "Makenaide, Yuuki", was pretty much kept to the conventional aidoru track. However, the song doesn't sound too bad here from Ryo Yonemitsu's（米光亮）arrangement of Tsugutoshi Goto's（後藤次利）melody especially with those swift violins in there. Yukinojo Mori（森雪之丞）was the lyricist for this one which peaked at No. 18.