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.
In the most recent ROY article that I've written, I noted that I didn't bother profiling the Top 3 songs on the August 3rd 1970 Oricon chart (yep, exactly 53 years ago) because I had yet to write about any of them. Well, that's now down to two songs.
That is correct since I'm now covering the kayo kyoku that hit No. 1 on that day, Hide & Rosanna's（ヒデとロザンナ） May 1970 5th single"Ai wa Kizutsukiyasuku" (Love is Fragile). Despite the direct translation that I've provided, the record cover has the official English title as "Love is Free".
It's a little surprising that it's taken this long to cover "Ai wa Kizutsukiyasuku" since I did write about their "Ai no Kiseki"（愛の奇跡）here several years ago and the melody is familiar to me as one that has probably been performed on music shows such as "Uta Con"（うたコン）. Written by Jun Hashimoto（橋本淳）and composed by Taiji Nakamura（中村泰士）, the opening verses show a vocal give-and-take between Hide and Rosanna about their love along with an uncertainty in the melody before it gives way to a key shift into something happier and more hopeful with the two singing together.
I love the triumphant trumpet, by the way. The song not only hit No. 1 on August 3rd 1970 but it stayed there for the rest of the month. "Ai wa Kizutsukiyasuku" eventually ended up as the No. 7 single of the year, and it became a million-seller with it also leading to Hide & Rosanna getting invited onto the Kohaku Utagassen for the very first time that year. They would make one more appearance on the annual NHK special the following year.
A couple of days ago, we "Star Wars" geeks heard the announcement that we had been waiting for: the 2nd trailer to "The Force Awakens" was online. As an early teen, I saw the original movie at a Toronto movie theatre in 1979 that had been showing "A New Hope" everyday for two years since it had opened...and it still had lines snaking around corners!
Feeling a bit creative today, I then thought about which kayo kyoku would have debuted at around the time that the very first movie in the franchise premiered in May 1977. I did some looking on J-Wiki and discovered that there was one tune that had been released about a month before George Lucas'magnum opus hit the screens. And coincidentally enough, it had the title of "Hoshi no Suna" (Star Sand...or my choice of Stardust, although the sand has me thinking of the dusty planet of Tatooine).
The thing is that I have heard the song before since I've got it on the 1977 discs from my "Seishun Uta Nenkan"（青春歌年鑑）series. As soon as I heard singer Rumiko Koyanagi（小柳ルミ子）launch straight into the lyrics of lost love in that really high-pitched voice, I just went "Oh, yeah...I've heard this one before!" Speaking of the lyrics, I was caught a bit off-guard when I saw the lyricist himself show up on the above video of "Yoru no Hit Studio" (unfortunately, that video has been taken down). It turned out to be Hiroshi Sekiguchi（関口宏）...a newscaster (although he's listed on J-Wiki as also being an actor, emcee and all-round tarento) that I used to see back on TV over there, and in much grayer form.
The music for Koyanagi's 22nd single was composed by the late Hide Demon（出門英）who was one-half of the singing duo Hide & Rosanna. Listening to the song, it has all the romanticism of a wind-swept melodrama. Not quite sure whether it would have been able to replace John Williams' mournful version of the Jedi Theme when young Luke Skywalker was looking away at the twin suns setting in "A New Hope", though (yes, I'm being snarky).
I'm not sure when the cover was performed, but Hide & Rosanna did their own version of "Hoshi no Suna". As for the Koyanagi original, it went all the way up to No. 2 on Oricon and became the 13th-ranked song of 1977. It also won Sekiguchi an award in songwriting and got the singer another ticket to the Kohaku Utagassen in the same year which was her 7th appearance on the New Year's Eve special.
As for that movie, I heard it won a few accolades itself.
During my time in Japan, I got to know my fair share of gaijin tarento (non-Japanese TV personalities) whether it was Thane Camus, Chicago-born Dave Spector or former Megadeth guitarist Marty Friedman. My ability with the Japanese wasn't too shabby but when I saw those guys on some morning wide show or a variety program just gabbing away at the speed of a very friendly Osakan, I simply thought that I would never be able to make it on television. Not that I ever harboured any desire to do so...I think it was Camus who may have said to a reporter once that if a foreign wannabe wasn't willing to make an utter fool out of himself/herself on nationwide telly, then don't even bother.
Well, perhaps things were a bit easier...and rarer...for that tarento from overseas. I didn't get to see her nearly as often as I did the above mentioned fellows, but there was an Italian lady by the name of Rosanna Zambon who was a longtime resident in Japan who used to pop up as a talking head on one of those shows or as a guest cook to whip up some dishes from her home country (and boy, do the Japanese LOVE their pasta).
I also realized that a long time ago she was one-half of a duo known as Hide & Rosanna（ヒデとロザンナ）who often popped up via vintage footage on those kayo kyoku retrospectives. For this article, I'm profiling their debut single from October 1968"Ai no Kiseki" (The Miracle of Love). Hide was born Hideo Kato（加藤秀男）in 1942 in Tokyo and debuted as an actor under the stage name of Eiji Mizuki （水木英二）before making his start as a singer in 1962 with "Tokyo Romantic Guy". Changing that stage name once more to Hide Demon（出門ヒデ）, he made another start of it in a duo known as Yuki & Hide（ユキとヒデ）in 1966 before that fizzled out a couple of years later. Then, in that same year, he met 18-year-old Rosanna who had arrived in Japan a year earlier at the encouragement of her uncle who was performing as a musician there. After that, "Ai no Kiseki" made its debut.
I'm sure the suits at Nippon Columbia were wondering if a miracle indeed had happened with this song and this duo. Written by Kotaro Nakamura（中村小太郎）and composed by Shinichi Tanabe（田辺信一）, "Ai no Kiseki" became a huge hit for Hide & Rosanna. Starting out with some ominous strings, the song goes immediately into that snare drum-and-horns arrangement that automatically yells natsumero for me ("Blue Light Yokohama" has the same effect). My only problem with the song is just that cornball instrumental section when Rosanna starts wailing plaintively in Italian, but my impression is that having a foreign language incorporated into a kayo must have given the tune that extra oomph of character according to the songwriters.
But I digress. As I said, "Ai no Kiseki" got Hide & Rosanna on the map. It peaked at No. 6 on Oricon (it kept hovering in the Top 10 for almost 2 months) and was the No. 25 single of the year for 1969.
Hide and Rosanna would get married in 1975 and have three children who are currently all in the entertainment industry. Sadly, though, Hide would pass away from stomach cancer in 1990. The duo was able to release music right up to the late 1980s.
