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.
For all those kayo kyoku lovers, Saori Yuki's（由紀さおり）"Tegami" (The Letter) is a breezy classic that first hit record store shelves and ears back in 1970. And Saori is still performing it on kayo programs such as "Uta Con"（うたコン）.
Well, what I hadn't known was that aidoru Hitomi Aki（秋ひとみ）, who had a relatively brief career in the limelight between 1976 and 1982, had her own cover version of "Tegami" in her second and final album"Omoi"（想い...Memories） from 1980. Although I've only featured a few of her songs on the blog, my impression is that Aki and the people around her thought that she could handle some of the more urban contemporary stuff with a Latin tinge as was the case with her "Summer Melancholy"（サマー・メランコリー）from 1979.
"Tegami" definitely takes the deep dive into the samba-influenced sector of City Pop through the original melody by Makoto Kawaguchi（川口真）and Rei Nakanishi's（なかにし礼）lyrics. It is recognizably "Tegami" by Yuki but with a good amount of 1980s Shinjuku disco oomph. Love the saxophone!
As I've said before, coffee connoisseurs will probably shoot at this drink with a Magnum .357 since Georgia's Max Coffee is basically liquid coffee sugar. And I loved it, especially during those torrid summer months in Japan. I'm talking about summer today despite it being still April because we just got a rare early taste of the hot season (which will continue for at least one more day) with a record-breaking high of 26 degrees Celsius. The T-shirt and shorts were on and I need to have the electric fan at my back as I'm typing this.
I've had a store of summer kayo ready to go when the official start of summer comes in a couple of months, but I think I can spare one to commemorate the warm day today. Late 1970s aidoru Hitomi Aki（秋ひとみ）already has one song up here on KKP and to join it, I have her 4th single from July 1979, "Summer Melancholy". A pretty refined aidoru tune with a bit of metropolitan Latin spice along the lines of Junko Yagami's（八神純子）"Omoide no Screen" (思い出のスクリーン）although "Summer Melancholy" hews a bit closer to the conventional kayo rather than New Music.
The polish on this one may be due to not only the songwriters consisting of lyricist Masako Arikawa（有川正沙子）and composer/arranger Tsugutoshi Goto（後藤次利）, but also to the guys in the recording studio behind Aki such as Goto himself on the bass, Masaki Matsubara（松原正樹）on the electric guitar and the late Ryuichi Sakamoto（坂本龍一）on the synthesizer. The story in this one isn't a new one; it goes into a lady's thoughts after sadly getting out of a love triangle following a torrid love affair. Have your sangria with this one.
I've been hearing about the anime version of "Ijiranaide, Nagatoro-san"（イジらないで、長瀞さん... Don't Toy with Me, Miss Nagatoro） for some months, and now that it's running for some weeks now, I've caught some scenes on YouTube. Still not totally sold on it quite yet so I guess that I will wait until its run is over and then decide whether to get my own copy of the series.
Not that this 1980 song has any direct connection with "Nagatoro-san" but reading the lyrics for "Aishuu Boy" (Melancholy Boy), I can't help but feel whether they were giving a premonition of what would become the original manga many years later. Singer-songwriter Megumi Takanashi（高梨めぐみ）created the words and music for this cute song about a young girl secretly pining for this rather introverted fellow in school for aidoruHitomi Aki（秋ひとみ）as her 6th and penultimate single in March of that year.
The Osaka-born singer's career behind the mike only lasted a couple of years with those seven singles and two albums between 1978 and 1980. Aki also had a brief time as a TV personality but after deciding that she wanted to take a break from the geinokai in 1982, she apparently decided not to return.
Takanashi herself did a cover of her own song with only a slightly different arrangement as a track on her lone 1980 album"Miss Tearful". Both versions are very light and bouncy and cheerful with the observation on Takanashi's version that the singer sounds a little like Meiko Nakahara（中原めいこ）whom I wrote about only yesterday.
Hailing from Ibaraki Prefecture, Takanashi first won an award at the inaugural EMI Express Singer-Songwriters' Audition in 1978 and had also won a couple of grand prizes at the Yamaha Popular Song Contests in the Ibaraki and Chiba regional competitions in that year and earlier in 1976. She released a couple of singles starting in 1979 and then that lone album the following year. She also provided songs for other singers such as Aki. After a hiatus of some length, she returned to the music scene from 2001 under the name of forty winks with three albums.
