Kiyoshi Hikawa -- Hatsukoi Ressha（初恋列車）

 

Let's see...over the 13-year history of this blog, this will be our 925th article regarding an enka song. I encountered the list of such tunes that have reached No. 1 on Oricon, and I actually had to scroll from the very first Oricon chart-topping enka, Masao Sen's（千昌夫）"Hoshikage no Waltz"（星影のワルツ）in 1968, all the way down to the year 2005 to find another enka chart topper since we've covered most of the hits. Mind you, some of those No. 1 hits in the scroll strike me more as conventional kayo kyoku than enka.

However, that song I found from 2005? Oh, yeah...it's an enka tune alright. I'm talking about Kiyoshi Hikawa's（氷川きよし）"Hatsukoi Ressha" (First Love Train) which was released in February of that year. Written by Ryuiichi Satomura（里村龍一）and composed by Michihiko Ohta（太田美知彦）under his pseudonym of Akira Kitano（北野明）, the song is all about a man jumping onto a train headed for the north country to track down that first love he left behind all that time ago. The arrangement is so enka that it practically cries for an ochoko and tokkuri of sake.

Released as his 8th single, along with that No. 1 ranking on Oricon, "Hatsukoi Ressha" won several awards including the Gold prize at the Japan Record Awards, and eventually the song ended up as the 39th-ranked single of the year. Hikawa made his 6th appearance on the Kohaku Utagassen that year but it was to sing another song and not this one. I swear, though, that there have been so many enka songs about heading up to northern Japan, I'm guessing that northern Japan has been grumbling "Hey, where are our royalties?!".