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.
It's another Saturday night in Tokyo. If you're alone and got that feeling of ennui, head on over to that hotel-top bar in Akasaka or Ginza, order a couple of fingers of whiskey on the rocks, and contemplate the meaning of la vie. And listen to this song over the speakers while the bartender is shaking up a cocktail.
Tis another classy romantic ballad by Takao Kisugi（来生たかお）. But this time, the crooner extraordinaire is joined by actress Kaori Momoi（桃井かおり）. Momoi was featured in the Hollywood film, "Memoirs of a Geisha" back in 2005 as Okaasan, the tough-as-nails proprietress of a geisha house. In Japan, she's also a frank-talking TV personality and commercial pitchperson with a flair for style and the aforementioned ennui. Sometimes, I've seen her on the small screen in a hairstyle of a short bob which has made me wonder if the lady is the reincarnation of Louise Brooks.
"Nejireta Heart de"(With a Wrenched Heart) was released as Momoi's 12th single. It just seemed to be the right song for her to sing with Kisugi. Coming out in July 1982, it was once again created by Kisugi and his sister, Etsuko（えつこ）, and went as high as No. 13 on the Oricon charts.
Let's remember about our final year in high school: getting ready for university/college, the yearbook and the senior prom. Pretty eventful time, eh? In Japan, it's also an important year for the high school senior. The yearbook is there but there's no such thing as a prom and the pressure to get into higher learning is enormous on a terrifying level. I very much doubt that most folks there will ever forget that year....whether they want to or not.
Perhaps that might be one reason that Kazuo Funaki's（舟木一夫）"Koukou Sannen-sei" (High School Senior) hit such a chord when it was released in June 1963. Funaki was born as Shigeyuki Ueda（上田成幸）in Aichi Prefecture in 1944, and had his first taste of show business when he was invited on stage to do a duet with singer Akira Matsushima（松島アキラ）in 1961. A couple of years later, armed with his new stage name, the young man who had just graduated from high school himself a couple of months earlier made his debut with "Koukou Sannen-sei"(High School Senior), written by Toshio Oka（丘灯至夫）and composed by Minoru Endo（遠藤実). Endo reportedly told Funaki to wear a high school uniform when performing the song.
Funaki made his first big step into stardom right from the get-go. With his prim and proper and handsome appearance and his tender voice, the song hit the stratosphere in terms of popularity and sales. There was no Oricon at the time but "Koukou Sannen-sei" sold well over 2 million records and earned awards for both Funaki (Best Newcomer) and the team of Oka and Endo (Best Songwriting) at the Japan Record Awards. Not surprisingly, Funaki was also invited onto that year's Kohaku. Just imagine how the kid and his family must've been feeling....a little over 2 weeks after this 19th birthday getting all the accolades AND appearing at a major New Year's event. If his family didn't have a TV set that year, they probably bought one by December 31st.
And Funaki also achieved another career benchmark. He was placed alongside two other young male stars, Teruhiko Saigo（西郷輝彦）and Yukio Hashi（橋幸夫）to become the Gosanke (御三家...The Big Three). Approaching his 40th anniversary in the geinokai, he released his 114th single just at the beginning of 2012.
Been trying to find this one for ages although I think it's somewhere in one of my compilations. Aoi Sankaku Jougi(青い三角定規...Blue Triangle [as in the one in your school pencil case]）was a short-lived folk group that managed to sing one of the evergreen songs of the 1970s. "Taiyo ga Kureta Kisetsu"(Season of the Sun) was the theme for a yearlong high school drama "Tobidase! Seishun"(飛び出せ！青春...Break Out, Youth!) that was shown on TBS.
It has stuck in my head all these years since the song's arrangement is so anthemic, almost along the lines of a superhero serial, and also because it represents the sound of early 70s Japanese pop with the strings and orchestral brass, despite the fact that it's been labeled as one of the big folk songs of all time.
Here is the group consisting of Kumiko Nishiguchi（西口久美子）in the middle, and Shigeru Iwaku and Mari Takada（岩久茂・高田真理）. Aoi Sankaku Jougi first formed in 1971, and released 6 singles and 3 albums before their breakup in 1973 due to creative differences. "Taiyo", released in February 1972, was their only big hit, written by Keisuke Yamakawa（山川啓介） and composed by Taku Izumi（いずみたく）. The song hit the No. 1 spot and won the Newcomers Award at the Japan Record Awards while selling over a million copies.
I'd think people in their 50s back in Japan would be swooning about this one.
My first two entries of Rumiko Koyanagi（小柳ルミ子）were her two beautiful ballads of the early 1970s. "Ohisashiburi ne" （It's Been A Long Time) was definitely far more uptempo and showed the Takarazuka-trained Koyanagi in feisty form. It's one of my favourites of the 1980s and I don't think I'm going too far out on the limb when I say it's probably one of the last great kayo kyoku pop hits.
Written and composed by singer-songwriter Masato Sugimoto（杉本真人）, "Ohisashiburi ne" has the instrumental tropes of a typical enka tune but aside from the classy piano intro, it just has this relentless energy which doesn't have time to stop off at an izakaya or watch a cargo ship leaving the pier. It's as if Koyanagi was declaring, "Enough of the 70s good girl stuff! I wanna paint this town red!"
And here is the lady several years after its July 1983 release performing "Ohisashiburi ne". Long time, no see indeed! Whenever I hear this song, I will always envision her TV appearances when she performed it on stage as she is whooping it up with her younger male dancers.
But it took the song half a year for it to finally gain access into the Oricon Top 10. Although it didn't finally break through until January 1984, the song's popularity otherwise got her the invitation for the 1983 Kohaku. It got as high as No. 8, her first Top 10 single in several years and her very last one up to this date, and would eventually become the 24th-ranked song of 1984.
Koyanagi must've been in a great mood when she recorded this tune. She even got her manager to do the backup vocals!
"Dancing All Night"is a song that I've encountered now and then on the Japanese music retrospectives. I wasn't a huge fan of it when I first heard it but over the years, it has grown on me. I think Yoshinori Monta's（門田頼命）gravelly voice kinda turned me off initially. Perhaps my initial dislike could be analogized by my hatred of sashimi and wasabi until I was close to my teens when a gastronomic light switched on, and now I eat the stuff several months a year.
To throw in another analogy, Monta's big hit of 1980 was the equivalent of a journeyman baseball player hitting a World Series-winning grand slam homer in Game 7. He had dropped out of high school in Kobe to start a career in music in the late 60s before making his official solo debut in 1971. Even before the late 60s, as a teenager, he had become a huge fan of The Beatles and started a band. However, after almost a decade of no hits, he was ready to throw in the towel.
But then, he made one more try and got together a band called Monta & Brothers. The grand slam came in April 1980 when "Dancing All Night"was released. Composed by Monta and written by Keiji Mizutani（水谷啓二）, the composer treated the song as his last chance. Breaking into the Oricon charts at No. 19, the song flew up to No. 4 the following week, and then hit the top spot a week after that. It stayed at No. 1 for 10 straight weeks. More glory came for the band with Grand Prizes coming from all of the major Japanese music awards, an appearance on the Kohaku Utagassen and 2 million records in sales. And to top it all off, it was the No. 1 song of the year.
Still not a huge fan of the chorus section, but overall I enjoy it now and then as an example of nighttime City Pop.
Well, it's been a couple of days since my last entries. Yesterday, I had a hell of a monstrous translation plus some horrible logistics which contributed to a very tense me. But strangely enough, I got my lone happy moment of the day when the good folks at Amazon.jp were able to deliver something to my mailbox that I had ordered several days prior:
EPO--Uwasa ni Naritai
Yup, it cost me a goodly sum of 6,478 yen, but since I am a fan of hers and her discs are getting rarer by the year, I wasn't about to let this opportunity pass. This is EPO's 4th album, "Uwasa ni Naritai"(I Want to Be Talked About), released in May 1982 Considering what she was wearing on the cover, I'd say that her wish probably did come true. I acquired this one since the first track was the Ray Parker Jr.-composed "Girl in Me", the fun disco tune that was my first profile of her on this blog. Very radio-friendly, it also happened to be the only single released from the original record. And there are a few more tunes that I've heard from this album since they've been included on her BEST compilations.
Track 5 is "Ame no Meguriai"（雨のめぐり逢い...Love Affair in the Rain), a ballad composed and written by EPO herself. The one thing I've liked about her is that she's always had this clear-as-a-bell, energetic voice for her uptempo stuff. "Ame" is a lovely tune but if she could have just softened her voice a bit more, it would've been that much more effective.
This is the title track, which starts off with a bit of a Latin piano riff before going into a happy-go-lucky melody about a young lady not trying too hard to hide an unseemly past from her new beau. I think if there has been a lyrical theme to EPO's repertoire, it's been cheeky fun....kinda like that best friend who always seems to get the hero/heroine in trouble.
The final track is a cover of the song that got her into the limelight, "Downtown". This version is even poppier and more radio-friendly. Although this song has EPO handling all of the vocal arrangements, the album has her usual co-horts, singers Taeko Ohnuki, Yasuhiro Abe, and Shigeki Miyata as backup singers. And her fellow RCA sister, Mariya Takeuchi comes in on one track titled "Secret Agent" as the English-speaking spy. The above, though, is a concert version.
Not all of the songs are winners. One of the last songs just has her blasting even more loudly which kinda reminds me of something being played at too much volume. Didn't even bother to confirm the title. Could be one of those "It'll have to grow on me" ones.
The scary thing is that I can emulate what she's wearing.
As we went from the 80s into the 90s, one of the musical trends in Japan was the band boom. And one of the big bands was Lindberg. Named after the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh (without the 'h' though), guitarist Tatsuya Hirakawa（平川達也）, bassist Tomohisa Kawazoe（川添智久） and drummer Masanori Koyanagi（小柳昌法）were right behind former aidoru-turned-vocal sparkplug Maki Watase（渡せマキ）.
I first came across "Ima Sugu Kiss Me"when I was watching this Fuji-TV Monday night 9 pm drama titled "Sekai de Ichiban Kimi ga Suki"（世界で一番君が好き....I Love You The Most in the World). Now back then, 9 pm on Monday for Fuji-TV was the prime programming slot for the star-powered, super-popular trendy dramas. So, the band had quite the ace in the hole when the song was selected to be the theme for this drama.
Then I came across the music video which in itself has become one of my memories of life in Japan during that time. Seeing the bouncy spiky-haired Watase just bopping along like a stray electron in the popular Harajuku fashion of the time has been seared into my brain. I also love her voice which seems to be that of a prepubescent choir boy just at the point of breaking...try to imagine that voice leading a rock band!
The band's 2nd single, released in February 1990 and composed by guitarist Hirakawa and written by Miyuki Asano（朝野深雪）, hit the top spot and became the 3rd-ranked song of the year.....a big boost for a new band that would continue for 12 years. In 2009, Lindberg got together one more time just to celebrate their 20th anniversary. Strangely enough, considering where their name come from, all of the members are terrified of air travel.
