Shoichiro Hizume -- Room No. 909

 

Apparently, there is a Room No. 909 in the manga and anime world as a base of attack for the famous assassin Golgo 13. Not sure how significant this room is in the grand scheme of things for him but I hope that he was able to get a weekday rate.

I was going to post a Miina Tominaga （冨永みーな）song here but seeing how similar it sounds to the subject of my previous posting, Akiko Nakazato's（中里あき子）"Do You Wanna Dance?", I've decided to hold off until next week. However, when I was taking another look at Tominaga's "Kanojo no Kare kara Watashi no Kare"（彼女の彼から私の彼）, I saw the name Shoichiro Hizume（日詰昭一郎）as the composer and decided to look him up.

There's a bit of information about Hizume that I added to that Tominaga article including his untimely death at the age of 43 in 2001 due to a cerebral hemorrhage. However, I would also like to state that the bassist and songwriter had begun his career as a studio musician from 1977 before finally going behind the microphone as a singer in 1988. He released two singles and two albums in 1988 and 1989 of which his second album was "Take a Chance" from August 1989. And from there, I would like to show you "Room No. 909" which was written and composed by Hizume.

I'm not sure whether the bassist had been inspired by that Golgo 13 episode, and to be honest, "Room No. 909" has got a pretty upbeat chorus in contrast to the tension-laden scene of the main character setting up for the kill. However, it would be a major coincidence if there were nothing between the room and the song. I gotta say that whoever's playing the saxophone, there's something of the blue-eyed soul or sophisticated pop injection into the arrangement.

Miina Tominaga -- Kanojo no Kare kara Watashi no Kare（彼女の彼から私の彼）

 

Though I have seen Miina Tominaga（冨永みーな）as a veteran seiyuu and narrator, often on NHK shows, I'm still finding out about that part of her career as a singer. About a year and a half ago, I contributed the first article devoted to her through one of her early songs in the mid-1980s. Incidentally, the above video had Tominaga advertising some sort of seiyuu audition event in which she was one of the judges.

In comparison to the synthpop of "Hito Natsu no Memory"（ひと夏のメモリー）, the topic of that first article, Tominaga's "Kanojo no Kare kara Watashi no Kare" (Her Boyfriend is Mine) straddles the blurry line between 1990s City Pop and straight-ahead brassy pop. A track on her 1991 album "mind", the song has got that sophistication and flair which I've often acquainted with a night out in Tokyo back in the Bubble Era. Love that saxophone in there.

Written by Tominaga and composed by singer-songwriter Shoichiro Hizume（日詰昭一郎）, I don't know what the lyrics are about but with that title, I would think that it would have made for the ideal theme for one of the final trendy dramas on Japanese television. As for Hizume, he played support bass for TM Network and Tetsuro Oda（織田哲郎）, but also released a few singles and albums of his own. Sadly, he passed away suddenly in 2001 at the age of 43.