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.
Last week, I posted up "Sagamihara Singers" in tribute to the fact that my hometown of Toronto and the city of Sagamihara had a sister-city relationship. Tonight, I'm talking about "Nagoya Singers" but my inspiration isn't connected to any similar bond between Nagoya and a Canadian city. In fact, I don't think Nagoya has any sister-city relationships with any urban zones in my nation although it does have them with Los Angeles, Mexico City and Sydney.
Nope, the impetus for writing about singers or bands who come from Japan's 4th-largest city is today's edition of NHK's "Asaichi"（あさイチ）morning information show. It just so happens that the focus was on Nagoya and all of those scrumptious dishes that originate there and elsewhere in its Aichi Prefecture. When I saw that wonderful dish of grilled eel called hitsumabushi（ひつまぶし）on my screen earlier, I just went "OK...got my second article for Hump Day!". But have a look at hitsumabushi and some of the other famous local treats in the video above from Mui's Diary.
Anyways, I've got four acts here from Nagoya. Please enjoy!
Anyways, Nagoya has been in the news for being one of the hottest places in Japan right now, so I'm hoping that folks there are trying to keep cool and safe. As a PS, you can also take a look at another Nagoya specialty, ten-musu（天むす）, from YouTuber Just One Cookbook.
I can say that the above looks just like the first telephone that I ever saw in my apartment in the late 1960s. The good ol' rotary phone. Never got to use the even older model where people had to crank it up and yell "Maisie! Is that you? I'm calling Pennsylvania 65000!".
Earlier today, the first article for Urban Contemporary Friday on KKP was Mariko Tone's（刀根麻里子）"Private Number" and that got me thinking that among the many different themes I've had for Author's Picks, one common object that I had yet to highlight was the telephone. And yet, as soon as I put up "Private Number", suddenly all these phone-themed tunes came back to mind. So, to finish my contributions today, I'm putting up my telephone or denwa songs. Not all of them are City Pop, mind you, but enough of them are including the one with City Pop's most famous number.
I've been covering individual tracks from Junko Yagami's（八神純子）February 1982 album"Yume Miru Koro wo Sugite mo"（Even If The Time to Dream Passes） for a number of years now including "I'm a Woman" and "Secret Love"（シークレット・ラブ）. It's no surprise that these songs have had more than enough urban oomph to get them onto the blog on Fridays when I cover that sort of thing.
But the album begins with the title track itself and I'd say that the title track is more of a conventional pop ballad, although I'd been wondering whether I should have placed it during Urban Contemporary Fridays. Ultimately though, I opted to post it during a regular day. Obviously, there's nothing wrong with "Yume Miru Koro wo Sugite mo"; it's one of those Yagami ballads that features her alternating soaring and purring voice, beautiful contemplative piano by her, and those shimmering strings as part of the entire package. In a way, I think the ballad hearkens back to her very early days as a teen balladeer of the 1970s. Yagami and Ryuichi Kawamura（川村龍一）co-wrote the lyrics (under the pen name of Hisashi Kawamura) with the former handling the melody. Masataka Matsutoya（松任谷正隆）provided the arrangement.
I only noticed this some minutes ago, but this article will become the 2700th such article under the City Pop banner since beginning "Kayo Kyoku Plus" in 2012.
Thank you, thank you!
And who better to share this honour than with one of the greatest representatives of City Pop, singer-songwriter Junko Yagami（八神純子）? She was looking rather glammed up and Blondie-ish in that bold striped dress against the red-and-black background. I'd probably say that it is one of the more famous images of the Aichi Prefecture-born singer as a cover for her 16th single"Koi no Smash Hit"(I WANNA MAKE A HIT WIT-CHOO) from July 1983.
To be honest, "Koi no Smash Hit" wasn't a smash hit, only getting as high as No. 61 on Oricon, but for the fans, it's another jewel in the crown and kinda shows Yagami's transition from her City Pop phase into a more West Coast R&B sound going into the middle of the 1980s. She wasn't even behind words and music this time around...they were provided by lyricist Frank Musker and composer Louis St. Louis. I think the song is also notable for the cameo appearance of what sounds like the turbolift doors on the USS Enterprise and the somewhat tongue-in-cheek lyrics with Junko having a grand ol' time singing about simultaneously getting her guy and getting that Grammy with this creation. Her 6th album from the same month is also titled "I WANNA MAKE A HIT WIT-CHOO" and it did better in comparison than the single by peaking at No. 16.
I've often referred to the Japanese asset price bubble which arguably lasted from around 1986 to 1991. Commonly it's known as the Bubble Era and it originated from the effects of the Plaza Accord signed at New York City's Plaza Hotel by representatives of various countries including Japan and the United States. Basically, the US dollar was depreciated against the currencies of the other nations, and from the following year, a huge influence was felt in Japan with asset prices skyrocketing and economic activity bubbling away like my pot of boiling pasta.
When I visited Japan in 1981 and started studying about the country in those early 1980s, I'd already thought that the economic party-hearty atmosphere arrived. I saw glossy magazines from the nation showing what was a pretty nice life among the citizens and certainly borrowing all of those videotapes of Japanese TV shows with their commercials emphasized those feelings.
But then it was in the late 1980s when I was fully into my time at the University of Toronto that I read the craziness of buying million-dollar golf club memberships, sidewalk tiles that were more expensive than whole cities outside of Japan, and sprinkling gold flakes on broiled eel on rice. I got to Japan once more in 1989 at the tail end of the Bubble Era although I was working deep into the countryside so it wasn't quite that often that I experienced the grand Tokyo life.
In terms of Japanese popular music, and specifically City Pop, I thought that during those late 1980s, there was a certain additional swagger in City Pop which encompassed a lot of genres including disco, soul, and Latin. During that time, I think that there was also a goodly injection of sophisticated pop and horn-based jazz. And I've often made use of the phrase "champagne-and-caviar" when describing some of those tunes because whenever I heard them, it wasn't just about walking the streets of Tokyo; it was also about partaking in the various high-priced and high-life establishments on those streets of Tokyo. There still was the groove to be sure but there was also some of that Henry Mancini swing jazziness grafted onto the City Pop tunes. And since I love both groove and Mancini, I've remained a happy camper when it comes to the songs of the Bubble Era.
Of course, the party came to a crashing end at the beginning of the 1990s and music took a new tangent but I still look fondly at the City Pop that came out then. So yes, I'm also a nostalgic guy about the uber-genre. And as such, I thought that it would be nice to provide a summary of some of those champagne-and-caviar City Pop songs. One of the songs on the list actually came out a few years before the Plaza Accord but I still think it fits the bill in terms of the overall feeling. Anyways, have a good weekend.
PS If any of you have your own favourites that you think would fit the champagne-and-caviar platter, please let us know!
I don't consider myself a particularly lucky man. I've never won a lottery nor did I ever find the love of my life. However, where I did score some luck was growing up at a very interesting time in Toronto. I finally got some freedom in staying up late at night around the late 1970s going into the 1980s: music videos were just coming into their own and there were some rather intriguing TV shows popping up on the tube in my area.
I mentioned this in last week's Reminiscings of Youth when I wrote about the late Lalo Schifrin's theme for "T.H.E. Cat" suspense series. I got to (re-)acquaint myself with a number of these old TV shows and even some musical interludes through the lone season of a 1980 program called "The All-Night Show" on the local multicultural channel, CFMT-47 (popularly known as MTV just before a certain music channel down south grabbed the call letters forever). This aired most nights (so about 300 episodes) for about four to five hours overnight...a time when most channels would actually sign off and go to test patterns.
"The All-Night Show" starred comedian Chas Lawther as Chuck The Security Guard, the overnight guardian of MTV, who, out of a sense of boredom and curiosity, would basically take over operation at the station and with some drop-in buddies, engage the viewing audience in conversation and show off some of those old TV shows such as "The Twilight Zone", "The Beverly Hillbillies", the aforementioned "T.H.E. Cat" and other chestnuts. Obviously, even with my newfound nocturnal liberty, I didn't get to watch "The All-Night Show" every night. It was more like Friday and/or Saturday nights past 1 am and that wasn't even for the entire show (I don't think my parents would have been too thrilled to wake up to see that I hadn't gone to sleep).
One of the most bizarre moments on the show that I still remember to this day is when Chuck showed a washed-out video of a man outside somewhere who confessed on camera that he no longer had the will to live and would blow himself up with a homemade bomb right in front of the camera. He took his clothes off right then and there and blew himself up, although there didn't seem to be any gore. I think even Chas/Chuck looked very rattled by the sight and in the next several minutes, "WTF?!" phone calls came pouring in. Another number of minutes passed by before a woman phoned in to reassure everyone that her husband had survived his own suicide attempt of several years prior with surprisingly few injuries and that he was feeling much better with therapy and love but that he would not be willing to provide any further comment. I'm not sure if this had been an elaborate (and unfunny) hoax by the show but from Chuck's expression, it sure didn't look like it.
Along with watching some of the spookier episodes of "The Twilight Zone", one other thing that stuck with me was the de facto theme song for "The All-Night Show" which played after a few minutes of a Chuck intro. I'd heard "Strangers in the Night" before, notably with Frank Sinatra, so the song was recognizable but this version was about as spacey and bizarre and un-jazzy as it could get as it usually played over a montage of clips from B-movies and old TV episodes.
This version was provided by French composer Jean-Jacques Perrey and German-American composer Gershon Kingsley, known popularly known as Perrey and Kingsley, who were known as two pioneers of electronic music in the 1960s. In fact, their take on "Strangers in the Night" can be found in their 1967 album "Kaleidoscopic Vibrations: Electronic Pop Music From Way Out", and yeah, it was way out, man!
As I stated above, "The All-Night Show" lasted just a month shy of one year between September 1980 and August 1981. It was a good run and I've seen YouTube comments wondering whimsically if there could be another program like that to pop up in the overnight hours once more, but then again, I have to observe that YouTube is probably doing something like that right now.
Anyways, just for comparison's sake, here is Ol' Blue Eyes' version of "Strangers in the Night" from 1966. But let's go with the starting date of "The All-Night Show" which was late September 1980. What was at the top of the Oricon charts on September 22nd that year?
Welcome to another Thursday edition of Reminiscings of Youth. What I remember from the music video for Blondie's October 1980 hit"The Tide is High" are two things. First, there was the close-up of Debbie Harry's pretty face singing the song in a lower register compared to the high and floaty vocals she demonstrated with the band's first big breakthrough "Heart of Glass" in 1979. Second, I recall seeing a rocket ship on the pad ready for launch. Looking over the video again for the first time in a long time, I was reminded of what I'd thought was the Dark Lord of the Sith admiring the singer through some video effects.
"The Tide is High" is quite the different animal from "Heart of Glass". Both have been categorized as New Wave but with the former, there are a few more genres that have been thrown at it: reggae, calypso, rocksteady and pop. And as for me, contrasting with those reggae and calypso labels, I couldn't help getting some of those mariachi vibes from Mexico because of the horns and strings.
"I'm going to be your No. 1"? Wow, no better prediction could have been made. Blondie's take on "The Tide is High" actually got to be No. 1 in Canada, America, New Zealand and the UK. The song is also available on the band's 2nd album from November 1980, "Autoamerican".
As with many 1980s hits, "The Tide is High" by Blondie is actually a cover of the original 1967 song by the Jamaican group The Paragons and is known as a rocksteady song. According to the Wikipedia article regarding the genre, rocksteady seems to have been a transitional type of music between its precursor ska and then its successor reggae.
So what also got to be our No. 1...No. 2 and No. 3 on Oricon just a few days before Blondie's "The Tide is High" was released on Halloween 1980? Let's take a look.
If someone were to ask me "Who has been one Japanese singer who has worked in the largest variety of genres?", I would answer quite quickly: Junko Yagami（八神純子）. She's not the only one but she's the one who readily comes to mind. Pop balladry, City Pop, bossa nova/samba, R&B, world music...perhaps I have missed one or two.
And now I can include 90s dance music (House, anyone?) to the list. In 1994, Yagami released her 16th album"Renaissance" in November 1994 and one of the tracks there is the very long-worded "Tatoe Kanawanai Yume demo Kore de Ii" (Even If It's a Dream That Won't Come True, That's Fine). Written by Yuuho Iwasato（岩里祐穂）and composed by Yagami, I'm not sure if she had been aiming for C+C Music Factory but she's thrown in everything but the kitchen sink into this one...dance, funk, Latin and jazz. And lyrically speaking, her protagonist is also going for broke trying to get this one guy. Life and love in Tokyo, ladies and gentlemen!
Always nice to welcome Junko Yagami（八神純子）back to KKP especially on a day of City Pop. As soon as I heard the first few bars of this particular song, I figured that this must have been one of the Nagoya singer-songwriter's 1990s creations, and it has turned out to be so.
"Ai no Honoo" (definition is right on the byline) was a coupling song to Yagami's 29th single, the very wordy "Tatoe Kanawanai Yume Demo Kore de Ii"（たとえ叶わない夢でもこれでいい...Even If It's a Dream That Won't Come True, That's Fine） which was released in July 1993. While Yagami took care of the music, Yuuho Iwasato（岩里祐穂）provided the lyrics. Just from the certain synthesizers involved and a bit of Latin mixed into the arrangement, it did feel like something from out of the 1990s. If a B-side can sound like this cool, I would love to hear the A-side.
Now that we're into March here, there's still a lot of snow on the ground after that major storm a couple of weeks ago but perhaps a lot of it may be disappearing in the next 24 to 48 hours with the forecast of some major rain tomorrow. We'll be a little closer to spring with the rising temperatures but we may have to go through some flooding.
One of the first Junko Yagami（八神純子）songs that I ever heard was her "Omoide no Screen" (思い出のスクリーン）from February 1979, and among other Yagami tunes that I heard back in those blossoming days of my love for Japanese pop music, it set the template for my initial impression of the Nagoya-born singer-songwriter. Back then, it was about the boogie-down downtown disco and Latin; I had yet to hear her very early works as a teenager in the early to mid 1970s.
Well, I got to get acquainted with the B-side of that 6th single recently. "Ame no Kyuujitsu" (Rainy Day Off) is very much a different animal. Written/composed by Yagami with arrangement by Masaaki Omura（大村雅朗）, it's a very somber ballad about a woman on a rainy day seeing a café or a restaurant that used to be frequented by her and a no-longer-present beau, and the reminiscings begin and perhaps some of her own water works. There is that dreamy feeling to the song as if the lady were seeing memories through rose-coloured glasses and a gauzy filter.
Incredibly enough, after nearly thirteen years of doing "Kayo Kyoku Plus", I still don't think I have covered all of Junko Yagami's（八神純子）singles going into the early 1980s, and this is considering that the Nagoya singer-songwriter has been one of my favourites in the City Pop field.
Case in point: Yagami's 14th single from October 1982, "Touch you, tonight". I've been seeing this title for years but never quite got around to posting it until today. Written by Yoshiko Miura（三浦徳子）and composed by the singer herself, this is just one of a number of successful collaborations between the two which include "Mizuiro no Ame" (みずいろの雨）and "Purpletown"(パープルタウン）, although the latter would eventually include a few more people in the songwriting credits.
"Touch you, tonight" weaves a story of some titillating skinmanship between a couple (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) with Ichizo Seo（瀬尾一三）incorporating some harder New Wave instrumentation into the City Pop arrangement (there's still that wailing electric guitar though). Speaking of arrangement, Yagami's especially breathy and kittenish delivery at points has reminded me a bit of Minnie Ripperton.
Meanwhile, the B-side of "Miss Plumeria", which was wholly concocted by Yagami, rides on a Doobie Brothers rhythm as she sings about the titular young lady bewitching interested fellows on the beach. It's a pleasant summertime AOR tune that has a rather weirdly bracing bit in the middle before that electric guitar solo reassures listeners once more. The single reached No. 45 on Oricon.
Perhaps the above byline is a little longer and odder than usual but in my defense, I have to explain that all the way back in January, I had jumped the mighty gun and already spoke on singer-songwriter Junk Fujiyama's（ジャンクフジヤマ）most recent album, the album of covers known as "Shoukei Toshi ~ City Pop Covers"(City of Aspirations), several weeks before it was even officially released in March. I was too taken by the tasting menu of Junk's covers of "Telephone Number" by the late great Junko Ohashi（大橋純子）and then "Windy Summer" by Anri（杏里）that were already up on YouTube.
Generally speaking, I don't usually go for albums of cover versions since I'm always going to think that the originals will be far better, but cuing ahead several months, I finally pulled the trigger and bought my copy of "Shoukei Toshi" a couple of weeks ago just on Fujiyama's reputation and his takes on "Telephone Number" and "Windy Summer". Besides, considering how I've wondered how Tatsuro Yamashita（山下達郎）would have handled some of those other City Pop songs outside his own contributions, "Shoukei Toshi" was my best chance to find out.
The cover of "Futari no Natsu Monogatari"（ふたりの夏物語）is another winning one by Junk. Retaining the dashing pace of the 1985 original by Kiyotaka Sugiyama & Omega Tribe, there are fewer bells and whistles in the arrangement but it's still got summer right here. In a way, it's perhaps more reflective of the times now when compared to the craziness of the Bubble Era years of those high-flying 80s (although I don't think stingrays were flying over Tokyo back then).
Up to this time, there probably have been more covers of "Mayonaka no Door 〜 Stay With Me"（真夜中のドアー）than there are shooting stars in the sky, but if one is doing an album of City Pop covers, this song by the late Miki Matsubara（松原みき）obviously has to be in here. In fact, there are two versions including this one that is the final track of "Shoukei Toshi". This version of "Stay With Me" though is done as a duet between Junk and singer-songwriter/keyboardist biki from Saitama Prefecture. It has a bit more keyboard groove and key changes, and the dynamics between the two singers bring some more excitement to the proceedings.
But it isn't just the City Pop from the 1970s and 1980s that's been covered by Fujiyama. He also tackles benzo's 1998 light and funky "Mahiru"（真昼）which I first discovered on one of my "Light Mellow" albums. Aside from the timbre of the vocals, there isn't all that is much different between the original and the cover, although of course, both are fine songs.
The cover that deviates the most from the original among the tracks on the album is the 1983 "Tasogare no Bay City"（黄昏のBay City）, one of Junko Yagami's（八神純子）big hits and a City Pop pillar. Not quite sure how to describe it, except that the funky disco has been replaced by a certain spacey atmosphere. No, I have to admit that this isn't my favourite track; I miss the horns.
I'll finish up here with his cover of Yumi Arai's（荒井由実）"Ame no Station"（雨のステイション）which was originally from Yuming's 3rd album"Cobalt Hour" (1975). This track is still a few away from the last one but it feels like a final song for the album since Junk takes the New Music ballad and makes it even more anthemic, though it still holds to that somewhat downbeat and reserved tone of the original.
For me, these are the highlights of "Shoukei Toshi" although I will at least cover one of the remaining tracks on its own because I hadn't even heard the original version by Original Love.
Oh, the irony...it was just eight days ago that I wrote up about Hiromi Go's（郷ひろみ）"Hachi-gatsu no Etranger"（八月のエトランゼ...August Stranger）, and then I realized to my amazement that I had "Hachi-gatsu no Etranger" all along...for close to 35 years! It was just that it wasn't Go's "Hachi-gatsu no Etranger".
Actually, it is Junko Yagami's（八神純子）"Hachi-gatsu no Etranger", a track on her May 1990 13th studio album, "My Invitation". Yup, as I mentioned in that article, I'd bought the album in Kobe just a month after its release. By this point, Yagami had long gone past her City Pop stage, went through American R&B, and landed here in a mixture of R&B and World Music.
"Hachi-gatsu no Etranger" was written and composed by Yagami and her husband John J. Stanley, and it can be compared with Go's namesake song in that there are some danceable elements on the Lido Deck with both. However, unlike the disco City Pop of the earlier "Hachi-gatsu no Etranger", Yagami's version has incorporated some African and tropical island dance club rhythms and funk into this melodic sangria. Of course, another difference is that whereas the Go song has the kanji for August in the title, Yagami's song uses the number 8.
It didn't take me too long to figure out that a lot of Japanese lyricists in the 1980s loved to pluck the Beatles' phrase of "Love me do" or another affectionate collection of words "Hold me tight" for their clients' songs. However, it took me a while of doing this blog before I realized that folks in the Japanese music industry had a love for that particular time period between bright afternoon and dark night if their song (and album) titles were any indication.
Yup, twilight, sunset, dusk, etc. which can be translated into Japanese as yuuyami（夕闇）, yuugure（夕暮れ）, tasogare（黄昏） and just plain sansetto（サンセット） is, I gather, the happy hours for musicians, singers and songwriters alike in Japan. Mind you, we've got our pop cultural representatives for that, too. One of the best examples is Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone" mystery TV series. Ironically in Japan, it's titled "Mystery Zone", maybe because the distributors there probably didn't want something spooky to invade their romantic notions of twilight time.
Closer to what the Japanese have envisioned is most likely The Platters'"Twilight Time" from 1958 which I used to hear on some commercial aired in my old stomping grounds. Perhaps it was a beer ad or something for cars; the main point is that I think the Japanese cherish the sunset hours as ones when folks can just hit the highway after work for a relaxing drive or meet up with friends or that significant other for a drink or dinner as the sun dunks below the horizon.
I know that a lot of songs that have been created in Japan have those synonyms of sunset and twilight, many of which are already up here on KKP. And they don't necessarily have to be of the City Pop persuasion although some of the six here are. But I can say that they all have their varying levels of soothing feeling, so enjoy the following half-dozen. It's Twilight Time!
Isn't that nice? Kayo Grace Kyoku has taken up a new hobby of creating her own art. Perhaps she has a lot of time on her hands. It would seem that I may have just a little too much time on my own hands.
As you know, for the past several months, I've been using the Bing AI art generator sometimes to come up with some pics of Kayo Grace along with the odd other picture...usually reflecting City Pop. Well, in the past few days, I was kinda thinking about what would happen if I threw in a few famous song titles into the Bing-ster. What would pop out?
For the inaugural AI Gallery, I decided to throw in a few famous City Pop song titles but also added "...in anime style". Unsurprisingly, for two of the three results, I did get a cute anime girl in there. I tried it again last night with those two titles without the anime tag. The third title was fine enough after the first shot. So, below are five pictures and so I'm not seen as chintzy, I've also included the music.
Looks like KKP AI representative Kayo is having her fun behind the wheel of a sports car. Pretty impressive if you ask me, especially considering that she was born a couple of weeks ago.
Anyways to make things clear, I wasn't stuttering when I came up with the above title. It's just that I had one of my rare brain waves about putting up a small and incomplete list of City Pop tunes that basically spell out the city. Y'know...it is a city so why not sing about that city?
(New York City) Junko Yagami -- Purpletown (パープルタウン）You Oughta Know By Now (1980)
(New York City [though I like to think Tokyo]) Minako Yoshida -- TOWN (1982)
Unfortunately, I have to begin today's crop of KKP articles with an announcement of another death of a significant figure in Japanese music this year. Earlier on Twitter, I discovered that prolific lyricist Yoshiko Miura had passed away on November 6th from pneumonia at the age of 75 as reported from sources such as "Sponichi Annex" today.
Yoshiko Miura www.asahi.com
Miura was born in 1949 in Aomori Prefecture. After graduating from Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo, she became a copywriter but in 1977, she got her first credits as a lyricist by writing the words for aidoru Mizue Takada's（高田みづえ）"DOMO DOMO", the B-side to her first single"Garasuzaka"（硝子坂）. She would then go onto a career writing the words to songs recorded by male and female aidoru such as Seiko Matsuda（松田聖子）, Toshihiko Tahara（田原俊彦）and Yukiko Okada（岡田有希子）while at the same time providing songs to singers even in the City Pop realm such as Junko Yagami（八神純子）and Miki Matsubara（松原みき）.
It's not easy to find out a lyricist's approach to their craft but for Miura's J-Wikiarticle, there is a small section on her musicality. Apparently, she felt that she had to come up with the words that the original melody "wanted" in the song and that those words were something that came at her suddenly so she had to grab them and protect them from others who may want to deny or change them; otherwise, they would lose their appeal. At the same time, if the main chorus didn't sound right, she would keep on rewriting over and over again until satisfaction was achieved. In one interview, she noted that for one of her bigger clients, Seiko Matsuda, her task was to establish a colour for Seiko-chan's image in that song and then come up with the lyrics which would enhance that colour.
For the following few examples of Miura's vast work, I'll leave some translated excerpts from the songs. My condolences go out to Miura's family, friends and fans, and of course, all those singers that she had provided songs for.
Back in the summer of 2020 when the world was in the middle of the pandemic, I posted up the third in the series of "Happy Songs for Me"...those tunes that would get me in a better frame of mind just simply by listening to them. Well, yesterday I listened to a Junko Yagami（八神純子）favourite on YouTube, "Be My Best Friend" from 1980 and although I hadn't been in a dark place, I could immediately feel the glorious decompression setting in once I heard those golden bossa nova tones.
Looking at the comments below the video, I saw one Japanese person mention how kokochi yoi"Be My Best Friend" was. Of course, I don't really teach Japanese through the blog but in the interests of cultural exchange, kokochi yoi means "comfortable" or "pleasant". So, today I decided to start today's round of KKP posts with an Author's Pick on those comfy and relaxing songs. These ones can be different from the ones that I've picked on "Happy Songs for Me" (although there may be some overlapping) in that these don't so much energize me into bliss as they actually give me that ASMR feeling of "Ahhhhhh". More hammock than nightclub, you might say. Anyways without further ado and in no particular order, I give you the following tunes.
I've probably already made the same observation in a past article regarding actress, tarento and singer Yoshiko Miyazaki（宮崎美子）, so apologies in advance, but her singing back in the day had that certain creaminess in her delivery which reminds me of one of her contemporaries, Hiroko Yakushimaru（薬師丸ひろ子）. Her debut single was "No Return" from October 1981 and it could have surprised quite a lot of listeners in that she not only could hold a tune but could also hit the high notes fairly well after her first few years in show business as a pin-up model and commercial star. "No Return" was a Junko Yagami（八神純子）creation with Sonomi Ari（阿里そのみ）also co-writing the lyrics while Motoki Funayama（船山基紀）arranged the song as a contemporized version of a happy-go-lucky 1960s pop tune.
Yagami herself would cover "No Return" as a B-side to her City Pop 13th single, the sultry "Summer In Summer ~ Omoide wa Suhada ni Yaite"（サマー イン サマー 〜想い出は素肌に焼いて〜）which was released in March 1982. Her version still had the contemporary touches but skewed a little more toward the traditional side of 1960s pop, thanks to Ichizo Seo's（瀬尾一三）arrangement.
For everyone reading this in the United States, Happy 4th of July. If I'm not mistaken, America is celebrating its 247th birthday today...getting close to that special 250th anniversary. According to Wikipedia, the word that you can use to describe such an occasion is a Sestercentennial which is probably a whole lot easier to pronounce than Bicenquinquagenary which is an alternate term. But we can all worry about that a few years down the line in 2026, eh?
Anyways, I was figuring that since I did a "Canada" Tunes article on Canada Day, I thought that I would do the same thing for the United States of America south of us. Of course, there is plenty of variety in terms of the music involved.
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