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.
The weather here in Toronto today is nothing like that shown above with the El Cid Hotel in Mexico. It was 0 degrees Celsius with a -7-degree wind chill and areas a few hours north of my city are supposed to be getting their first dumping of snow over the weekend. On the penultimate day of this November, it's really feeling like a little bit of Christmas.
I'd been more of a night person than a morning person but at my wizening age, I no longer consider myself someone who's really all that chipper at any particular time of the day. However, it seems as if seiyuu and singer Mitsuko Horie（堀江美都子）might have been more of the latter. The last time I wrote about her was back in June 2023 when I posted her "Morning Rain", a pleasant City Pop concoction from her December 1981 mini-album"Micchi no Hitorigoto Club"（ミッチの独言倶楽部）.
Earlier in the year though, Horie released her 4th single in June, "Pure Morning". I guess she really had a thing for the AM hours. Written by Machiko Ryu（竜真知子）and composed by Koji Makaino（馬飼野康二）, "Pure Morning" has more of a calming mixture of down-home City Pop and the ol' kayo kyoku thanks to that orchestra backing her up although there is some of that groove of the former genre. It almost sounds like something that Hiromi Iwasaki（岩崎宏美）would have tackled at the same time. The same song headlined her 2nd original album"Image" which was released a couple of months later and ended up as high as No. 54 on Oricon.
"Well, I'm an anison singer but what I really want to do is GROOVE!"
OK, I'm merely fantasizing a quote that singer-actress Mitsuko Horie（堀江美都子）might have said back in the early 1980s. To be honest, what I just put up there could also be adapted for a lot of Japanese folk singers in the early 1970s who later made that jump (temporary or otherwise) to City Pop at the turn of the decade such as Iruka（イルカ）and Kingo Hamada（濱田金吾）. Of course, Horie has been known as an anison singer responsible for classics including "Candy Candy"（キャンディ♡キャンディ）, but I remember posting one of her songs of the City Pop persuasion last summer, "Chigasaki Memory"（茅ヶ崎メモリー）, her 5th single from June 1982.
About half a year earlier, Horie also released a mini-album on Xmas Day 1981 titled "Micchi no Hitorigoto Club"（ミッチの独言倶楽部...Micchi's Talking-to-Oneself Club）. It was an LP consisting of just six songs and on Discogs, it's been categorized as a kayo kyoku album but the opening track sure sounds City Pop to me. With "Morning Rain" being co-written by Horie and Machiko Ryu（竜真知子）with the chorus group Miw providing the melody and arrangement, the title not only comes across like a brand of really pleasant air freshener but the song itself is a pleasant Sunday stroll in the urban park in the AM. The singer's vocals fairly stride happily along the shiny sidewalks of Tokyo in the spring (not in the summer when they would broil pedestrians alive).
For people who may want to purchase the album, I should let you know that Horie must have really enjoyed that album title since she had also put it on her book of essays earlier in October that year and it was also the title for her December 2009 BEST compilation album commemorating her 40th anniversary in show business. I probably would have posted the song here on Urban Contemporary Fridays but knowing how much of a backlog I have of songs to write about and how my memory is becoming increasingly sieve-like, I decided not to let the opportunity go.
One of my regrets when it comes to providing thumbnail photos in KKP articles is that I don't really have very many beach shots. At the time when I was living in Japan, I obviously had no idea that I would be doing a music blog that would be going for ten years and running, but I also have to confess that I was never a seashore-loving sun worshipper like so many other people.
I did have my walk along Shonan during my 2014 visit to Japan but never quite got to Chigasaki in Kanagawa Prefecture which is why I'm providing this YouTube video from Japan Life Channel. Of course, the city is the birthplace of Keisuke Kuwata（桑田佳祐）, leader of the legendary band Southern All Stars（サザンオールスターズ）which has been the pop cultural symbol of the summer life.
However, today's first article on Urban Contemporary Friday on "Kayo Kyoku Plus" doesn't involve SAS though it is all about the wonders of Chigasaki. Actually on the mike here is Mitsuko Horie（堀江美都子）, a singer that I've usually associated with anison such as the theme songs for "Candy Candy"（キャンディ♡キャンディ）and "Don Don Domeru to Ron"(どんどんドメルとロン), but on the first day of summer 1982, she released her third studio album"Ready MADONNA" and sometime in that June, she also put out her 5th single which is on that LP, "Chigasaki Memory".
"Ready MADONNA" was produced by Ichiro Nitta（新田一郎）, musician, songwriter and Spectre No. 1 of the dynamic band Spectrum（スペクトラム）, and he arranged all of the tracks along with composing most of them including "Chigasaki Memory". It's nice that it was Horie on vocals since she hails from Yamato City which is only about 32 kilometres away from Chigasaki or a short drive away. Yashuhito Miyashita（宮下康仁）wrote the lyrics of pining for the titular city and the summery spell that it casts on folks.
"Chigasaki Memory" really is one upbeat disco-powered pop tune and Horie sounds as if it were indeed Nitta channeling through her, and I think that it is Nitta on the trumpet in the refrain. In fact, I think the song is so up with the area that I swear that the Chigasaki Chamber of Commerce could have requested Nitta to come up with the tune.
Sorry to say, but there has been another loss in the manga and anime industries following the death of manga author of Fujiko A. Fujio（藤子不二雄Ⓐ）. Voice actress and narrator Minori Matsushima（松島みのり）, who played the main character, Candice White Adley, on the 1976 anime adaptation of the 1975 manga "Candy Candy", passed away on April 8th at the age of 81 from cancer.
When I was growing up here in Toronto in the 1970s and 1980s, we did start getting our dubbed anime. So we were able to catch shows such as "Uchuu Senkan Yamato"（宇宙戦艦ヤマト）and "Gatchaman"（ガッチャマン）on the American channels, but at the same time, there was also anime showing up on CBLFT which was the French-language station under the CBC umbrella. I had to learn French for some years as part of my mandatory education but my abilities were never enough to really pay attention, although I knew that "Candy Candy" and "Captain Harlock" were being shown regularly on the French channel.
I never saw the anime but over the years through life here and in Japan, and via various anison retrospectives, the theme song for "Candy Candy" which was also "Candy Candy" became known to me. Takeo Watanabe（渡辺岳夫）was responsible for the melody which for the most part seems to describe the high upbringing of young Candice while showing off an underlying current of funk just to show that she can probably cause as much ruckus as any curious kid.
Meanwhile, the lyrics were written by Keiko Nagita（名木田恵子）who happens to be the creator of the original manga under one of her pen names, Kyoko Mizuki（水木杏子）. "Candy Candy" was recorded by frequent anison singer Mitsuko Horie（堀江美都子）with the backing of the chorus group The Chirps（ザ・チャープス）who consist of three sisters, Mariko, Yuriko and Eriko Takeuchi（竹内まりこ・竹内ゆりこ・竹内えりこ）. Singing kayo kyoku, children's show themes, commercial jingles and anison, they had their initial run between 1969 and 1983, but they became active again as of 2007.
My condolences to the family, friends and fans of Ms. Matsushima. Incidentally, the theme song earned the Golden Hit Award from Nippon Columbia in 1977.
I'm not sure what the situation has been of late for those traditional Xmas cartoons and Rankin & Bass stop-motion presentations, but when I was a kid, it was a given that they would be all over the channels. Outside of "A Charlie Brown Christmas", the one that I've known the best is the hour-long "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town" with the vets from old Tinseltown, Fred Astaire and Mickey Rooney. It was always heartwarming watching Kris Kringle when he was a young man fighting the imperialistic Burgermeister Meisterburger.
Now, just imagine if the life of Santa Claus and his family were made into a regular weekly anime series spanning between October and March. Well, that is indeed what was done back starting from 1984 when Fuji-TV broadcast "Mori no Tonto-tachi"（森のトントたち）. Known in English as "Elves of the Forest", the show depicted jolly ol' Santa and his elves living life large in a Finnish forest with the rest of the denizens.
I came across this one song from the soundtrack devised by Takeo Watanabe（渡辺岳夫）. Although it's neither the opening or closing theme, it's a pretty jaunty number sung by anison singer/seiyuu Mitsuko Horie（堀江美都子）who I have just written about last week for another anime theme song. "Oide White X'mas" (Come On, White Christmas) is about what I would expect for a J-Xmas tune for the kids: light and positive vocals by Horie and optimistic/industrious melody by Watanabe with lyrics by Machiko Ryu（竜真知子）.
I'm gathering that the video below is the Spanish-language version of "Mori no Tonto-tachi" since I couldn't find the original Japanese show.
For a number of folks in my generation living in Southern Ontario back when we were kids, we probably caught this cartoon "Fables of the Green Forest" on TV Ontario. It always started with Sammy Jay yelling the above words to herald another adventure with that happy theme song and a bunch of really friendly animals.
My reaction on first seeing Rocky the mountain rat and the bunch was very similar to the one that I had when I found out that the early 1970s anime"Gatchaman"（ガッチャマン）, that I had first been seeing in the thick tomes of manga that my parents bought me at the Furuya food store in downtown Toronto, was appearing on the Buffalo ABC affiliate as "Battle of the Planets" in the late 1970s. It was surprise and delight because I also had first seen this cartoon in the pages of a manga tome. I believe that all of us who loved "Fables of the Green Forest" realized that our interest in anime came a whole lot earlier than expected.
Now, the original title for the 1973 anime was "Yamanezumi Rocky Chuck"（山ねずみロッキーチャック...Rocky Chuck The Mountain Rat） which had its year-long run on Fuji-TV, and the opening theme song was "Midori no Hidamari" (The Sunny Spot Among the Green) by Micchi to Chatterers（ミッチーとチャタラーズ...Micchi and Chatterers）, a group consisting of veteran singer Mitsuko Horie（堀江美都子）and three men who have remained unnamed (I hope that at least they got their royalties). Compared to the folksy melody that had been recorded for the English-language version of the show, "Midori no Hidamari" has got more of a beat; in fact, I think it also has some elements of 1960s French jazz and it comes across as a somewhat mischievous trickster of a tune.
Seiichiro Uno（宇野誠一郎）was responsible for the melody while Chinatsu Nakayama（中山千夏）provided the lyrics. Nakayama already has some representation on the blog for her 1969 folk single"Anata no Kokoro ni" (あなたの心に). Uno also took care for the entire soundtrack behind "Yamanezumi Rocky Chuck".
Micchi to Chatterers tackled the ending theme as well. Titled "Rocky to Polly" (Rocky and Polly), it was Uno behind the composition but the lyrics this time were written by Morihisa Yamamoto（山元護久）. Incidentally, singer Horie was also behind a 1988 anime theme that has recently become a Future Funk favourite.
You might say that I grew up with the pastime of bowling. In my early childhood, my father and his buddies used to bowl at the huge Thorncliffe Bowling Alley regularly so I used to watch him get his fair share of spares and strikes.
Being a frequent viewer of "The Flintstones" on CFTO-TV here in Toronto and then WKBW in Buffalo, I was very accustomed to seeing Fred and Barney roll the ball down the lanes.
Another Buffalo, New York affiliate WBEN televised weekly episodes of "Strikes, Spares and Misses", and then there were the Saturday-afternoon shows of "Pro Bowlers Tour" on ABC. You may have wondered if I ended up wearing Polo shirts, slacks and bowling shoes to go for multiple rounds at Thorncliffe.
The answer to that would be "No.". Not that I didn't enjoy the occasional rounds of bowling with friends now and then, but it never became a lifelong hobby for some reason. I think it was because it wasn't all that easy to access a bowling alley from home and none of my friends were all that crazy about the pastime either. And frankly, in the era of video game parlors which only required a small pile of quarters, bowling seemed to appear more and more as a luxury thing.
I would later find out during my studies of Japan in university that the pop culture over there experienced periodic bursts of interest in bowling as well. I guess one of those times was the late 1960s and early 1970s. And yep, during my two different times living in Japan, I did partake in bowling with students and teachers.
To capitalize on the boom of bowling for that turn of the decade from the 1960s into the 1970s, there was a TBS drama called "Utsukushiki Challenger"(Beautiful Challenger) which ran from April to October 1971. It dealt with the story of young Midori, played by Tokyo-born actress Emi Shindo（新藤恵美）, a high school student training in hurdles who somehow finds herself in the world of bowling finding her share of rivalry, competition and romance.
Shindo also sings the theme song "Utsukushiki Challenger", a bright and optimistic pop song punctuated by some sharp horns and an incessant bass thrumming away. There's also a fluttery flute and Shindo's vocals which might be representing the youth and innocence of Midori while those horns and bass may be hinting at the hustle and bustle of life in the big city. Tokiko Iwatani（岩谷時子）was the lyricist here with Kyohei Tsutsumi（筒美京平）handling the melody.
Apparently, the song "Utsukushiki Challenger" was a fairly hot commodity since a number of singers recorded their own versions. That would also include Mitsuko Horie（堀江美都子）, who has since become a singer of anison, including "Fly Away ~ Yume no Hikouki"（夢の飛行機）, a tune that has been transformed into a popular example of Future Funk. Horie's cover isn't all that much different from the Shindo original except for an epic French horn helping out.
In any case, all of the bowling establishments that I used to know, including my childhood Thorncliffe Alley have all come down thanks to the wrecking ball instead of the bowling one.
On another one of my YouTube browsings, I encountered another Yung Bae video which brings together all that Vaporwave or Future Funk to a really sparkly song that goes well with all of those images of planes. Well, I mean that lyric "Fly away" helps out, too. Plus, with that cheerful synthesizer that sounds like a horn section arranged by 60s music whiz DeVol, it really kinda makes me want to take off to Japan again...and I've not liked air travel in a long time. In a way, I guess it really gets me into that aesthetics mood....or perhaps I should say A E S T H E T I C S!
The song hooked me but I had to dig deep to find out what the original title was and who the original singer was. There was no mention of either for the top video so I had to go with what lyrics I could hear and understand. Well, a few tries through the Yahoo Japan search engine finally got me the answer I needed. And I was somewhat gobsmacked.
It wasn't any sort of City Pop or any late 1980s champagne synth-imbued urban contemporary tune but merely an opening theme to a 1988 anime. The anime in question was titled in Japanese as "Don Don Domeru to Ron" (どんどんドメルとロン) based on the original French-Belgian comic series "Cubitus" with the anime being broadcast to the United States under the title "Wowser".
And before I forget, the title of the flashy opening theme is "Fly Away ~ Yume no Hikouki" (Plane of Your Dreams) by veteran singer Mitsuko Horie（堀江美都子）. I've heard her name bandied about in the anime and tokusatsu fields for years but I had no idea that she has been around for such a long time. Born in 1957, she started out as a singer in 1969 and then took on a second gig as a seiyuu which has been going on since 1978.
My impression is that "Fly Away" is to "Don Don Domeru to Ron" as that iconic theme by Hoyt Curtin is to "The Jetsons". Mind you, I think "The Jetsons" has the longer legacy but my point is that "Fly Away" just adds some extra warp drive to the launch of the show every week. As I intimated at the top, I had assumed that this was some sort of paean to all things City Pop, especially with that title.
Today I spent the day with some friends for lunch and a movie, the latter being "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back" starring Tom Cruise. I had seen most of the first Jack Reacher movie on TV and wasn't particularly thrown over the moon with it, so it was nice that I actually enjoyed "Never Go Back" a bit more. However, I still thought the movie was rather paint-by-the-numbers. It could have been any of the episodes of "NCIS" with Jethro Gibbs played by Cruise instead of Mark Harmon.
As for my thoughts on the annual rash of superhero blockbusters, it was also as hit-and-miss as "Never Go Back". "Captain America: Civil War" was fine although the story became increasingly sadder, while the earlier "Superman v. Batman" was disappointingly dire. "X-Men: Apocalypse" was also another missed opportunity and I didn't even bother with "Suicide Squad" due to the unhappy reviews despite all of the hoopla of last year's filming of a pivotal chase scene down on Toronto's Yonge Street. I'm hoping that "Doctor Strange" will end this year on a high note and from what I've heard from the early reviews is that it will be good if not spectacular.
In a year when the thought of a superhero team on the Hollywood screen was probably a mere dot of out-there-in-left-field fantasy, I had heard that Japan concocted a live-action show of a group of five human superheroes in contrast with the lone warrior of Kamen Rider（仮面ライダー）and the gigantic Ultraman (ウルトラマン) along with the anime Gatchaman (ガッチャマン). The 1975 show was "Himitsu Sentai Gorenger"（秘密戦隊ゴレンジャー...Secret Task Force Five Rangers）, produced by Toei Company and televised on TV Asahi as the first of the long-running Super Sentai series. One of its descendants ended up getting over to America in the early 1990s and transformed into the "Power Rangers" series.
But going back to "Gorenger", I first saw this team on those thick children's readers that were sold in the front of the Furuya Japanese food shop in Chinatown, and boy, did I want to know about these guys. I was amazed by the costumes and the weapons that were miraculously stored in their masks such as the whip in leader Red Ranger's mask and the bow-and-arrow setup in Blue Ranger's mask. However, the 1970s were the pre-Internet, pre-VCR prehistoric age so the best I could do was read one manga involving the team when they were going up against a villainous skeleton with a long cape. Fairly disappointed was I.
Things are obviously quite different now, but when I finally got over to Japan again in 1981, there wasn't any mention of any Super Sentai series and my interest had already waned down to a nub by that point. Still, I could find that little bit of the Gorenger in action above.
Also, there is the theme song, "Susume! Gorenger" (Go! Five Rangers) as sung by Isao Sasaki (ささきいさお) and Mitsuko Horie（堀江美都子）with the chorus group Columbia Yurikago Kai (コロムビアゆりかご会). Of course with Sasaki, I've always seen him as the king of the songs used in the "Uchuu Senkan Yamato"（宇宙戦艦ヤマト）franchise, and Horie has also contributed one or two songs to the adventures of the Yamato. But I think this is the first time I've heard them sing a good ol' tokusatsu tune.
And what a heroic tune it is. There is the urgent first part before the melody gives way to something hopeful with the combination of horns and plucky electric guitar. I've heard "Susume! Gorenger" used in parodies of the Super Sentai format by various comedians over the years but never knew that it had been the theme song for the pioneer show. Shotaro Ishinomori（石森章太郎）wrote the lyrics while Chumei Watanabe（渡辺宙明）took care of the music.
Missed opportunity, to be sure. But at least, I get to see some of what made the show so popular with the kiddies and my parents were able to save a ton of dough and frustration toward me for demanding that I get one of the team costumes.
Also, have a look at JTM's playlist for tokusatsu theme songs since he also mentions about the ending theme for "Gorenger" among some of his other favourite tunes from the genre.
