Manzo Saita & Megumi Kawashima -- Tokyo Country Night（東京カントリーナイト）

 

Well, a little over 6 months must mean "fairly soon" in my addlepated head. Yeah, that's what I said when I wrote up the first article for aidoru Megumi Kawashima（川島恵）back in late December. Although she had started as the average teenybopper singer, she then decided to take on a more shibui path just around the mid-1980s and tackled the genre of enka. I wrapped up the article by writing that I would write about a duet that she did with comedian Manzo Saita（さいたまんぞう）...fairly soon.

That duet is here now. "Tokyo Country Night" is a song that Saita and Kawashima recorded together for release in March 1987. Just for information on Saita, he's a fellow who's based out of Nakano Ward, Tokyo (my final posting as an English teacher) and along with him being a comedic TV personality, he's also been a singer since 1980 and even a baseball umpire.

"Tokyo Country Night" is your typical jaunty duo-powered Mood Kayo that probably made for a popular karaoke choice back in those days which was written and composed by a singer-songwriter named Beethoven Suzuki（ベートーベン鈴木）. As for why he's named that way, even his sparse website doesn't divulge that reason, but it does identify this fellow from Ibaraki Prefecture as "a composer with a genius-level intellect in music and comedy." I'll settle for the observation that he enjoys coming up with the comical tunes.

Mind you, I don't think "Tokyo Country Night" is necessarily a comical song. It comes off as that quintessential Latin guitar Mood Kayo with Suzuki sprinkling a lot of shoutouts to various neighbourhoods in the Tokyo area among the trials and tribulations of love. Saita and Kawashima do a pretty good job with the delivery interspersed with some of that scattershot banter.

A decade later in June 1997, Saita released a cover version of "Tokyo Country Night" under the new title of "Ahh, Tokyo Country Night"（ああ東京カントリーナイト）as a solo song with only a slight difference in the arrangement (maybe more guitar). It's still Mood Kayo but this time, the lyrics were changed by Mitchi Dobashi*（ミッチー土槁）and two different versions for the train fans: the JR version and the private railway version. Apparently, it was all about the major stations in the area.

*Couldn't find a confirmed pronunciation of the last name and even Jisho.org couldn't rustle up anything.

Megumi Kawashima -- The Sunshine Boys（ザ・サンシャイン・ボーイズ）

 

When I first heard the name of this song "The Sunshine Boys", my mind warped back in time to that 1975 Hollywood comedy with the same title starring Walter Matthau and George Burns as a bickering comedy act. 

Methinks that Megumi Kawashima's（川島恵）2nd single "The Sunshine Boys" from May 1982 was probably not inspired by the movie unless lyricist Yu Aku（阿久悠）and composer Katsuo Ono（大野克夫）were big fans of the movie. The song doesn't have any hint of conflict in there; instead it's one of the more cheerier 80s aidoru numbers that I've heard recently with plenty of summer sun in the arrangement by Motoki Funayama（船山基紀）. I also think that some of the nature of "The Sunshine Boys" also comes from that sense of West Coast AOR in there.

Kawashima may have been one of the dozens or hundreds of aidoru that came and went in the 1980s but I think her voice rather stands out in a clear-as-a-bell way. A native of Aichi Prefecture born in 1965, she appeared on a local talent TV show and that was where her desire to become a singer was first sparked and once she graduated from junior high school, she made her way to Tokyo. From early 1981, she became a member of The Sundays, the supporting group of teens on the long-running NHK music show "Let's Go Young" (I'm assuming that is indeed the spelling for the group instead of The Sundaes since the program was broadcast on Sunday), and then in February 1982, she made her debut as an aidoru with "Mister Fushigi"（ミスター不思議...Mister Strange）.

Releasing 6 singles and 1 album "Sunshine Girl", most of which were released between 1982 and mid-1983, sometime in 1984, Kawashima went on the different path to head towards becoming an enka singer. Her penultimate single in 1987 was a Mood Kayo duet with singer/tarento Manzo Saita（さいたまんぞう）, "Tokyo Country Night"（東京カントリーナイト）. I took a listen to that one and will cover it fairly soon.