Joleen Benoit -- Tokyo Girl/Tokyo Woman

Hello, J-Canuck here. We have another article by occasional contributor Fireminer. Following the video, he'll take over the narrative.

I sometimes peruse YouTube for retro Japanese commercials, which was how I came across this Xerox advert. The song being featured is “Tokyo Girl” by the American single Joleen Benoit. It is the first track on her 1988 Japan-exclusive album “Joleen”.

This is a crowd-pleaser. On top of a catchy AOR tune guided by the clapping, you put a gratuitous amount of saxophone for that 50s flair. It goes well with the sunny lyrics, which depict a boy pinning for a manic pixie-type of girl with so much allure. Furthermore, “Tokyo Girl” and the rest of the album were performed by experienced artists who were pretty well-known in the easy listening world like Andrea Robinson (backing vocal), Joey Carbone (keyboardist) and Michael Thompson (guitarist). It is not a surprise that the song jumped to first place on the Oricon Western music chart in September 1988. Having the young actress Yuki Matsushita (松下 由樹) danced to your song in the Xerox commercial helped too.

As for the singer, Joleen Benoit was from the city of Farmington, Minnesota. She became Miss Minnesota in 1973 and toured with the United Service Organizations (USO) for a period of time. Her first single, 1986 “Forgotten Man”, was even about servicemen returning home. Joleen was also one of the people responsible for creating the Minnesotan supergroup “Women Who Cook”. The band was put together for the PBS Nighttimes Variety Show which Joleen was the host of. They even performed in the Soviet Union on a peace tour! You can read about the band here.

Joleen eventually released a follow-up single called “Tokyo Woman” (1990). I can not find anything about that single as well as the subsequent releases, but her last single was in 1999. Joleen then worked as a CBS Host for several years. I found her Facebook and YouTube page, but the former has been set to private while the latter has been inactive for years.