Back in May when I wrote that article on Mio Honda's（本田美緒）1982 "Ai Dancer"（哀ダンサー）, I noted that the creator for the song, Mitsue Ohshiro（大城光恵）, had passed away in February this year. Her death was even noted on the news.
Ohshiro was only a teenager when she offered Honda that song, and in fact, it would be a decade before her own debut single would finally make it out onto shelves. I noticed that a number of her singles made it as commercial jingles, and Single No. 1 was "Chuunen yo Taishi wo Idake" (Hey, Middle-Aged Folks, Be Ambitious) from July 1992 which wasn't only used for a Daiwa Securities TV ad but also as the theme song for a radio information variety show called "Takashima Hidetake no Ohayo! Chuunen Tanteidan"（高嶋ひでたけのお早よう!中年探偵団...Hidetake Takashima's Good Morning! Middle-Aged Detective Club）. Ohshiro cheerfully exhorts all those middle-aged guys in the middle manager ranks to get off their duffs and not let the youngsters pass them by. Happy-happy-joy-joy melody paired with some encouraging words got the song up to No. 50 on Oricon and sold 30,000 copies.
Well, Ohshiro wasn't done there. Less than six months later in November, the singer-songwriter would release a sequel of sorts to the debut single with the follow-up single of "Seinen yo Taishi wo Idake" (Hey, Young Folks, Be Ambitious). With a slight difference in arrangement and a bit more oomph in the tempo this time, she's now giving the young'uns the same old push in the right direction and telling them not to let the pressure get to them in the corporate world. Not surprisingly, this particular song was also used in those Daiwa Securities commercials as well.
Y'know...if I were truly and deeply cynical, I would say that there was something rather Yojimbo-esque about the effect of these two singles. However, I can also state that it's all about the two groups of young and middle-aged in a corporation synergistically working together for wholesale success.
