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.
The last time I wrote about Yaya（やや）, aka Yaeko Kojima（小島八重子）, was last August when I posted an article on what was arguably her most well known song "Yogiri no House Mannequin"（夜霧のハウスマヌカン）from 1986. It had the feeling of a Keiko Fuji（藤圭子）Mood Kayo with some of that boisterousness of a Checkers' tune.
Well, a couple of years later, Yaya came out with another single, "Onna Myouri" (The Joy of Being a Woman). Written by Yoshiko Oga（雄鹿美子）and composed by Minoru Komorita（小森田実）, this one is quite different in arrangement. Just my opinion, but the song strikes me as one of the latest examples of exotic kayo or Fashion Music that I've ever come across. Usually for either of those two types of music, I have to go back a decade prior or around the early 1980s, not really 1988.
There is something rather refined and kayo about "Onna Myouri", a song describing the complex feelings of a woman after another heartbreak. Through Oga's lyrics, I picked up on signs of defiance and resentment and rationalization of the situation. Maybe the setting is a sophisticated café somewhere in Aoyama but the roiling feelings inside prefer a plain nomiya in Yurakucho.
When I was doing my usual maintenance of various articles on the blog, I re-encountered one that I'd penned all the way back in June 2012. It was the one for Miki Hirayama's（平山みき）"Manatsu no Dekigoto" (真夏の出来事）and though this was a 1971 kayo kyoku, the first time I heard the song was through its technopop cover by MODOKEES in 1982 on an episode of "Sounds of Japan" on radio here. The group was fronted by vocalist Yaeko Kojima（小島八重子）and she would later change her professional name to Yaya（やや）going a few years down the decade.
I was curious about how Yaya did in her career and putting the name into the various search engines, the rabbit hole in cyberspace led me to her first single under that shorter name, "Yogiri no House Mannequin", which was released in January 1986. Compared to the breezy technopop cover of "Manatsu no Dekigoto", "Yogiri no House Mannequin" hit me with quite a wallop in terms of the arrangement. It sounded like a mix of Keiko Fuji（藤圭子）Mood Kayo and something that the then-popular Checkers（チェッカーズ）would release. Basically, it is a bruiser of a 1950s song that could be played in some roadside honky-tonk outside the city or deep within one. Give thanks to composer to Yoichi Sakube*（柵部陽一）.
Before I go into the lyrics by Seikou Ito（いとうせいこう）and Suwon Lee（李秀元）, I have to say that the title is also a striking one for me, particularly the last two words of house mannequin. Well, it's another example of wasei eigo or Japlish which refers to a sales clerk in a boutique. I've just read that the fascinating term is now officially a dead word since nowadays we simply use mise no ten'in-san（店の店員さん）. The entire title translates into "Sales Clerk in the Night Fog".
As for those lyrics, I think that they as emotionally delivered by Yaya relate the story of the titular sales clerk on the cusp of her thirties, possibly wondering about her life and times in Tokyo taking care of customers while the rest of the city is having its great times. Maybe she will decide to make a transformation from nebbishy salesgirl to tight-skirted vamp in Omotesando.
With a similarly boss arrangement, the late Teresa Teng（テレサテン）also released her version of "Yogiri no House Mannequin" in her third Chinese-language album produced in Japan, "Jiǔ zuì de tàngē"（酒醉的探戈...Boozy Tango）, which I could only derive via Google Translate (if anyone can correct what I've written, please do so). The album was released on Christmas Day 1986. The above video has Teng singing the original Japanese version but I don't know where that popped up in her discography.
*The composer's family name is perhaps a rare one since I couldn't find anything about it anywhere online. Therefore, I had to take a wild guess based on the individual readings of the two kanji involved, but again, if anyone can confirm or deny how I've written the name down, please let me know.
Just to show that not all summer J-Pop came from the 80s, here is another kayo kyoku classic from 1971 with Miki Hirayama（平山みき）. "Manatsu no Dekigoto" (Midsummer Happening) has Hirayama weaving her thoughts of an ideal date involving a car and a beach. Released in May 1971, this was just Hirayama's 2nd single after debuting with "Beautiful Yokohama"a year earlier. The second time was the charm since this would become Hirayama's biggest hit.
Written by Jun Hashimoto（橋本淳）and composed by the prolific Kyohei Tsutsumi『筒美京平』 (Kiyohiko Ozaki, Hiromi Iwasaki and Yu Hayami were just a small fraction of his clientele), the song won an award for composition at the 1971 Japan Record Awards. It went as high as No. 5 on the Oricon weeklies, and finished the year as the 37th-ranked single.
Strangely enough, the first time I had heard this song was actually through its cover version in 1982. Singer Yaeko Kojima（小島八重子）, later to be known as Yaya（やや）, became Miki Himalaya(ﾋﾏﾗﾔﾐｷ), and with a unit called MODOKEES, gave a somewhat techno-ized and sped-up version of the song. At the time, with the Yellow Magic Orchestra being at the top of the charts and my interest in them, I was quite keen on this version, having never been aware of the original for several more years. Amazing what some imagination and a good synthesizer can do.
