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.
How does that saying go? When life throws lemons at you, make lemonade!
Apparently, that is the premise for this track from Kirinji's（キリンジ）January 2026 album"Town Beat". The appropriately titled "LEMONADE" is the melodic elixir for all that ails you as prepared by Takaki Horigome（堀込高樹）and served by both him and singer-songwriter Tomomi Oda（小田朋美）in a nice tall glass with plenty of ice. The album also has another collaboration between the two, "Room Dancer"（ルームダンサー）, but unlike the Motown vibe of that one, "LEMONADE" has more of a fleet-footed Neo-City Pop/technopop feeling. At the same time, the harmonies and maybe some of the chords also have me thinking some Steely Dan as well.
When I looked at the J-Wiki article for "Town Beat", I also realized that "LEMONADE" was a cover of a song that Horigome had provided the Idolmaster album "THE IDOLM@STER MASTER PRIMAL POPPIN' YELLOW" from December 2017. This was a duet between seiyuu Chiaki Takahashi（たかはし智秋）and Azumi Asakura（浅倉杏美）as their characters of Azusa Miura（三浦あずさ）and Yukiho Hagiwara（萩原雪歩）respectively. The original here goes a bit more for the technopop but also has a funkier groove. If I had heard this one before the Kirinji and Oda cover and then found out who was behind the songwriting, I most likely would have exclaimed "Oh yeah! That's Kirinji to a T!"
After all of these decades of seeing Tom Cruise as the world's most amazing counterintelligence agent doing all that daring stuff such as hanging off a plane or flying a helicopter into a mountain (I was almost convinced that he was going to have a fight with a villain on the International Space Station in the last couple of "Mission: Impossible" movies), my earliest memories of him still evoke that iconic dance in "Risky Business" back in the 1980s. At the time, little did I know that this fellow was going to become the No. 1 box office guy.
Well, I was reminded of Cruise cruising on that smooth wooden floor when I watched the video for Kirinji's（キリンジ）"Room Dancer" which came out as a digital single on Halloween 2025. No rock n' roll here, though. It's a young lass who's tripping the light fantastic in her apartment but then takes it out on the road as far as Antarctica, and it's all to the familiar smooth and refined Kirinji beat (perked up with some Motown feeling). They're all joined by singer-songwriter Tomomi Oda（小田朋美）who made her first appearance on KKP through a more Gundam route. Both Takaki Horigome（堀込高樹）and Oda worked on words and music.
Initially, when I took a gander at the video, I'd thought that it was Wild Child SUZUKA from the song and dance group Atarashii Gakko no Leaders（新しい学校のリーダーズ）who was dancing all about. However, as it turns out, the young lady here is Miki Ayane who is a model and a staffer at a vintage store in Harajuku. "Room Dancer" can also be found on Kirinji's latest album"Town Beat" which came out in January this year.
Well, summer officially arrived here at 10:58 this morning Eastern Daylight Time, so just a little over an hour ago as of this writing (of this first paragraph). It's comfortably cool/warm out there although I've got the fan on behind me, so my tush is currently a happy camper for now.
I've already been putting up summer-titled or summer-themed songs here and there over the past several days. This time, I've got something similar in the mellow technopop vein thanks to veteran unit SPANK HAPPY. "Natsu no Tensai"(Summer Genius) was released in May 2018 as the group's one-and-only single thus far during their third phase which has only Naruyoshi Kikuchi（菊地成孔）, the man who has been behind SPANK HAPPY right from the beginning, and singer-songwriter Tomomi Oda（小田朋美）. Both of them were also responsible for their version of the minyo "Kushimoto Bushi" on the "Gundam Thunderbolt"（ガンダム サンダーボルト）soundtrack the previous year.
"Natsu no Tensai" is a happy synthpop tune with little scoops of rock and soul thrown in for good measure. It wouldn't be surprising if it had been used in an eclectic commercial. The song was also included in SPANK HAPPY's October 2019 album"mint exorcist" that has also been ominously tagged with the phrase FINAL SPANK HAPPY. Since then, I haven't heard anything scheduled by Kikuchi under the band name.
Happy Monday! Here I was about to do a whole thing on this min'yo which originated from my ancestral prefecture of Wakayama, only to learn that I had already done so through an article almost a couple of years ago. When that part of the brain starts to go...😞
Just to help folks with how "Kushimoto Bushi" (Kushimoto Song) sounded back decades ago, this is the original version. Since then, I've come across a hip-swiveling 1958 salsa cover by the late Chiemi Eri（江利チエミ）which signals more on the twisting front on the dance floor rather than a stately parade of traditional dance. That cover is located in the original article.
Well, imagine my surprise a couple of years later on discovering that the Eri cover got its own cover via Episode 7 of "Gundam Thunderbolt"（ガンダム サンダーボルト）back in 2017. That same Latin jazz pizzazz by arranger Tsunemi Naito（内藤法美）has been retained for this version which for some reason accompanied a certain tropical mission by the soldiers in that episode.
Even the vocals sound quite familiar to those of the original Eri thanks to singer-songwriter Tomomi Oda（小田朋美）. The music for the entire soundtrack to "Gundam Thunderbolt" was created by Naruyoshi Kikuchi（菊地成孔）, and I read that he just happened to be the sax player behind one of the most incredible and craziest anime songs ever created, so unsurprisingly the score has plenty of jazz and blues added to the pop. In all honesty, I was fully expecting those robots on both sides of the equation to be swiveling their mechanical hips and swinging those weaponized arms instead of getting ready for battle.
