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.
When I was thinking about this latest in the Gosanke（御三家...The Big 3）series on KKP, I also mused about whether our household every owned anything by Toshiba. Sony and Hitachi were represented at home and of course, there was the Toyota car, but I don't think a Toshiba item ever got past our threshold. However, I do remember the Toshiba Rupo word processor in the Board of Education of Tsukiyono where I worked on the JET Programme. Compared to the slender laptops we have now, the Rupo was a veritable World War I tank.
But I digress. For this Gosanke entry, there is the Toshiba Sannin Musume （The Three Ladies of Toshiba） consisting of singers Chiyo Okumura（奥村チヨ）, Jun Mayuzumi（黛ジュン）and Tomoko Ogawa（小川知子）. The connection among the three is that the ladies debuted their discographies from Toshiba Records, and the name got adhered to them in the late 1960s according to J-Wiki with Okumura being the latest to debut in the year 1965. The naming is similar to what happened with a later trio of singers: the RCA Sannin Musume（RCA三人娘）.
One of the weirder examples of Wasei-eigo（和製英語）or Japlish that made my internal organs itch as a teacher was the term adulty. I've had a few students spout that at me and it meant "mature" or "sophisticated", although when I heard it, it sounded like something that an elementary school kid would say. Of course, I corrected my young charges of that saying but there was always that one student who could never shake the habit.😩
Well, allow me to bring something adulty into your day today on "Kayo Kyoku Plus". This is "Wasurete Ii no ~ Ai no Makugire" (It's All Right To Forget ~ The Last Scene of Love), a duet originally performed by former 60s aidoru Tomoko Ogawa（小川知子）and singer-songwriter Shinji Tanimura（谷村新司）as a single back in February 1984.
It's about as mature and sophisticated as a ballad of heartbreak can be. A couple, resigned to the fact that their relationship has come to its inevitable end, exchange their goodbyes before one of them gets on the bus and takes off forever. Tanimura wrote and composed "Wasurete Ii no" and it really feels like one of his ballads since I've always treated his love songs as musical equivalents of a well-cooked steak. This one, in particular, is a filet mignon. Koji Makaino（馬飼野康二）arranged the song and it does remind me of some of the classy love tunes by singers such as Mariko Takahashi（高橋真梨子）, Hiromi Iwasaki（岩崎宏美）and Mieko Nishijima（西島三重子）.
The above video has Tanimura and Ogawa singing their duet although I'm not sure if it was because of a bad cold or the need to show the emotion, but Ogawa doesn't sound too steady for some reason. However, the setting is quite adulty! "Wasurete Ii no" went as high as No. 21 on Oricon and ended 1984 as the 91st-ranked single.
As such a tender ballad, cover versions are a foregone conclusion, and indeed singers like Iwasaki have performed "Wasurete Ii no" with Tanimura over the years. I gotta say that Iwasaki hits this one right out of the park. Wouldn't be surprised if this had been one of the more popular duet songs to be performed at karaoke back in the day.
Tanimura has even provided his own solo version of his creation.
I was looking for something older in the kayo kyoku era when I discovered....or perhaps I should say, re-discovered..."Yuube no Himitsu" (The Secret From Last Night). The beautiful melody is something that I recall but I can't sure where the source was...perhaps it was a single out of my Dad's old record collection or it was a song that I had seen performed by the lovely singer-actress Tomoko Ogawa（小川知子）.
"Yuube no Himitsu" was Ogawa's debut single from February 1968, and was written by Ichiko Tama（タマイチコ） and composed by Akira Nakasu（中洲朗）. Ogawa herself had just turned 19 when she started out as a 60s aidoru. It was quite the difference back then as to how an aidoru sounded back then compared to how an aidoru sounded in the 80s and now in the 21st century, wasn't it?
Hearing the original version, I was surprised at how mature she sounded considering her age although her vocals didn't sound as if she had been this jaded seen-it-all, heard-it-all woman. There was still this innocence about her delivery of the lyrics which had her plaintively begging her paramour not to reveal anything about the night before so that the experience could stay pristine. For me, the Latin rhythm brings to mind a romantic couple tripping the light fantastic on the dance floor, and there's even a bit of a feeling in my weird imagination that this could have fit onto the soundtrack of a James Bond film...notably "You Only Live Twice" but that had already been out the previous year.
Another interesting point about the song involved the recording. Ogawa had been suffering from a fever at that time, so her voice went somewhat whispery when she was behind the mike. That obviously didn't hurt the record at all, and it was probably because of that fever's effects that had the male listeners swooning. She also ended up appearing on the Kohaku Utagassen for 3 years in a row with her debut starting things off.
"Yuube no Himitsu" reached No. 1 on Oricon. However, Japan wasn't the only place to have applauded the song's charms. During the early 70s, it apparently (for reasons which have yet to be cleared up, according to the J-Wiki article on Ogawa) made the trip over to South America under the title of "Amor Japones" and become a hit over there as well. The strange thing is that although it was still Ogawa's voice, the singer's name was given as Akaina Akomoto.
The above video is of Ogawa performing the song back in the early days. Since that auspicious beginning, she has released 31 more singles up to the year 2000, although she only released three albums up to 1969.
