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.
Singer-songwriter Shoko Inoue（井上昌己）is someone that I have written about in the past. This was specifically in September 2016, when I provided the article on her 5th single"Kamisama no Mystique"（神様のミステイク）from May 1990.
Well, jump ahead several years here on KKP and several months ahead in her own discography. This is her 9th single from November 1991, "Merry X'mas wo Agetai" (I Want to Give You a Merry Christmas), and as written by Katsuya Koga（古賀勝哉）and composed by Inoue herself, the underlying rhythm kinda hearkens back to another more famous J-Xmas tune. However, unlike that tune and for that matter, "Kamisama no Mystique", it's all love and positivity here as a couple enjoy their first Xmas together starting with that fancy dinner.
The way it's all structured, I think "Merry X'mas wo Agetai" would have made for a wonderful campaign song in a TV commercial. Maybe it actually was. However, I know that there was a music video for it as shown below.
I just discovered on J-Wiki that there was a name to cover the music sung by these mellow female singers and singer-songwriters in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Apparently the easy name of Girl Pop was used to describe the works of ladies like Miki Imai（今井美樹）, Mariko Nagai（永井真理子）, Reimy（麗美）and Midori Karashima（辛島美登里）.
Another name I have encountered now and then over the years that was also listed as being part of this genre is Shoko Inoue（井上昌己）. Up to now, I hadn't explored any of her work but listening to "Kamisama no Mystique" (Divine Mystique), I feel that I should have gotten onto the bandwagon a whole lot earlier.
"Kamisama no Mystique" was released as Inoue's 5th single from May 1990 and though realizing that it may not be an iconic song, it's still very pleasant to listen to. Inoue, who hails from Ehime Prefecture, even sounds a bit like Seiko Matsuda（松田聖子）as she sings about the trials and tribulations of entering a romance fraught with all sorts of potential pitfalls. The lyrics were provided by Goro Matsui（松井五郎）while Kenjiro Sakiya（崎谷健次郎）took care of the gentle but fairly bouncy melody that hints at the action taking place in the big city.
The song also belonged to Inoue's 3rd album"matiere" from the same month that the single was released. All of the tracks were written by Matsui with folks like Yasuhiro Abe（安部恭弘）, Chikuzen Sato（佐藤竹善）and Chika Ueda（上田知華）joining Sakiya in weaving together the songs. With a composer lineup like that, I can imagine that the album was pretty AOR in character.
Inoue had started composing songs straight from elementary school and when she came to Tokyo to study at university, she even won the rookie audition for the very first Taurus Records Super Vocalist Contest. From there, she made her debut in May 1989 with the single "Mary Laurent no Shima"（メリー・ローランの島...Mary Laurent's Island [not sure whether that name is spelled correctly]）and the album "Kanojo no Shima"（彼女の島...Her Island）.
Although in her first decade or so, Inoue did have a lot of songs created for her by other songwriters, she has written and composed almost all of her works since 2002.
