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.
Azusa Nakamura（中村あずさ）is an actress, emcee and tarento who I used to see all the time on dramas and variety shows when I was living in Japan. She stood out for that wide-as-the-Mississippi smile and those twinkling eyes.
Little did I know though that she had released a few singles in the 1980s at least, although I should have known since anyone who's anyone on television in Japan was famous enough to be obliged to cut a few records here and there. And sure enough, Nakamura did sing behind the mike although her J-Wiki account doesn't mention anything about singles although there is a mention of a 1990 album.
However, YouTuber DJ Squall mentions that the above was her 2nd single from December 1988, "Fu......". And please, before anyone imagines that Ms. Nakamura was gauche enough to almost throw out a well-worn swear word as a song title, she's actually giving out a sigh as the title...kinda like "Whew!". I couldn't find the lyrics by singer-songwriter Mayo Shouno（庄野真代）but I could imagine that with the refined Riviera-friendly melody that was also provided by Ms. Shouno, who knows a fair bit about exotic kayoherself, the song might be all about the ups and downs of romance. As for the cover showing the singer being caught in the act of something, I'm not judging.
That's a nice photo of a street leading up to the tall Landmark Tower in Yokohama during the spring. I think that there are places in both Canada and Japan (including Toronto) that are just aching for some of that warm weather and cherry blossoms right now after a very wintry season. Simply think good thoughts for a few more weeks.
Plus, you can give Tsukasa Ito's（伊藤つかさ）5th single from November 1982, "Yokohama Meruhen"(Yokohama Fairy Tale), a spin on the record player or CD device. For a single coming out rather late in the year, it's got quite the spring bounce and there's very much of an Agnes Chan-like high-toned vocal coming out of Ito's mouth. Ryo Kawakami's（川上了）arrangement gives quite the 80s aidoru impression with the sliding strings and the twinkly keyboards. Singer-songwriter Mayo Shouno（庄野真代）took care of the lyrics while Masami Koizumi（小泉まさみ）was the composer.
Welcome once more to the AI art gallery where we take those Japanese song titles, throw them into the AI art generator and see what we get. In the past number of days, I've gotten together with some fellow foodie friends and had some delicious Greek and then Thai cuisine, and so I thought why not try some exotic kayofrom the late 1970s. Without further ado, then:
NHK's "Uta Con"（うたコン）had their final broadcast before going on a multi-week hiatus during Golden Week. Now, the annual spate of holidays ranging from the last days of April into the first days of May doesn't begin for a few more days yet, but I figured that I can still provide a few of the songs that got into their "Uta no Tabi"（歌の旅...Song Vacation） theme segment yesterday along with throwing in one of my own choices.
As it stands right now, though, with the Japanese currency plummeting down to 155 yen to the dollar, perhaps there won't be as much tourism from Japan to overseas destinations this Golden Week although Americans, Canadians and other people will be more than happy to fly over to Japan for the next little while. Maybe that's why some of the songs from "Uta no Tabi" were most definitely domestic. In any case, here are the selections.
Alcohol and I didn't particularly mix that well although thanks to my life in Gunma and Tokyo, I was able to eventually get accustomed to things like beer and sake. Cocktails were an easier path for me since I could pick the sweeter varieties such as the Brown Cow and the Margarita. The latter was something that I usually had at the Mexican restaurants and it was always of the frozen type. Thankfully, the melting ice helped dilute some of that tequila.
Listening to this song, I definitely got some of those "Margaritaville" vibes although Jimmy Buffett's classic tune of relaxation actually came out a few months after "Moonlight City Woman". It's a track from Mayo Shouno's（庄野真代）2nd album"Luna Park"（るなぱあく）which was released on Christmas Day 1976. I can imagine that "Moonlight City Woman" made for an ideal tonic from all that Yuletide cheer and winter cold.
Written and composed by Shouno, it's all about a woman getting slightly sniffy at a now-ex-boyfriend as she tries to rationalize the breakup and stalk off into the night. Maybe her lyrics aren't too happy but her melody is plenty cheerful and deserving of a margarita. It's light and tropical.
Well, continuing on from yesterday's Part 1 about going with any recommendations for people who are just beginning their kayo journey, I provided the aidoru singers in Sunday's list and today on this first day of March 2021, I will give the list of the pop artists.
American bands/performers helping out Japanese singers is nothing new and hasn't been for decades. Most recently, if I'm not mistaken, I heard that the newest Arashi（嵐）song was produced by Bruno "Uptown Funk" Mars. Mariya Takeuchi's（竹内まりや）classic "Miss M" had half of the album collaborated on by David Foster and members of soon-to-be famous band TOTO.
Still, I did pause a bit on learning that Mayo Shouno（庄野真代）, a singer/songwriter that I had associated with exotic kayothrough arguably her most famous song, "Tonde Istanbul"（飛んでイスタンブール）and then City Pop, was backed up on one album by New Wave band Oingo Boingo led by Danny Elfman who would later become famous for his soundtracks for movies such as Tim Burton's"Batman" and "Beetlejuice". The project that I'm referring to is her March 1982 album"Ai, Ai, Ai"(Encounter, Love, Sorrow).
As such, Shouno would add another genre to her repertoire, New Wave, which led to recruiting Elfman and company as the band. Even the album cover has the singer looking pretty New Wave herself. The title track is the track that launches the album. "Ai, Ai, Ai" sounds like something that I often used to hear on the radio and TV back in the wild-and-woolly early days of music video where folks thrashed around like punk rockers but wore tight suits and skinny ties. Interestingly enough, Shouno, who wrote the lyrics, sounds quite sedate on the title track whereas the melody by Masami Koizumi（小泉まさみ）with its mix of rockin' guitar, New Wave synths and some ska bass comes across as something that I could envision Ann Lewis or Sandii & The Sunsetz tackling. At the same time, considering the material and the lady singing it, Shouno even sounds like Misato Watanabe（渡辺美里）at points since that singer, who wouldn't be debuting for a few more years, also plied her voice on rock and ska.
Going to be dating myself yet again but my favourite version of the theme song from the motion picture "Around The World in 80 Days" is Arthur Fiedler & The Boston Pops' enthusiastic take on the Victor Young original. It's epic, sweeping, romantic and has that nice flavouring of Latin spice. I first heard it on that collection of standard LPs that we got when my parents purchased the humongous RCA stereo player, and through multiple listenings of The Pops' version, it's basically imprinted itself as the version for me.
A few nights ago, I listened to Rocket Brown's latest mixtape of City Pop favourites. This time, his theme was New York so he had folks such as Tatsuro Yamashita（山下達郎）, Casiopea and Hi-Fi Set to entertain me before bedtime. The next day, I thought about making my latest Author's Picks article and basing it not just on songs about The Big Apple, but on a variety of kayo having to do with those far-flung places outside of Japan. There have been plenty of them, y'know.
Well, I just had to start from my nation, eh? Still don't know what had composer and singer Masaaki Hirao（平尾昌晃）decide that The Great White North would make for the ideal setting for a hit kayo, but hey, if it helped inbound tourism to places like Banff and Toronto, all the better. It certainly worked out for the duo of Hirao and Hatanaka.
Let's take that one-hour flight from Pearson International in my hometown over to Manhattan, and we've come to "Purpletown", a love letter of sorts to The Big Apple (although I never found out why the colour purple was significant for New York City) Indeed, it was the JAL campaign song for tours to ol' Gotham, and just from all that fun funk by Yagami（八神純子）, Foster, Kennedy and Conrad, I can only hope that a lot of Japanese tourists were happily lured over the Pacific.
Well, it was done to me decades ago, but whenever I hear about the Aegean Sea, in a downright Pavlovian fashion, I will always remember Judy Ongg's（ジュディ・オング） most famous hit "Miserarete"（魅せられて）. It stands as one of the most famous examples of that exotic kayo involving adventures in those far-flung places that was the trend back in the late 1970s. Perhaps it helped draw Japanese tourists to Greece. Perhaps it also helped in sales of billowing white dresses.
A relatively short hop from Greece to another representative exotic kayo, Mayo Shouno's（庄野真代）"Tonde Istanbul"（飛んでイスタンブール）. I'm not sure whether the melody by the prolific Kyohei Tsutsumi（筒美京平）actually reflected Turkish music but it certainly sounded adventurous enough. One piece of trivia from the J-Wiki article for the song that I hadn't included in the original article was that Tsutsumi had actually created "Tonde Istanbul" for 70s aidoruGoro Noguchi（野口五郎）but later realized that a female vocalist would do better justice with his work.
As I hinted in the original article for the album "First Light" by Makoto Matsushita（松下誠）, the first time that I heard "One Hot Love", I didn't think of downtown Tokyo but downtown Los Angeles. There was something so Airplay, Doobie Brothers and a ton of other AOR artists imbued into this classic that the ghost of my old SONY radio almost materialized in front of my eyes. It didn't help that the original cover for the album is composed of a glorious photo of LA (at least, I think it's LA). How West Coast sound is that?
Honestly speaking, I never think of Rick and Ilsa when I listen to "Aishuu no Casablanca"（哀愁のカサブランカ）, but there's that feeling of traveling far afield to places surrounding the Mediterranean and enjoying a truly luxurious night. I'm just surprised that one of Hiromi Go's（郷ひろみ）trademark hits was never used to sell something like an airplane tour, a car or a cologne. The video above has a newly arranged version of the song.
We're finally jumping over to Asia and visiting Hong Kong, a place that I thoroughly enjoyed for a few days with my students over a decade ago. Yuming's cover of her husband's original tune seems to encapsulate a first-timer's visit to the famed area with all of the starry-eyed observations of places like Kowloon and Central. I thought that this was more "Blade Runner" than any place in Japan. I hope that Hong Kong will recover from not only COVID-19 but also the political turmoil that it had been wracked with even earlier.
Our final destination is somewhere in France, perhaps The City of Light itself. The reason being the final song is Taeko Ohnuki's（大貫妙子）"Tsumuji Kaze"（つむじ風）, a track from her 1982 album"Cliché". Aside from that synthpop intro, everything else about it just has that fragrance of Maurice Chevalier's and Charles Boyer's Paris. Croissants and café au lait come to mind here.
When deplaning, make sure you haven't left any of your belongings. Just follow the signs over to Immigration and Customs. Hopefully, in the not-too-distant future, we will all be able to hear the first two sentences again for real.
Earlier this afternoon, NHK's "Gogo Uta"（ごごウタ）was on and one of the guests happened to be a Chinese-born singer, Enrei（媛麗）, who gave this performance of a ballad titled "Good-by morning". Usually the program features a lot of enka and Mood Kayo, but this particular number was more on the pops side, and the way that Enrei sang it reminded me of some of the songs by 80s singer Ruiko Kurahashi（倉橋ルイ子）.
Thinking that it was a new song (and obviously not reading the songwriter information that usually pops up at the bottom of the screen), I decided to look it up on YouTube and J-Wiki. Although I couldn't find out anything about Enrei, I did discover that the singer was actually doing a cover whose origins were in the 1970s.
1976, to be exact. I saw the video that you see above and saw the singer's name as Sandy. But looking at the woman on the cover, I thought it could have been Sandii as in Sandii & The Sunsetz, a band that I had always identified as a New Wave group, certainly from the song that I had written about, "Battery" from 1986.
Indeed that Sandii and the Sandy for this song were one and the same (real name being Aya Suzuki/鈴木あや). Starting her career in show business as a pin-up girl in the early 1970s, she also released a few singles under the name Sandi Ai（サンディー・アイ）and then Sandy O'Neil. Included in those was "Good-by morning" which earned her a top prize in singing at the 7th World Popular Song Festival in 1976.
With lyrics by singer-songwriter Mayo Shouno（庄野真代）and music by Kaoru Nakajima（なかじまかおる・中島薫）, the original "Good-by morning" has that plaintive tone as a man tries to fix things with his love although it's not at all certain whether he will be successful. However, he's going to do his darnedest while the meaning of that title hangs over his head. The melody, though, sounds pretty hopeful with a hint of blues in there.
I don't know how "Good-by morning" did back then, but apparently it has been covered by a variety of artists over the years. One example was in November 1992 when blues singer Fusanosuke Kondo（近藤房之助）and Keiko Utoku（宇徳敬子）from the trio Mi-Ke did a duet version of the song with the title written in English. I like this version even better since it has quite a bit more blues feeling and it reminds me of an Eagles ballad. The single peaked at No. 19 on Oricon and is available as a track on Utoku's BEST album, "THE BEST 'eternity'" from December 2003.
Now with both Kondo and Utoku having collaborated as part of B.B. Queens (Mi-Ke was the backing chorus trio for the group), that group decided to go for its own version in 2011 as a track in the 25th anniversary edition single of their most famous song "Odoru Ponpokorin"（おどるポンポコリン）. This take definitely has more of a 50s doo-wop style.
Incredible how curiosity into a song on a kayo show can reveal a whole lot about its history.
The "Light Mellow" series of compilation discs has showcased various City Pop/J-AOR artists over a few decades, and several of their songs have already made it up to the pages of this blog. However, the series has also done their own spotlight on specific singers as well, and one of them is singer-songwriter Mayo Shouno（庄野真代）.
I can say that her most famous song is "Tonde Istanbul" which I've described as being one of those tunes that was part of a small late 1970s trend in so-called exotic kayoexpressing travel in places far afield from Japan. And for me until recently, "Tonde Istanbul" was really the only song by Shouno that I had known until I basically got into the blog. But in the last few years, I realized that not only did she often write her own tunes but she also created songs that spanned a few genres such as AOR and City Pop. So when I found out about a tribute to her by the good folks at "Light Mellow", I took a listen to the samples and ended up getting the CD back last Xmas.
So, without further ado:
1. Natsu no Sunglass 夏のサングラス 2. Moonlight City Woman ムーンライト・シティ・ウーマン 3. Yakusoku 約束 4. Hey Lady Yasashiku Nareru kai Hey Lady 優しくなれるかい 5. Maybe Tomorrow 6. Koi wa Kakehiki 恋はかけひき 7. Kaze no Machikado 風の街角 8. Week-end Love 9. Je T'Aime Je T'Aime ジュテーム・ジュテーム 10. Photographer フォトグラファー 11. Kinou ni Kanpai 昨日に乾杯 12. Chuo Freeway 中央フリー・ウェイ 13. Douzo Kono Mama どうぞこのまま 14. Hikageri no Machi 陽かげりの街 15. Adieu アデュー 16. Masquerade マスカレード 17. Tonde Istanbul 飛んでイスタンブール 18. Mina Goroshi no Hallelujah 皆殺しのハレルヤ 19. Old Love Song オールド・ラヴ・ソング
Now, to be honest, I could only find a fraction of the nineteen above to feature here since some of those that I couldn't find are pretty darn good. However, I will endeavour to do my best. Incidentally, Shouno's collection here, though released in September 2016, includes her music from the mid-1970s into the early 1980s.
There are a couple of covers here with one of them being Shouno's take on "Chuo Freeway", the classic Yumi Arai（荒井由実）song that has also been covered by vocal group Hi-Fi Set（ハイ・ファイ・セット）. This was actually Shouno's 3rd single from April 1977, and aside from a slightly peppier opening and a nice sax solo, it has basically retained its breezy 1970s City Pop flavour from the original and the Hi-Fi Set version. The other kayo cover was Keiko Maruyama's（丸山圭子）"Douzo Kono Mama" but unfortunately I couldn't find that one on YouTube.
As for a little background on Shouno, she was born in the city of Osaka. She was often sick when she was a little girl, but she did learn how to play the organ and became very active from elementary to senior high school, including diving happily into student council activities in junior high. Furthermore, even though she didn't pass her entrance examination to get into university, she kept up her music-based activities including getting into the Yamaha Music Foundation.
However, just when she was about to give music up at the age of 20, she entered a competition during a folk music festival and was able to get beyond the preliminaries and then won the regional grand prize. Getting scouted in 1976 by Columbia Records and selling a debut LP titled "Atelier"（あとりえ）, Shouno then aimed to become a singer in the New Music genre with an emphasis on urban contemporary.
Shouno's 7th single was "Masquerade" from November 1978, released six months after her big hit of "Tonde Istanbul". The song, written by Machiko Ryu（竜真知子）, composed by Kyohei Tsutsumi（筒美京平）and arranged by Ichizo Seo（瀬尾一三）, starts off with a natsukashii disco beat and maintains it for most of the song although the refrain takes things into some Latin. It may have had some influence from Barry Manilow's"Copacabana". "Masquerade" was also the title track for her 5th album which came out a month after the single.
"Adieu" was Shouno's 9th single from September 1979 which was written and composed by the singer with Seo behind the arrangement once more. Sounding like an after-hours (as in the sun is about to rise) mid-tempo ballad, Shouno relates the bittersweet story of a woman meeting an old flame by accident and realizing that the good ol' times cannot come back. Simultaneously sad and classy, Shigeru Suzuki（鈴木茂）was on guitar with Tsugutoshi Goto（後藤次利）on bass. "Adieu" was included in her 1979 album"Shisenritsu ~ Ballad"（私旋律（バラード）...Private Melody）.
"Hey Lady Yasashiku Nareru kai" (Hey Lady, Can You Be Nice?), Shouno's 11th single from February 1980, has slightly more of a good-time rock n' roll vibe to it. This was also written and composed by Shouno, and was used as the campaign song for Pola Cosmetics. Following her hits of "Tonde Istanbul" and "Monte Carlo de Kanpai"（モンテカルロで乾杯）, this song was Shouno's third Top 10 hit, peaking at No. 6 on Oricon and selling around 280,000 records. It also ended up becoming the 51st-ranked single of the year.
As I mentioned above, although there are other Shouno songs on YouTube, those ones didn't get onto the BEST album. However, I will be more than happy to explore those in the near future especially those represented on her 1978 album"Refrain"（ルフラン）. And hopefully, I've been able to show that Shouno did cover a wider musical territory than would have been assumed just on those first two Top 10 hits from the previous paragraph. She has continued to release singles now and then over the decades, and she is currently a trustee for the NPO Musicians Without Borders.
Fushigi ne...it truly is. I ordered Ikue Sakakibara's（榊原郁恵）6th album"C'est Drole ~ Fushigi ne ~" (Strange, Ain't It?) along with one other Ikue album "Slow Memory" back on July 16th and then just this past Monday morning, I got the e-mail from CD Japan that the package has shipped. Now, usually that means the discs won't be entering my hands for another week.
Well, three hours later on Monday afternoon...
THEY'RE HERE!
Man, I wanna congratulate CD Japan for getting that hypersonic jet in the air finally. If it can take human passengers, I wouldn't mind hitching a ride on that plane rather than take the 11~13 hour flight to Haneda on Air Canada.
The slightly "Twilight Zone" anecdote ends here. As for "C'est Drole", which was originally released back in January 1980, I bought it after hearing its title track "Fushigi ne" and after hearing a few more tracks on YouTube. Plus, seeing that another Sakakibara release "Ready Lady" (which I may also get a little later this year) was actually incorporated into my bible of "Japanese City Pop", I was intrigued about what the future Peter Pan used to sing when she was an aidoru, especially since she's been seen more as the friendly TV presence for decades.
Well, I popped in "C'est Drole" into the player and for the next two-thirds of an hour, my opinion of me deserving to eat more crow was further strengthened. As was the case with Seiko Matsuda's（松田聖子）2nd album"North Wind" which also came out in 1980 (mind you, all the way forward in December), "C'est Drole" didn't strike me as what I had envisioned to be the typical aidoru album of happy bouncy uptempo tunes and super-sweet love ballads. In fact, I got a fair potpourri of genres here too on my first listen. Double in fact, I had actually wondered whether I should have even labeled this as an aidoru album.
Case in point, the first track "Two-Way Street". It launches very much with a romantic saxophone and a soft and mellow ballad which fairly screams AOR. It's an interesting mix of two styles. The jazzy AOR which fills the instrumental passages and then Ikue singing a pop love tune about a man and a woman who may have been together at one point or at least fantasized about it but now walking in different directions on opposite sides of the avenue.
Mayo Shouno（庄野真代）wrote and composed "Two-Way Street". She is famous for singing one of those exotic kayo which was fairly popular in the late 1970s, "Tonde Istanbul"（飛んでイスタンブール）. The other thing that struck me was how well Sakakibara could sing. Something like "Two-Way Street" sounds like a ballad that Hiromi Iwasaki（岩崎宏美）would tackle but Ikue-chan takes care of it very well. There are also parts of the song which remind me of another more famous song which came out a couple of years prior.
The second track "Omoide no Irie"（思い出の入江...Bay of Memories）was written by Machiko Ryu（竜真知子）and composed by Casey Rankin of the band SHOGUN. Although compared to "Two-Way Street", this mellow number is more on the conventional side of kayo/aidoru ballads that I've envisioned, the arrangement by Reijiro Koroku（小六禮次郎）still has the song lifted up a level. I could even imagine one of my favourite singers, Ruiko Kurahashi（倉橋ルイ子）, covering this one.
Another bluesy number punctuated by the sax is "Toki wa Utsukushiku"（時は美しく...Time is Beautiful）which straddles that City Pop/AOR line. It's a nice slow twilight shuffle down a street as Ikue serenades her beau about how enjoyable her time is with him. Hearing that sax, I rather wish that somebody had actually put down who handled all of the instruments in the liner notes, but c'est la vie. In any case, Reiko Imamura（いまむられいこ）took care of the lyrics while Rankin once again came up with the music.
Singer-songwriter Nanako Sato（佐藤奈々子）, who I have also seen within the pages of "Japanese City Pop", was responsible for this happy and quirky "Sweet Sunny Side Up" about wedded bliss showing up over breakfast. Ikue not only sings about getting up early to make the most important meal of the day for her darling hubby but she does it in a faintly early 20th century style. I could almost see a giant NBC microphone materializing in front of her.
My last song for this article is "Kurenai Hana"（紅い花...Red Flowers）, one of my favourite tracks on "C'est Drole". It starts off rather gospel-like before it goes into this cool riff about heartbreak. My imagination once again flies here as I envision Ikue singing in front of a honky-tonk piano somewhere in Paris. Ahhh, l'amour....c'est drole, n'est ce pas? The only thing missing here are those rose petals just frittering away in the cold wind. Yukinojo Mori（森雪之丞）and Koichi Sugiyama（すぎやまこういち）were responsible for this one.
I couldn't find out how "C'est Drole" did on Oricon but I think for Ikue fans, it was a good buy. There is a nice mix of songs by good songwriters and I realized that Sakakibara wasn't just the happy-go-lucky aidoru who popped up on the first few episodes of the Kohaku Utagassen that I had ever seen.
Before I finish off, I have to give thanks to the YouTube uploader who was responsible for most of the videos up here tonight, Dasu（ダス）. He is totally devoted to Sakakibara and thanks to him, I was able to pull the trigger on my wallet to get "C'est Drole" and "Slow Memory", the latter of which I will also talk about in the next week or so.
Indeed it is February 29th 2016, Leap Day. In my view, we're in the midst of some rather unusual activities: we just had the Oscars handed out last night, tomorrow will be Super Tuesday in the United States, and today is the National Hockey League's Trade Deadline Day! For that last one, this has become such a quintessentially Canadian tradition that it should be made into a national holiday.
So, we've covered the cinematic, political and athletic. So why not go musical as well here?
These are my 5 choices for Leap Day since they all have something to do with jumping, flying and other synonyms within the title or the lyrics. The songs are not in any particular order.
1. Yoshie Kashiwabara（柏原芳恵） - Koibito tachi no Café Terrace（恋人たちのキャフェテラス）
This is the only entry on the list that has not had its own article on "Kayo Kyoku Plus" so I gather that I will be giving the largest paragraph here. The biggest thing I remember about the song is that lyricist Yoshiko Miura（三浦徳子）provided the phrase "Hop, skip, jump" for a ditty about a girl who just can't seem to raise the gumption to meet up with a guy she likes at a café despite her ardent feelings for him. This was Yoshie's 8th single from February 1982 composed by Masami Koizumi（小泉まさみ）, and it has that folky bouncy flavour that I often associated with the aidoru's earlier releases. It peaked at No. 9 on the Oricon weeklies scoring over 190,000 sold and was the 72nd-ranked song for 1982. "Koibito tachi no Café Terrace" (Lovers' Café Terrace) was also a track on her 6th album"Summer Sensation" from June of that year.
Part of the exotic climes kayothat was popular back in the late 70s, Shouno's most famous song has certainly got the right verb in the title. At the time, tourists were probably hankering to fly over to those amazing far-off places.
This was the song that sparked my idea to put up a Leap Song list in the first place. When you have that epic repeated lyric of tonde in there, it was pretty much fait accompli.
One of the classic Mariko Takahashi songs that has become rather rare to find on YouTube, so we've got enka singer Sayuri Ishikawa（石川さゆり）pitching in as a guest singer of the blissful soaring song.
I was looking around if I could find another example of that interesting hybrid within kayo kyoku that I like to call European enka. There is that shibui aspect that infuses the usual enka tune but the melody takes on that hue of a travelogue in terra exotica. I've always pegged the heyday of that subgenre around the late 70s so I often think about Teresa Teng, Saki Kubota and Judy Ongg due to their particular hits at that time.
And then there is also Mayo Shouno（庄野真代）who had come up with "Tonde Istanbul"（飛んでイスタンブール）, her 5th single in April 1978. Listening to that old chestnut, I think of travel on old-fashioned trains or bumpy cars through exotic lands (not sure if the melody can be truly called Turkish, though). Well, Shouno followed up on her biggest hit immediately a few months later in July with a second improbable hit, "Monte Carlo de Kanpai" (Here's to Monte Carlo). I say improbable because there is quite the similarity to mine ears of her 6th single to her previous one. The creators of the song, Tetsuya Chiaki and Kyohei Tsutsumi（ちあき哲也・筒美京平）, are the same, and I feel like I just transferred to another train and moved several hundred more kilometres to the east into Monaco. Mind you, there is that famous image of Monte Carlo with all of those high rollers and palatial mansions and a seemingly mandatory dress code of tuxedos and gowns. However, Shouno's song is definitely more on the business traveler/tourist level of things with camera and fanny pack firmly on call.
"Monte Carlo de Kanpai" didn't do quite as well as its sister song, "Tonde Istanbul" but it still did fine, getting as high as No. 5 on Oricon and finishing the year as the 43rd-ranked song of 1978.
Osaka-born Mayo Shouno's（庄野真代）5th single, "Tonde Istanbul"(Fly Istanbul), was another example of kayo kyoku's seeming interest in Central Asia and Europe during the late 70s. The exotic sound here, though, was a bit more subdued when compared to Saki Kubota's"Ihojin"and Judy Ongg's"Miserarete". I'd say that there was more of an even mix between the usual kayo kyoku and the exotic sound so that it may have been one of the first examples of what has been called European enka.
Released in April 1978, "Tonde Istanbul"was created by lyricist Tetsuya Chiaki（ちあき哲也） and composer Kyohei Tsutsumi（筒美京平）. It went as high as No. 3 on the Oricon charts, and sold more than 600,000 records. In addition, it and the following single, "Monte Carlo de Kanpai"（モンテカルロで乾杯....Here's to Monte Carlo) earned Shouno an invitation to that year's Kohaku Utagassen. The song is also available on her 4th album, "Refrain"(1978). Overall, the song was the 19th-ranked song of the year.
According to J-Wiki, Shouno made her first visit to Turkiye a couple of years after releasing the biggest hit of her career, and was rather shocked initially:
"I arrived in Istanbul after a long-distance bus ride from Greece, and it was snowing there! The humidity was high, though. We didn't have the Internet to collect any information, so I was surprised to see this weather since 'snow' and 'exotic' don't match at all."
