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| By Lystopad via Wikimedia Commons |
I've had this one on the back burner for a while, so I thought it was time to bring it to the light. It's another obscure song and apparently for Toshiko Tamamushi（玉虫俊子）, this was her one-and-only single to ever come out. There are some sites that talk about the obscurity of "Ochibazaiku (Watashi wa Ima)" (The Craft of Fallen Leaves ~ Me as I am Now) from December 1982 but I couldn't find any information about who the singer was and where she came from.
And that's too bad since I think her vocals are pretty good. Written by Uichi Ohwada（大和田宇一）and composed by Tatsuya Ogino（荻野達也）, "Ochibazaiku" strikes me as being an old-fashioned kayo kyoku most likely about heartbreak (autumn is the perfect season for that when it comes to the Showa Era music) that sounds as if it had been made a decade earlier and it also has a bit of Gallic flavour infused. At the same time, the first several seconds of the song reminds me of Mizue Takada's（高田みづえ）"Ai no Imagination" (愛のイマジネーション）that came out the previous year. Tamamushi has been referred to as an enka aidoru or an enkadol but I really don't get that vibe through this one song. She was apparently just a young lady with that one tune to her name.
Not only is Toshiko Tamamushi a mystery but so is SMS which was not simply an unknown vanity label: Sounds Marketing System was connected to Watanabe Production, with Apollon handling distribution. However, the SM07 catalogue sequence appears to have included small-scale or locally financed releases by one-off singers. That probably explains why the record looks professionally produced but left almost no national promotional or chart trail. So the safest conclusion I think is that 玉虫俊子 was the credited singer on one professionally produced but probably small-run SMS single.
ReplyDeleteHello, Brian. The YouTube fellow mentioned that SMS was an indies organization which was interesting to me since I couldn't really imagine such a company existing in the 1980s. However, being connected with Watanabe Productions is a big thing since that firm was arguably the biggest entertainment conglomerate in Japan at the time.
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