Bread & Butter -- Hotel Pacific

 

The Pacific Hotel Chigasaki（パシフィックホテル茅ヶ崎）had its time between 1965 and 1988 in Kanagawa Prefecture and seems to have been quite the resort back in the day. Certainly, its appearance stood out among the landscape although I'm not sure whether it attracted the celebrities. With the bankruptcy of its managing corporation in the late 1980s, the hotel closed down and for another decade, it apparently stood there crumbling away before it was finally demolished with a resort condominium arising from its ashes.

Again, I'm uncertain about celebrities staying there, but one future celebrity who had actually worked at the Pacific part-time was Satsuya Iwasawa（岩沢幸矢）, one-half of the brother folk/City Pop duo Bread & Butter（ブレッド&バター）when he'd been thinking of a career in hotels. In 1981, the duo released the album "Pacific" from which one track was "Hotel Pacific".

"Hotel Pacific" is a fairly melancholy song about thinking of that lost love while at the famous hotel. Fuyumi Iwasawa（岩沢二弓）provided the laconic bossa-tinged melody while Yumi Matsutoya（松任谷由実）wrote the lyrics under her pen name of Karuho Kureta（呉田軽歩）. All in all, it sounds like something that Michael Franks would sing, and I believe that it can now be used to think wistfully of the Pacific itself. Maybe even famous painter Hiroshi Nagai（永井博）could have been inspired by the old place. At least, one other band was inspired.