Saori Hareyama -- Ichi-en Dama no Tabigarasu（一円玉の旅がらす）

By Monaneko via Wikimedia Commons

For the past several years, we Canadians have been getting along in our economy without the one-cent coin, aka the penny. Rounding up and down has been our way of circumventing the lack of that copper disc when paying in cash here in the Great White North. And yet...and I will apologize to Japanese currency fans in advance for what I'm about to write...the one-yen coin over there still exists despite the fact that it looks and feels more like a token to slip into a gacha-gacha machine.

And yet, the one-yen coin received its fame and appreciation in the sun when this song came out as the debut single of enka singer Saori Hareyama（晴山さおり）. Released in March 1990, "Ichi-en Dama no Tabigarasu" (The One-Yen Coin Vagabond) was presented so that the coin was depicted as the typical historical lone-wolf hero on the byways and highways of Japan. At around the same time, the consumption tax was first applied to the bills of the Japanese public so that having all of those one-yen coins became rather precious in trying to provide exact change.

Written by Toyohisa Araki（荒木とよひさ）and composed by Tetsuya Gen（弦哲也）, it was created as this rather robust if playful enka performed by the then-16-year-old Hareyama from Kanagawa Prefecture. I first saw and heard it played on a recent episode of "Shin BS Nihon no Uta"（新BS日本の歌）and just from how it sounded and what the song was about, I figured that it would have ended up on NHK's music vignette show "Minna no Uta"（みんなのうた）, and sure enough it was there.

"Ichi-en Dama no Tabigarasu" won a number of awards including Best New Artist for Hareyama who was especially lauded for her kobushi, the vibrato technique that is vital to any enka singer. Hareyama's career in singing had started when she won an award in NHK's amateur singing program "Nodo Jiman"（のど自慢）in 1988. Following that debut, however, her career failed to stay on fire and by 1992, she went into temporary retirement. She decided to give it another go for another decade beginning in 1995, but this time, she went along more of a pop vein although eventually nothing really took off for her.