I've been a fan of Japanese popular music for 40 years, and have managed to collect a lot of material during that time. So I decided I wanted to talk about Showa Era music with like-minded fans. My particular era is the 70s and 80s (thus the "kayo kyoku"). The plus part includes a number of songs and artists from the last 30 years and also the early kayo. So, let's talk about New Music, aidoru, City Pop and enka.
Credits
I would like to give credit where credit is due. Videos are from YouTube and other sources such as NicoNico while Oricon rankings and other information are translated from the Japanese Wikipedia unless noted.
A couple of months ago, I finally got around to talking about that spooky theme for the original "Ring" movie that unleashed Sadako onto the pop culture zeitgeist. HIIH's "feels like HEAVEN" could send chills up your spine or send you down to the dance floor depending on the version and your mood.
To be honest, I think I'm actually enjoying the coupling song to the January 1998 single by HIIH even more than "feels like HEAVEN". "Yuganda Tokei" (Warped Clock) is all very moody and such, but I do appreciate having the beat machine in there. Perhaps as one YouTube commenter stated, this would have made for a nice ending theme for one of the other J-Horror movies such as "Rasen".
The JASRAC database was able to clarify things a bit on the songwriting credits. Writing and composing can be laid at the feet of one Tomo Hirata（平田知昌）or DJ Tomo.
Horror isn't my favourite genre in movies. I remember catching "Alien" for the first time at my friend's house on VHS, and I had a sofa cushion fully planted over my face during the infamous chestburster scene. Ironically, I guess that I was reenacting the facehugger scene.
Then during the late 1990s, when I was on my second tour of duty in Japan as an English conversation teacher, the horror movie "Ring"（リング）came out which suddenly became a big thing, followed by other spooky mindbenders such as "Rasen"（らせん）and "Chakushin Ari"（着信アリ）, and Hollywood came on knocking to adapt them. One of my good friends actually caught "Ring" at a theatre in Tokyo and he's one that doesn't scare easily at all. And yet, he admitted to me that when that scene arrived of Sadako crawling out of the television, he completely freaked out.
Apparently, so did Morning Musume!
The commercials for the original "Ring" had all of the creepy scenes but there was also what sounded like a haunting techno jingle to advertise the movie. The female vocalist seemed to be singing "It's surely coming...it's surely coming...". People were probably terrified and had that urge to get onto the dance floor at the same time.
Well, I only found out recently that the song was titled "feels like 'HEAVEN'" and it was by a unit called HIIH which released it as a single in January 1998. With very little information on it, I still don't quite know whether the name is pronounced "Hiiiii" like a Japanese shriek or "H to H". I actually had to dig deeper into the search engines to find out that the female vocalist was identified as Rie Takahashi (not to be confused with the seiyuu). Not sure who her partner was either, although maybe it's the songwriter TOMO TETSUAKI SAWACHI. I found the English translation for "feels like 'HEAVEN'", and the lyrics seem to describe Sadako's search for that long-sought happiness...and a really good Lux conditioner, while slaughtering as many viewers as she can.
The above performance incidentally sounds warmer with a Tetsuya Komuro（小室哲哉）touch.
August 15 2020: The JASRAC database has listed the songwriters as Tomo Hirata（平田知昌）and Hiroto Otsubo（大坪弘人）.
