Kazue Ito -- Juu-nana Sai no Terror（17歳のテロル）

 

Compared to the photo above of a lovely and innocent 80s aidoru Kazue Ito（伊藤かずえ）above, the cover of her 7th single from January 1985 is anything but.

The first thing I thought on seeing the cover for "Juu-nana Sai no Terror" (17-Year-Old Terror) was "Wayward Teen Punk! Red Alert!". I didn't see too many Japanese movies from that decade but I heard about them and some TV dramas dealing with delinquents causing havoc in the city while all garbed in dark leather instead of breathable light cotton.

Written by Masao Urino（売野雅勇）and composed by Tsugutoshi Goto（後藤次利）with arrangement by Goto and Hiromoto Tobisawa（飛澤宏元）, there is that de rigueur electric guitar wailing away to signal motorcycles and their riders weaving back and forth as they bomb down the highways at night. While Ito doesn't have the greatest voice, she is conveying some of that sultry menace. In fact, listening to "Juu-nana Sai no Terror", I was reminded of Akina Nakamori's（中森明菜）early songs from 1982 and 1983. Goto did compose a number of Akina's tunes but they were actually on her "D404ME" album which came out later in the same year as this Ito single. 

Kazue Ito -- Tasogare wa Ano Hi no You ni（黄昏はあの日のように）

 

Yes, that is indeed Kazue Ito（伊藤かずえ）as a fresh-faced teenager in the early 1980s but we will not be doing "Kaze to Hikari no Sneaker"（風と光のスニーカー...Sneakers of Wind and Light） today as shown on that page from an aidoru book. That cover looks like an advertisement for some very effective detergent, by the way.

Actually, the first Kazue Ito article that I did was almost a year ago, but that song, "Fallin'", was for an image album in 1985. This time, though, we are in her main discography with "Tasogare wa Ano Hi no You ni" (The Sunset is Just Like That Day) which was a track from her debut album "Heartstring"（ハートストリング）which came out in January 1983.

Written by Toyohisa Araki（荒木とよひさ）and composed by someone whose name could be pronounced Yasuhiro Kumagaya（熊谷安廣）, "Tasogare wa Ano Hi no You ni" starts off briefly sounding like an AOR tune but it quickly settles into an introspective but fairly bouncy aidoru tune. Those front-and-centre strings lend quite a bit of sophistication to the arrangement, though. The overall feel of the song strikes me as being a premonition of sorts of at least some of the aidoru numbers that would come out in the latter half of the decade when the arrangements for those became a little lusher.

Kazue Ito -- Fallin'

I was wondering where I had heard the name Kazue Ito（伊藤かずえ）before, and as it turns out, she's an actress who's been in at least one of the shows in the "Nurse no O-shigoto"（ナースのお仕事ナースのお仕事...A Nurse's Work）TV franchise on Fuji-TV that first started in the 1990s. In fact, if you play the above video, she's the very first person you spot as the tough-as-nails nurse in the dark-frame glasses.

Just like Yuko Asano（浅野ゆう子）, Ito is a thespian whom I hadn't known had her own singing career as an aidoru way back when. In fact, she released 15 singles and 5 original albums going late into the 1980s, including her debut back in 1978 as an 11-year-old.

However, the song by Ito here isn't included in the mainstream discography but in an image album for a girls' manga titled "Rising!" that was released in July 1985. "Fallin'" is a very comfy tune that's sung quite capably by aidoru Ito (the high notes may be a bit suspect but off-tune was usually forgiven for the teenyboppers). Written by Junko Sato（佐藤純子）and composed by Tsunehiro Izumi（和泉常寛）, the brief melody rather weaves between AOR and a fantasy world. At first, I'd assumed that the soundtrack was for an anime adaptation of "Rising!", but apparently going over the J-Wiki article, it was never made into one.