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.
One of the earliest television theme songs that I remember hearing when I was but a toddler was the theme song for the long-running series "Perry Mason" with Raymond Burr. That killer tune with the pounding piano keys has long embedded itself into my music memories, and in fact, I will probably cover it on this Thursday's edition of Reminiscings of Youth (or more accurately, Reminiscings of Babyhood).
I heard a bit of that piano pounding in Hachiro Izawa's（井沢八郎）"Otokogasa" last night when it was performed on the latest episode of "Shin BS Nihon no Uta"（新BS日本の歌）. When it comes to Izawa, I and probably most people will always think of his signature tune "Ahh, Ueno Eki"（あゝ上野駅）from May 1964 as one of the representative songs for the mass migration of young people from the countryside areas of Japan to the big cities like Tokyo to man the engines needed to power the economic recovery of the nation.
Well, "Otokogasa" was his 5th single which came out later that year in October. There isn't a set translation of the title that I could find on Jisho.org so considering the lyrics, I'm just going to translate it as "Man Under an Umbrella". And those lyrics by Yurio Matsui（松井由利夫）seem to be describing a rather melancholy scene of one last tender embrace under an umbrella in a rain storm by a couple who will soon not be a couple. Izawa's wailing style seals the deal and the music has that jazzy if somewhat mournful Mood Kayo including the key pounding that I referred to in the above paragraphs. Jouji Osawa（大沢浄二）was responsible for the melody.
Our regular Sunday kayo kyoku viewing habits were upended a little when I saw that "Shin BS Nihon no Uta"（新BS日本の歌）had actually been scheduled for 11:30 am this morning on the NHK Premium stream. It's usually set on Jme for 5:30 pm on NHK Select. Well, not looking a gift horse in the mouth, we all opted to watch it just before lunch instead of right after dinner.
As usual, one of my habits was seeing and listening for any kayo kyoku that I hadn't heard or covered on the blog yet, and as it turned out, there was one new entry out there. With a title of "Ore no Deban wa Kitto Kuru"(My Time Will Surely Come) , this is about as enka as they get...plenty of kobushi, shakuhachi, emotion and all of that traditional arrangement. However, it's not about a romance underneath the blossoming cherry trees or a wandering vagabond ronin righting wrongs and such.
From what I've gleaned of Yurio Matsui's（松井由利夫）lyrics, the story is about an understudy in a kabuki performance biding his time before he gets his time to shine on the stage. So much enka to come bursting forth from the grand kabuki hall. Masatoshi Hyudo*（首藤正毅）was behind the very woodsy enka melody and "Ore no Deban wa Kitto Kuru" was the debut single of enka singer Masumi Yonekura（米倉ますみ）from 1983. The song itself gradually picked up speed and popularity over several years until in 1989, it became a huge hit, selling approximately 300,000 copies.
Yonekura, who comes from Aichi Prefecture, has released a number of singles but she seems to have kept a very low profile for a talented singer. I've come across recordings of her song on YouTube but only one video of her actually being shown performing it on television. As well, a number of other enka singers have covered it such as Aya Shimazu（島津亜矢）with her usual brio.
*According to Jisho.org, there are many readings for the first name of the composer stated above so I'm just going with Masatoshi for now. If anyone can confirm or correct me on this, I'd greatly appreciate it.
Even though I (luckily) didn't go all that crazy with the barhopping during those seventeen years in the Tokyo area since my friends weren't all that heavy into the drinking, I did get my education in the imbibing of alcohol while I was living in Gunma Prefecture for two years on the JET Programme. Whenever there was some sort of major event on the school calendar such as Sports Day or the end-of-year parties, teachers, the PTA or the town staff would get together at a restaurant for dinner before hopping to a couple of karaoke bars and the like in places like Numata City. I did have my share of the booze when I was in university but I really got to "learn" about beer, sake and shochu although somehow my liver remained intact.
It should then come as no surprise that I learned the expressions hashigo（はしご）and hashigozake（はしご酒）fairly quickly and placed them into my mental lexicon of Japanese. The first expression means "ladder" but both of them in the pop culture vernacular refer to barhopping or pub crawls. Yep, my first few experiences with the teachers and town hall staffers going out on the town did feel like going up a number of rungs on the ladder since it increasingly felt like gravity was tugging on me hard as I was dragged to the next watering hole.
And thus, we come to "Hashigozake" (Barhopping), Keiko Fuji's（藤圭子）26th single from November 1975. Fuji, having been the female kayo expert on all things bar-related, seemed like the perfect person to sing this story of a guy going to his favourite drinking establishments in Tokyo's shitamachi district. The J-Wiki article for "Hashigozake" even lists the various neighbourhoods which are given the shoutout by Fuji: Kinshicho, Kameido, Hirai, Koiwa, Oshiage, Kanamachi and my beloved Asakusa. Aside from Hirai, I've been to the other areas though not necessarily for drinking.
There are a few things that distinguish "Hashigozake" from other Fuji songs. For one thing, although that famous cigarette-and-whiskey voice still holds court, I don't think that this particular single which hit No. 43 on Oricon is the usual morose enka/Mood Kayo about a permanent resident of Shinjuku spending days and nights as a barfly. There is something that feels more upbeat because the song is really about what a lot of folks in Japan have been doing for decades. Another thing is that "Hashigozake" ended up being Fuji's final performance on NHK's Kohaku Utagassen in 1975 after a total of five appearances on the show.
Now, I usually would have already mentioned the lyricist and composer by this point but even within that, I did need an extra paragraph. The lyrics were provided by Nana Hazono（はぞのなな）which is the pseudonym for Yurio Matsui（松井由利夫）who would later become the mentor for one enka prince of the 21st century, Kiyoshi Hikawa（氷川きよし）. As for the melody, once again a possible pseudonym might be in play here, too. The name「赤坂通」does read as Akasaka Douri, aka Akasaka Avenue which actually exists in Kobe. However, checking things online, I couldn't find any songwriter that could be connected with that name. According to Jisho.org though, 「通」can be read as a first name in several ways including Ikariya or Kayo, but no light was shed on the identity. It could mean that any compositionally-inclined staffer at the RCA label responsible for the production of the song could have come up with the music.
A song this amiable has most likely been covered many times, and one such cover was recorded by kayo legend Hachiro Kasuga（春日八郎）for a 1978 album "Asakusa Ninjou"（浅草人情...The Asakusa Way）."Hashigozake", by the way, has been recognized as a go-tochi（ご当地...regionally referential） kayo for Tokyo.
Well, sure enough, enka singer Hiroshi Itsuki（五木ひろし）will be making another appearance on NHK's "Uta Con"（うたコン）later tonight I will see what he has in store in terms of any new songs or one of his past hits. My parents have always tended toward the old traditional music, so I'm always relieved when one of the veterans shows up on the show.
I guess then that this enka, Itsuki's 51st single from October 1985"Yume Shizuku" (Dream Drops), reflects the sweet pain of love. Written by Yurio Matsui（松井由利夫）and composed by Chiaki Oka（岡千秋）, the veteran singer does his usual heart-on-a-sleeve best expressing how the emotion can be fleeting at best; two ships passing each other in the night and all that. Tsuneo Saito's（斉藤恒夫）arrangement pretty much brings together a scene of either two lovers under the cherry blossoms a couple of centuries back exchanging some final words before parting for good or a contemporary pair doing the same thing in an old out-of-the-way bar.
"Yume Shizuku" ranked in at No. 17 on Oricon and it ended up as the 75th-ranked single for 1986. Parting is such sweet sorrow indeed.
Although I couldn't find out when this version came out, Oka himself tackles his own creation here. The sparer arrangement and the composer's crustier vocals makes the protagonist sound even more forlorn and lonely.
As a fan of sumo, I have to say that the most recent Nagoya tournament in mid-July was most thrilling as it served as the stage for a good number of milestones in the sumo world. Among them were the indomitable yokozuna Hakuho's 45th title and perfect 15-0 run despite a year-long absence and the birth of a new yokozuna in the form of Terunofuji. Congratulations to them both!
It has been exactly a year to the basho since I started watching sumo and I've had the pleasure of witnessing the last leg of Teru-chan's comeback from the pits of the 2nd last division due to injury and illness. His inspiring comeback story and beastly performance on the dohyo made him a common favourite in my household, and we were all hoping he'd be the one with the perfect score and the title to add more pizzaz to his yokozuna promotion, but alas, ol' Haks was having none of it. Nevertheless, everyone's still stoked to have their 73rd yokozuna, one who seems to embody the sumo (Japanese) core value of perseverance, so sayeth the Yokozuna Council members, at least. For the time being, Teru had his tsuna (rope, i.e. that thick white belt with the lightning bolts) made and is in the midst of preparing for his dohyo-iri (ring-entering ceremony) during September's tournament.
Speaking of sumo and yokozunas, I bring to you today an enka tune that includes just that: Kiyoshi Hikawa's"Ninjou Toridejuku" (Kindness at the Toride station). It came early on in Hikawa's career on 7th July 2004 as the B-side to the successful single "Banba no Chutaro" (番場の忠太郎) and seems to be decently popular among fans. Like its A-side, there is a ronin element to "Ninjou Toridejuku" alongside the sumo one, the latter of which I couldn't quite comprehend, what with vocabularies like keisho-mawashi (decorative apron) not making any sense to my perenially struggling Japanese ability. I mean, I did vaguely understand that the words "dohyo-iri", sung once at the end, point to sumo, but I didn't see how it related to the whole assumed ronin-based narrative.
As with most songs I enjoy, what got me into "Ninjou Toridejuku" was its rousing melody courtesy of Hideo Mizumori (水森英夫). Making it stand out from most ronin-related enka in my opinion was the liberal usage of the taiko which seemed to suggest a protagonist with a powerful and/or stubbornly proud character... which is also not uncommon among this enka category. It took seeing Hikawa patting his kimono belt and taking on a shoulder-wide stance to finally allow me to fully connect the song to sumo. You can check out the video here.
After quite a bit of research, I believe that Yurio Matsui's (松井由利夫) words take inspiration from author Shin Hasegawa's (長谷川伸) novel "Ippon gatana dohyo-iri" (一本刀土俵入), which also served as the basis for many renowned rokyoku/enka-rokyoku pieces of the same name by the likes of enka greats like Haruo Minami and Michiya Mihashi. So, in a similar vein, "Ninjou Toridejuku" centers around the hapless (former) low-ranking sumo wrestler Mohei, who got kicked out from his stable for one reason or another. Intent on getting back into the profession so as to one day be able to perform the yokozuna dohyo-iri before his mother's grave, Mohei heads to Edo from Komagata, Gunma, to seek a new stable. Along the way, he ends up at the Toride post/pitstop in Ibaraki, broke in the wallet and probably spirit. There, he meets barmaid Otsuta, to whom he relates his story. Sympathetic to his cause, she provides him with some of her possessions and what little money she has to enable him to take the ferry to Edo via the Tone river, to which he swears to repay someday. I think Matsui's telling of Mohei's exploits ends here. Spoiler: Mohei never makes yokozuna... nor even returns to becoming a wrestler. He just turned into a gambler. I mean, he reunites with Otsuta and there's some sort of happy ending, though.
Frankly, considering what Mohei was up to, somehow Mizumori's score seemed to be on the extravagant side, but I suppose if you looked at it as representing Mohei's determination, Otsuta's graciousness and the powerful sport of sumo, it is rather apt. Also, it really gets the blood pumping when having it playing in one's earpieces on the way to Ryogoku.
To round off here's what yokozuna dohyo-iri are supposed to look like, as done by Kakuryu, Harumafuji, Hakuho, and Kisenosato. Can't wait for Terunofuji's.
P.S. J-Canuck had written an article on the other renditions of "Ippon gatana dohyo-iri", so you can check it out here if you're keen.
In a way, this can also be considered to be an All-Points Bulletin article.
But first to explain, I found another old 45" in that bag of vinyl records some months ago, and it was of a couple of Takeo Fujishima（藤島桓夫）songs, one of which is "Ano Ko wa Itchatta"(There Goes That Girl) as you can see in the photo at the top. Playing it on the turntable definitely brought images of more than half a century ago out in the small towns along the seashore. The late Fujishima is singing about the woman he loves parting from him sadly as she gets onto that night train to somewhere else.
"Ano Ko wa Itchatta" was written by Yurio Matsui（松井由利夫）and composed by Kozo Masuda（増田幸造）. And this is where the APB comes in. I tried hard by looking it up in the JASRAC database, the search engines, the J-Wiki article for Fujishima but I couldn't track down exactly when this song had been first recorded. Even the record and the liner sheet itself didn't divulge the year, and the above video seems to be the only one of this particular song on YouTube. So, the best I could do was find out that lyricist Matsui had provided words for another Fujishima song in 1957, and though this is still a way-out stab at it, I speculated that songwriters often created tunes for singers in clumps within a certain period of time, so until I find out otherwise, I'm gonna go with the 1957 tag for this one. If any enka fans or Fujishima die-hards know exactly when "Ano Ko wa Itchatta" was released, let me know.
I do miss those kaiten sushi joints back in Tokyo. There is a place in downtown Toronto that has sushi come out on floating boats but I don't think that's quite the same.
Back on the most recent episode of "Uta Kon"（うたコン）, enka veteran Takashi Hosokawa（細川たかし）sang this particular tune which had me searching for the original version on YouTube. It was easy enough to find and after listening to Hachiro Izawa's（井沢八郎）"Hokkai no Mangetsu"(Full Moon Over the Northern Seas), I felt like I had to bring out more respect for the fishermen who have provided the wonderful tuna and mackerel on many a plate at those kaiten sushi restaurants.
This was Izawa's 45" that came out in October 1965, and it blasts out of the gate with a yell by the singer that could be the biggest min'yo declaration or something epic from a Spanish opera. It certainly got my attention like accidentally ingesting a large hunk of wasabi. Izawa then goes into this huge story of the fishermen heading out into the weather-beaten seas to get their daily haul like soldiers going gamely into battle.
Written by Yurio Matsui（松井由利夫）and composed by Joji Osawa（大澤浄二）, "Hokkai no Mangetsu" was successful enough that Izawa got his first of two invitations to NHK's Kohaku Utagassen that same year. And it looks like the singer made every moment of his appearance count as he gave out that yell on the steps. There's not only sweat coming out of the crew's pores...it's also pride.
Yappari ne! Soudaro ne! Shindoi ne... Miren da ne...
Aw geez, just these lines alone got me hooked on to Kiyoshi Hikawa's (氷川きよし)"Oi Okkake Otojiro".
I managed to find the popular enka singer's 2nd single when listening to "Hakone Hachiri no Hanjiro" (箱根八里の半次郎). Despite looking a little awkward back in 2001 and that horrendous coconut hair not doing him any favours (it's like a redux of Mae-Kiyo's glaring 80's perm), I must say that "Oi Okkake Otojiro" caught my attention through Hideo Mizumori's (水森英夫) score. As Mom had said when I played this song, it is loud. Besides the rousing strings, shamisen and blaring shakuhachi that his debut had, now there's even the taiko to spice things up. And not to forget Hikawa's bullhorn-like delivery that makes this tune more boisterous than it already is. Providing the lyrics for "Oi Okkake Otojiro" was Yurio Matsui (松井由利夫), and like its predecessor it seems to be about another ronin getting tired of his nomadic lifestyle.
Released on 21st February 2001, "Oi Okkake Otojiro" was very well-received, managing to get as high as 8th on the Oricon weeklies before settling at 50th by the end of the year. It became a certified Platinum record too, and allowed Hikawa to bag the "Gold Award" at the 43rd Japan Record Awards, as well as the "Cable Music Excellence Award" (I think that's how it's translated) at the 34th Japan Cable Awards. And finally, he sung it once during the 52nd Kohaku. Y'know, with it being that popular, I'm surprised that it's not sung often on TV nowadays. Too bad, I actually like it more than "Hakone Hachiro no Hanjiro".
Anyway, to round things up here's Fuyumi Sakamoto (坂本冬美), Junko Ishihara (石原詢子) and Yuri Harada (原田悠里) giving their rendition of "Oi Okkake Otojiro" on an old episode of "Nippon no Uta".
From the "Kayo Arena" magazine I got a while ago. He really
looks younger than his actual age.
I caught this weekend's episode of "Shin Nippon no Uta". Overall, it was decent and one of the better episodes I've seen so far. The "Kyu Kyoku no Kyu Kyoku" (究極の９曲) segment - the "Meikyoku 11" replacement - was tolerable and Hiroshi Kadokawa (角川博) appeared twice, so that kept my attention from wandering off into some far corner. And performing during the "Special Stage" were 2 big figures in the world of enka, IkuzoYoshi (吉幾三) and Kiyoshi Hikawa (氷川きよし). It was really amusing to see the young (in comparison) Hikawa keeping up with Yoshi's antics and both put on a good, funny show.
At one point in the performance, Yoshi's official debut single, "Koibito wa Kimi Hitori" (恋人は君ひとり), was brought up. Released in 1973 when Yoshi,the gruff enka singer I know and love, was known as Eiji Yamaoka (山岡英二), the aspiring aidoru (I kid you not). The cover photo of this single, which was enlarged for the crowd to gawk at, had him in a white, Elvis-like outfit and standing in all sorts supposedly cute (fine, he did look a little cute) and sexy poses... I'm so glad the big guy turned to enka. But anyway, all that talk about Yoshi's/Yamaoka's debut single had me thinking about the Prince of enka's own debut single, "Hakone Hachiri no Hanjiro".
Released on 2nd February 2000, "Hakone Hachiri Hanjiro" was the song that shot a then 23 year-old Hikawa to instant fame. It peaked at 11th place on the Oricon weeklies and remained in the Top 50 even on the following year, coming in at 41st position, and it sold around 750 000 copies as it was certified a triple platinum record. Written by Yurio Matsui and composed by Hideo Mizumori(松井由利夫 . 水森英夫), it won the singer many accolades, 5 in total, 4 of which were Best Newcomer Awards and the other being the Grand Prize at the Japan Lyricist Awards. So it's not a surprise that this song gave Hikawa his first ticket to the Kohaku on that same year. Now that's one heck of a feat!
Attributing to the success of "Hakone Hachiri Hanjiro" was most likely his youth, impressive warbling, looks - in my opinion, he's better looking now than then (it's the hair) - and the catchy-ness of this jaunty tune with its signature line "Yadane tara, yadane" that he sings with a playful intonation, complete with the necessary finger gun hand gestures, has the fans screaming, "KIYOSHI!!!" immediately after. Just this one line alone got stuck in my head after hearing it for the first time during a "Kayo Concert" episode a few months ago, and it made me want to listen to it again.
Y'know, the "Yadane tara, yadane" part of this song seems reminiscent of one of Hikawa's more recent singles, "Choitto Kimagure Wataridori" (ちょいときまぐれ渡り鳥), where the pauses in between his equally as whimsically sung "Otto dokoi ikenee yo" allow the audience to scream out his name.
Finally, the video above (that video was taken down) shows Hikawa's performance during the annual year-end competition 15 years ago. Okay, it's definitely the hair... and that feather boa isn't helping (that was in the previous video that got taken down... that coat in this video is not doing him any justice either).
