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.
Happy Monday! Well, the third Monday of July has already passed in Japan but they did celebrate a long weekend culminating in the national holiday of "Umi no Hi" or Marine Day (or Sea Day or Ocean Day). I was watching the NHK news footage of kids and grownups hitting the sea and having oodles of fun while the heat wave bombarded on them. And so I figured about whether I actually had done a tribute to the national holiday. As it turned out, I did do a tribute back in 2023, also on the third Monday of July.
But I still wouldn't let the idea of another Author's Picks go. So thanks to a J-Wiki entry called "Umi wo Daizai to Shita Gakkyoku"（海を題材とした楽曲...Songs Themed on the Sea）, I was able to find some more ocean-frolicking-themed tunes that I had already written about way back when. Without further ado then:
The final regular Reminiscings of Youth article lands on Christmas Day today and it will be on the theme song for "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" from December 1966. It's a special, just like "A Charlie Brown Christmas", that I used to see every year on CBS on the old tube telly. By this point, pretty much everyone in North America knows about the green Grinch with his heart being two sizes too small (initially at least) and his willingness to ruin everybody's Christmas.
As a little kid, I didn't know who the narrator was and wouldn't finally find out for quite a few years. At first thought, I'd assumed that it was Dr. Seuss behind the narration but then I discovered it was Boris Karloff, Frankenstein's Monster himself, behind the mike when I'd known about his time many decades earlier as a horror movie icon. And dang it! He had a great voice for the theme song "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" which was given lyrics by Dr. Seuss and composed by Albert Hague as this classic comically villainous composition. Karloff chewed the heck out of this tune like a zombie on bone.
I never saw the Jim Carrey version of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" from 2000, but he one-ups Karloff in his rendition of the song. Some fine Canadian ham there!
Anyways, we have a couple of singles in Japan that got released at around the same time as the original cartoon.
In the last few years of my stay in Japan, I was collecting those big volumes of the old "Peanuts" newspaper strips which began in 1950. Although those tomes went all the way to Charles M. Schulz's final productions in 2000, I basically stopped collecting them after I reached the 1980 edition since I think the heyday of Charlie Brown and Snoopy was within those first thirty years. The above two photos display the October 26, 1959 strip showing Linus' first mention of the Great Pumpkin as Lucy must be thinking about committing her little brother to a hospital somewhere.
Interestingly enough, it was 56 years ago today that the television adaptation of those Halloween hijinks of Charlie and the gang made its debut on CBS. "It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" made its premiere less than a year after "A Charlie Brown Christmas" as the second holiday-themed Peanuts special, and I've also enjoyed this Halloween-themed one over the decades. The introduction of the show with Linus and Lucy getting out into the pumpkin patch, accompanied by a reprise of the iconic "Linus and Lucy" by jazz pianist and composer Vince Guaraldi, was able to remind viewers of the Van Pelt siblings' different personalities without a word said in the first minute and a half.
Linus' raving and ranting about the Great Pumpkin aside, I think the one other scene that has stuck in fans' memories is Charlie Brown's perennial "treat".
Now, as I promised when I wrote on the theme song for "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving" a few weeks ago, I will be giving my Halloween-themed Reminiscings of Youth article (KKP's 9,100st!) in the form of the song that has remained in my head from "It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown". "Great Pumpkin Waltz" by Guaraldi and five other musicians was a song whose title I hadn't even known; it was just a number that I knew as a theme for the special. It wasn't until I had purchased George Winston's tribute to Guaraldi, "Linus and Lucy: The Music of Vince Guaraldi" in 1996 and listened to Winston's slower, longer and even more soulful rendition the piece that not only did I finally find out the title but also that it was a particularly beautiful waltz. It's up there with one other waltz created for pop ears, "Lover", by Rodgers and Hart which was also a ROY article early last year. The original by Guaraldi hits harder in the special especially in the scene when Sally Brown decides to sit in the pumpkin patch with her sweet Baboo.
When I was prepping this ROY article, I discovered that the music which accompanies the title reveal and the Peanuts kids getting spooked was also pretty good, so I've included it here. According to Wikipedia, it was originally titled by Guaraldi as "D Minor-Major Groove" when he did a recording session with bassist John Mosher and drummer Johnny Markham back in 1958, but he brought it back for the special under the new title of "Graveyard Theme". There is some playfully sinister feeling in the brief musical cue, although I think that for a graveyard song, it's still pretty happy.
Anyways, I will be coming up with a J-Halloween song for next Monday. There were a few singles coming out in Japan around October 1966 of course, although Halloween wouldn't become a thing for a few more decades there.
Linda Yamamoto -- Kommachauna （こまっちゃうナ） (September 1966)
Although I was never a beach bum myself, I do remember going to Cherry Beach by Lake Ontario as a (relatively) wee lad, and then jumping into one of the smaller Great Lakes. Not to say that it is a crystal-clear body of blue water right now, but back then, it was definitely a soup of something not really healthy. I came out of my diving experience feeling rather slathered in lotion with all sorts of pill bugs crawling over me. I guess I was too young to be disgusted since I don't recall feeling much of anything as I emerged (maybe it was shock...being a buffet for some woodlice can do that to you). My mother on the other hand was in all likelihood none too pleased.
There is also the Don River which feeds into Lake Ontario. At the time, it had possessed a notoriety of being one of the world's most industrialized rivers (very politely said). In fact, our local joke was that in winter the Don didn't so much freeze as it actually gelled.
All right. Enough talk of environmental horrors although it is one of my earliest memories of the beach. Now, let us segue into an oldie that I was reminded of just a few hours ago as I was watching the latest episode of NHK's "Nodo Jiman"（のど自慢）. One fellow who had been trying to get onto the program 14 times finally got his wish and got to appear (mind you, he only got the two dings of the bell), and he sang this chestnut "Omoide no Nagisa" (Memory Beach).
I first heard this Group Sounds classic back on "Sounds of Japan" in the early 1980s and had assumed that it was a Yuzo Kayama（加山雄三）tune, but actually it was first recorded by a GS group called The Wild Ones（ザ・ワイルドワンズ）. Looking at the cover of the single, these young lads hardly look mildly agitated, let alone wild, mind you.
"Omoide no Nagisa" was The Wild Ones' first single in November 1966, and was written and composed by Shigeki Torizuka（鳥塚しげき）and Kunihiko Kase（加瀬邦彦）who were two of the guitarists for the band, although the article for the song stated that all of the members had a hand in the lyrics. It's one of those gentle summer songs that brings forth images of the beach, a sunset and a nice breeze as the young folks look into the west and realize that the hot season is about to fade away for another year. The song was an immediate hit as it sold over a million records according to a July 1991 edition of the Yomiuri Newspaper.
The song was covered by a variety of singers and groups over the years, including a cover by 70s aidoru group Candies（キャンディーズ）a decade later. Their version of "Omoide no Nagisa" was recorded onto their 1976 live album"Kuramae Kokugikan Ichiman-nin Carnival Vol. 2 ~ Candies' Live"（蔵前国技館10,000人カーニバルVol.2 キャンディーズ・ライブ...Kuramae Kokugikan Sumo Arena 10,000-strong Carnival Vol. 2）.
A couple of years later in 1978, another straight-ahead version of "Omoide no Nagisa" was recorded by The Handers（ザ・ハンダース）. However, The Handers wasn't a singing group per se but actually a conglomeration of comedians from the TBS variety show "Ginza NOW!"（ぎんざNOW!）which ran from 1972 to 1979. Their cover was officially titled "Handers' no Omoide no Nagisa"(The Handers' Memory Beach), and although the arrangement was pretty much the same as the original, the schtick was that each of the guys sang their parts while doing an impression of another singer or celebrity such as enka singer Shinichi Mori（森進一）, R&B chanteuse Akiko Wada（和田アキ子）or even Mood Kayo legends The Cool Five.（クール・ファイブ）.
The only member of The Handers that I recognize is veteran impressionist Akira Shimizu（清水アキラ）who's been a mainstay of Japanese variety television for years and years. As for the derivation of the name for the band, apparently it comes from the fact that there were six members in the band so in Japanese we have "han"「半...half」 + "das"「ダース...dozen」.
