Takashi Fujii -- Irene（アイリーン）

 

When I visited Tokyo back in the fall of 2017, I stayed at the R&B Hotel in Otsuka, not far away from Ikebukuro. The hotel served a complementary breakfast each day in the lobby but of course, I couldn't eat the same thing for nearly two weeks straight, and so I was grateful that right beside the hotel was a Royal Host restaurant. Variety is the spice of life after all, and I got to go there a couple of times, once for breakfast and once for dinner.

As has been the case for the past few months on Fridays, my urban contemporary contributions are made up of the four articles and then the weekly Yutaka Kimura Speaks article. But I'm making an exception here tonight in the form of a sixth article because of the RoyHo connection. A couple of days ago, I found out that the restaurant chain and actor-comedian-singer Takashi Fujii（藤井隆）collaborated on a project for the reason that both entities celebrated their 50th birthdays in 2022. Looking at the short documentary above via YouTube, I had no idea that RoyHo had started life in Fukuoka and that its interior décor in the early years was indeed quite royal.

As for that project, that was an album titled "Music Restaurant Royal Host" which was released last year in September. I'm not sure what the criteria were for his choices but I'm assuming that they were simply songs that he liked. One of those songs just happens to be a cover of Yasuhiro Abe's（安部恭弘）"Irene", and being one of my favourite City Pop songs, I not only did the article on that smoothie years ago, it was also No. 2 on the Yutaka Kimura Speaks series a few months ago. 

Fujii's more subtle cover won't ever make me forget the Abe original from 1984 but I'm still happy that there is someone out there who was willing to make a cover of this classic. In any case, I wish a belated birthday to both RoyHo and Fujii. I promise that I will have a meal at the former the next time I'm in Japan.

tofubeats feat. Takashi Fujii -- Disco no Kamisama（ディスコの神様）

 

I don't get to see actor/bon vivant Takashi Fujii（藤井隆）all that much anymore and when I have seen him recently, he's been tackling more serious roles. However, I still remember him in his early days when he was doing his manic dancing, yelling out "Hot! Hot!" and acting as one of the most flamboyant weirdos out there in Japanese entertainment, and that's saying a lot, if one knows who often populates the comedic region in the geinokai.

Once he got his feet firmly in place as a bona fide celebrity, Fujii created his persona of Matthew Minami who had his own show on TV Asahi in the early 2000s. He even got to exercise his music muscles into the early 2010s with his most famous tune being his debut single "Nandakanda" (ナンダカンダ) in 2000.

This particular single, though, isn't part of Fujii's discography. It's actually part of tofubeats' discography as the singer and DJ released "Disco no Kamisama" (Disco God) in April 2014. Seeing Fujii in the title, I could pick up on that slightly nasal voice immediately and it's good to see that he still has the flexible moves in him. I was fully expecting to see him in the music video dancing and prancing all over the disco floor but instead the video shows the atypical scenes out of the ordinary lives of four young women. That is, until he and tofubeats suddenly show up in a living room to perform their way to the end. Not particularly a standout song by tofubeats but it's good to see Fujii again.

Takashi Fujii -- Nandakanda (ナンダカンダ)

For the third episode of "Uta Con" (うたコン) which was broadcast last week, I saw a tarento that I hadn't seen in some years suddenly appear in Kyoto to do something which I expected that a regular NHK announcer would have done. This was Takashi Fujii（藤井隆）who has apparently become a serious actor but for that show, he quietly and graciously interviewed a priest at some temple or shrine. Quite a shift in my perception.

Fujii comes from the famed comedy conglomerate Yoshimoto Kogyo based in Osaka but instead of being one-half of the usual duos doing a routine behind an old-fashioned microphone, he blasted onto the scene like cold water being thrown onto hot oil as a solo performer. Just imagine an especially deranged fusion of Canadian comedian Jim Carrey and Japanese comedian Ken Shimura（志村けん）, and you've got a bit of what Fujii is...or was. The first and most memorable routine by him was his "HOT, HOT" gag that you can see above. He was truly a nut and the folks ate him up.

Of course, the music world would come knocking. And in March 2000, he came out with his first single "Nandakanda" (One Thing or Another) whose video I remember seeing fairly often on TV. Looking at that video, he was surprisingly serious about the singing thing, I found. He did the singing and dancing thing with nary a funny face or "HOT, HOT". MC-GAKU wrote the lyrics but Daisuke Asakura's（浅倉大介）music and arrangement had me thinking some old-style Eurobeat and Rick Astley.

"Nandakanda" was his most successful single out of the 8 he has released between then and 2013. It went Platinum when it peaked at No. 9 on the weekly rankings and sold close to 300,000 copies. Ending up as the 94th-ranked single on the yearly charts, Fujii even got to be the first batter on the White Team for that year's Kohaku Utagassen.

His career got an even bigger second-stage boost when he took on the persona of the effeminate and haughty Matthew Minami for his own late-night show, "Matthew's Best Hit TV" on TV Asahi which lasted from 2001 to 2006. I regret not having seen more of the show during my time in Japan since from watching some of the YouTube videos, the hilarity is everywhere at every moment.

For those of you who are not too up on Japanese TV, you may have still caught sight of the flamboyant Matthew if you had seen the movie "Lost In Translation" when a bemused Bill Murray appeared on the show in the movie. Yup, it was indeed a real variety show and probably lodged the meme about variety shows there being completely unhinged...and yup, they sure can be.

But it might be the case that Fujii has gone the Tom Hanks or Jim Carrey route and become a more sober sided thespian. After all, it can be rather exhausting doing "HOT, HOT" for several years.

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