Hiroya Hama -- Ichibangai Blues（一番街ブルース）

Although I still hear new enka singers and new enka singers making their debut on shows such as NHK's "Shin BS Nihon no Uta"（新BS日本の歌）, its city cousin Mood Kayo isn't something that I see and hear all that much unless the current crop of singers are covering the old classics from the 1960s. So it was with some surprise that I saw this fellow Hiroya Hama（浜博也）come on "Shin BS Nihon no Uta" the other day to do just that...sing a Mood Kayo. "Ichibangai Blues" (First Street Blues) is perhaps his latest single from August 2025. 

Hama is singing solo but he's backed up by a female chorus and it's got that snazzy Latin swing in there so those old memories of Mood Kayo are coming back along with images of Akasaka and Ginza bars selling drinks by the thousands of yen. Nice to hear that someone is keeping the genre's torch burning. "Ichibangai Blues" was written by Ryusei Sameshima（鮫島琉星）and composed by Akihiro Ohtani（大谷明裕）.

The crazy thing is that I had never seen nor heard of Hama before. And yet, according to his J-Wiki profile, the man born as Hiroya Suzuki（鈴木浩也）has been singing since 1982. In fact, he was brought in that year to be the third vocalist for the veteran Mood Kayo group Masayoshi Tsuruoka and Tokyo Romantica（鶴岡雅義と東京ロマンチカ）. Leaving the group in 1994, he then began his own solo career.