Happy Monday! I think next to "Hello, how are you? Fine, thank you. And you?" in the Japanese education system (and "Azumanga Daioh"), maybe "Boys, be ambitious!" is the most well-known English phrase. But I would have had to hear it in Japan. It was stated by American science professor Dr. William Smith Clark as final words to his students at the end of an eight-month stint in Sapporo to help establish Sapporo Agricultural College, now known as Hokkaido University.
I've mentioned in the past, usually when I wrote on Hokkaido-based kayo kyoku, that I had visited Sapporo years and years ago during my long teaching period in Japan. My two nights and three days there were great, and I actually did take a walk into Hokkaido University and took the long path to see the bust of William S. Clark. Ironically, last week I did post an article here about a Mitsue Ohshiro（大城光恵）song that took a variation on Clark's famous statement as the title. For the record, the Japanese translation for "Boys, be ambitious!" is "Shōnen yo, taishi o idake"（少年よ、大志を抱け）.
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| From Wikipedia |
Well, "Boys, be ambitious!" was adopted once again into Japanese pop culture, this time as the somewhat truncated title of a 1991-2001 anthology manga titled "Boys Be...". It was all about teenage romance among various couples, and it was popular enough that it was adapted into a 1998 live-action drama and then a 2000 anime.
Strangely enough, it was so popular that even before the drama and the anime (and with no connection to either project), Victor Entertainment decided to commission a couple of soundtracks as image CDs in 1997 in tribute to "Boys Be...". A couple of seiyuu, Houko Kuwashima（桑島法子）and Machiko Toyoshima（豊嶋真千子）, were recruited to form the duo GIRLS BE and they sang all of the songs on both soundtracks.
From the second soundtrack titled "French Dai Sakusen"（フレンチ大作戦...The Big French Operation）, we have here "Cecile no Yakusoku" (Cecile's Promise). Written by Nobuko Orihara（折原信子）and composed by Seiki Sato（佐藤清喜）of microstar fame, the song sounds like it took a riff from Bananarama's "I Heard a Rumour" with a bit more of a walk into the synthpop field. Also, I guess in keeping with the title of the album, both Kuwashima and Toyoshima were probably instructed to sing in the vein of breathy/whispery French pop of the 1960s although the arrangement (also by Sato) has that 80s Eurobeat sound.
