imase & Yumi Matsutoya -- Buntsuu（文通）

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The above is a very old piece of correspondence to Miss Mellie Ryan that is apparently at the Riley Birthplace and Museum in the state of Indiana, United States. The museum is where 19th-century poet James Whitcomb Riley was born and raised. 

I was also born and raised in a time when pen pals were a thing. When I was on the JET Programme between 1989 and 1991, my friends back in Toronto and I exchanged letters on our situations in Japan and Canada. Since it took a week for a letter to get from Japan to Canada, the fastest that I could get a reply to my letter was most likely around three weeks, taking into consideration the time for my friends to write out their end of the correspondence. Things are obviously much more lickety-split now for most people and areas.

Back in 2023, I wrote about relative wunderkind singer-songwriter imase and his "NIGHT DANCER" with its groovy urban contemporary feeling. I liked it so much that I even went out on a limb and predicted that he would end up on the Kohaku Utagassen before too long. Well, I'm still waiting for that Nostradamus wish to come true but until then, I discovered that he and Japanese pop legend Yumi Matsutoya（松任谷由実）collaborated on a song together which came out in the last couple of weeks at the end of May.

"Buntsuu" (Correspondence) is a song about a couple of people getting to know each other through some form of the title and hoping that they can do a face-to-face in the near future. With both Yuming（ユーミン）and imase also working on words and music together, it's a lovely duet that has had some commenters noting that it's a mix of the old kayo kyoku (or perhaps New Music of Yumi Arai's time) and current J-Pop. I can also hear some of that bossa nova, a genre that Yuming has known for quite a long time since "Ano Hi ni Kaeritai"（あの日にかえりたい）. Plus the laidback groove was rolled out by Tomita Lab（富田ラボ）in the arrangement and he's quite the expert at that. I remember Yuming and Tomita Lab collaborating on something themselves a couple of decades earlier.

imase -- NIGHT DANCER

 

I guess that I can add the good folks at Japan's "Weathernews" as a source for new music to be discovered. Yesterday, I was just casually leaving the YouTube channel for the station open while I performed my usual blog maintenance when the caster introduced the relatively new segment known as "Weather Music". It's the brief part where J-Pop songs from a variety of decades are played while the weather maps and temperatures are shown and perhaps the caster gets a bit of a break or an update.

Well, the song on that particular "Weather Music" segment was a new one for me. It was "NIGHT DANCER" by singer-songwriter imase from Gifu Prefecture. The song came out as his 5th digital single last year in August and though it's not a Neo-City Pop tune per se, it does have that amiable urban feeling to it as a couple having to deal with yet another humdrum night but at least they are together to enjoy that humdrum night. "NIGHT DANCER" managed to get up to No. 38 on the Billboard Japan Hot 100, and since then, a couple of remixes of the song have been getting out this year.

From what I've read of his profile on J-Wiki and Wikipedia so far, it seems like imase is the latest Luke Skywalker for J-Pop. After only getting into songwriting for a year, this young man in his early twenties had already been getting his debut single out there in 2021, and less than half a year after that, he got the gig to sing the Pocari Sweat jingle, something that only established artists usually get. Business has apparently also been booming on his social network accounts. The Force has truly been with him, so I wouldn't be surprised if he were invited to the Kohaku Utagassen in a couple of months.