Saori Hayami, Sakura Tange & Yuko Minaguchi -- Eien Diary（永遠ダイアリー）

Although my buddy got me back into anime once I returned from Japan for good, his other hobby of gaming never infused into me either here or back there. There was a period of several years though when my anime buddy had temporarily given up on the ghost for anime up to 2006 and was more into video games.

Well, perhaps I should revise that first sentence. Actually, in my Ichikawa days, I did buy a Play Station 1 in the mid-1990s on which I played a lot of those arcade games and even one of those do-it-yourself games where I could design and build my own house. However, I never got into some of the games that my friend liked such as those sword-and-sorcery epics.

One of the other habits that also happened during my Ichikawa life was that my buddy would sometimes ask me to receive some of his purchases from Japanese pop culture stores since those establishments wouldn't send their ware overseas and required a Japanese address (that's still the case with Tower Records). I would then dutifully relay the goods over or wait for him or one of his friends to visit so that I could hand over the stuff to him.

Well, as Nozaki-kun and Mikorin will kindly illustrate in the video above, one of the goods that my buddy purchased and had delivered to my home was a couple of dating sim games. He was very generous in even allowing me to try them out if I so desired. I didn't so desire but out of curiosity, I tried one on for size (the game...THE GAME!) and perhaps I made it up to the first five minutes before deciding that this was a little too skeevy for me. When his buddy finally arrived one day to pick up the games, I handed them over with no questions or answers.

Let's jump forward to the present day, shall we? Now that we've been doing the usual anime-and-food outings for several years, this particular song that gets into the anison hour from time to time reminds me of that very brief dating sim experience. And that's because the song is the theme from a dating sim itself called "Love Plus" which came out in 2009.

"Eien Diary" (Eternal Diary) is an alright song (nice jazzy guitar riff in the middle) but I chose it for the blog tonight mostly due to the three seiyuu who play the potential love interests. Saori Hayami（早見沙織）, Sakura Tange（丹下桜）and Yuko Minaguchi（皆口裕子）are now familiar names to me in the anime department but they would've just garnered a blank stare from me at the time that "Love Plus" was first released.

Hayami is now an A-lister but I think that she was at a pretty early stage in her career when she participated in "Love Plus". Tange and Minaguchi had already gained a lot of fame for their starring turns in "Card Captor Sakura"（カードキャプターさくら）and "Yawara!" respectively, but again at the time, anime was a lost art to me, let alone the knowledge of seiyuu. So it was interesting to find out that it was those three behind this theme.

I was able to find out from the JASRAC database that Tatsuji Ueda（上田起士）was the lyricist and Norihiko Hibino（日比野則彦）was the composer for "Eien Diary", and the song is available on the "Love Plus" soundtrack.

Pocket Biscuits -- POWER

For me, Pocket Biscuits（ポケットビスケッツ）, a group which consisted of tarento Teruyoshi Uchimura（内村光良）, Udo Suzuki（ウド鈴木）and Chiaki（千秋）, will always be close to my heart for their 2nd single, "Yellow Yellow Happy", as you can see from my purchase of the CD single.

However, in terms of the Oricon rankings, Pocket Biscuits' most successful hit was their 4th single, "POWER" which came out in July 1998. It's a song that I remembering hearing in excerpts on the ranking shows but for all intents and purposes, a couple of nights ago was the first time that I got to listen to the song in its entirety.

The reason that I mention it is that a few nights ago on the latest "Uta Con"（うたコン）, vocalist Chiaki (the lady hasn't aged one iota) showed up for the first or second time to perform "POWER" alongside one of the members of AKB48 who is apparently a huge fan of the song. I can't remember the name of the member but I think it took a lot of her discipline not to squee once the performance was over and even then, I don't think she was totally successful.

Written by Chiaki with Pocket Biscuits and composed by Bakufu Slump's（爆風スランプ）guitarist, Pappara Kawai（パッパラー河合）, "POWER" has a beat which reminded me of Princess Princess'（プリンセス プリンセス）"Diamonds" from the previous decade after a slower-paced intro. As I mentioned in "Yellow Yellow Happy", I still think Chiaki has some pretty decent vocals for someone who has been known mostly as a TV personality, and apparently since her Pocket Biscuits days, she went on to release a few solo singles in the early 2000s along with a couple of albums.

As for the success of "POWER", it hit No. 1 on the charts, selling approximately 900,000 copies, and becoming the 21st-ranked single of 1998. In fact, Pocket Biscuits even got to perform on the Kohaku Utagassen for that year in the form of a medley.

Fuyumi Sakamoto -- Ore de Ii no ka（俺でいいのか）

I don't quite remember when I started enjoying enka and Mood Kayo. I mean, it's been something that I have been listening to for my entire life when my parents played the old LPs on the stereo but I always considered that brand of kayo kyoku the stuff that my parents liked and I just had to hear it. Pretty sure that it wasn't during that 1981 trip to Japan or even exposure to "Sounds of Japan" on the radio since enka tunes were the main songs on most of the broadcasts (which I didn't listen to) while the pop stuff that I fell for (which I did) made their presence known perhaps once a month. Still, listening to Takashi Hosokawa's（細川たかし）"Kita Sakaba"（北酒場）on "Sounds of Japan" opened the door a bit for me.

Most likely, it started to a small extent during my 1981-1991 JET Programme stint when karaoke almost became a job-related obligation and then things started further expanding during my far longer stint between 1994 and 2011. Of course, watching "Uta Kon"（うたコン）and its predecessor "Kayo Concert"（歌謡コンサート）on NHK and doing this blog over this decade has further strengthened my amity toward these older genres. The music for enka and Mood Kayo with its noble koto, violins and Latin brass among other instruments has also proven to be a tonic of sorts whenever I feel that I've gotten a little too much of the J-Pop stuff, even my favourite genre of City Pop. Maybe the bouncy bass has its limits within me.

In any case, I was watching a recent episode of "Uta Con" when enka veteran Fuyumi Sakamoto（坂本冬美）appeared near the end to perform her 48th and latest single, "Ore de Ii no ka" (Will I Do?) which just came out late last month in August. For some reason, I was struck by this one although I have heard my fair share of enka on this show and elsewhere.

My father remarked during the performance that this was a refreshing change since I believe that Sakamoto had perhaps gone for a more modern enka approach in recent years with a truly rock guitar and arrangement. And I think that's what struck me positively about "Ore de Ii no ka" which is a story of a lifelong love between two soulmates, represented by Ou Yoshida's（吉田旺）lyrics. Koji Tokuhisa's（徳久広司）music with Toshiaki Maeda's（前田俊明）arrangement doesn't seem to have that contemporary enka feeling to it; there is something more old-fashioned as if "Ore de Ii no ka" had been composed back in the 20th century. The song peaked at No. 36 on Oricon.

Tatsuro Yamashita/Hiroyuki Namba -- Natsu e no Tobira（夏への扉）

Jerry from Come Along Radio passed along some rather important information to me in regards to City Pop a few hours earlier. Today is the 39th anniversary of the release of Tatsuro Yamashita's（山下達郎）classic album "Ride On Time". Yep, on this day in 1980, when I was in my mid-teens and Ronald Reagan was in the campaign to become president of the United States, Yamashita came out with "Ride On Time" that became his first No. 1 album. And of course, years later, it has become a hit with a new generation of fans in and outside of Japan.

I kinda missed my opportunity for the grand presentation of "Ride on Time" since I had already put up my article for the album back on New Year's Eve 2015. However, there are a few songs that I didn't cover then, so this gives me a chance to at least cover one here.

And this one here is "Natsu e no Tobira" (The Door Into Summer), another wonderfully smooth and mellow track from the album under the dynamic duo of Yamashita as composer along with Minako Yoshida（吉田美奈子）as lyricist. It goes down as well as one of my favourite cocktails, the Brown Cow and has that lovely flugelhorn solo by Kenji Nakazawa（中沢健二）. All very summery...except that "Natsu e no Tobira" wasn't really titled for the season.

It was actually titled after a Robert Heinlein science-fiction hardcover novel from 1957, "The Door Into Summer" about an engineer and inventor, Daniel Boone Davis, who got cheated out of his fortune and decides to use time travel and his genius to get justice...and the girl. The one thing that got my curiosity in the lyrics was Yoshida's usage of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, and so I had once assumed that "Natsu e no Tobira" had something to do with Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book". However, the fact is that Rikki-Tikki-Tavi was the childhood nickname for Virginia Heinlein, the author's third wife, and it turns out that the love interest in "The Door Into Summer" is named Frederica Virginia "Ricky" Heinicke. 

At the end of the song, there's even a sound indicating some sort of sci-fi ship taking off. It isn't exactly the TARDIS but I can imagine that it's Daniel's contraption in action.

So what was the connection between Tats and Robert Heinlein? Well, according to the liner notes for the 2002 re-release of "Ride On Time", it turns out that in the previous year of 1979, "Natsu e no Tobira" had originally been created by Yamashita and Yoshida for keyboardist and composer Hiroyuki Namba's（難波弘之）album "Sense of Wonder" which would also become the name of his own group in the 1980s. Namba, who is also a science-fiction novelist as well as a big fan of the genre (not mentioned in the English Wikipedia article for him), recorded "Sense of Wonder" with the theme of sci-fi for each of the tracks including the original "Natsu e no Tobira" at 20:20 in the above video for the whole album. Nice original and the instrumental bridge is filled with Namba's own doodlings on the keyboard instead of the flugelhorn on the Yamashita cover.

In any case, Happy 39th Birthday for "Ride On Time" and looking forward to the 40th next year! Plus, Namba is a name that I've been seeing for years in "Japanese City Pop" and when making up the articles for the blog, although I have to admit that this is the first article in KKP's history to include him. I will have to see what else is out there by him.

P.S. Also have a look at Jerry's own article on the album itself.

Mari & Red Stripes -- Omoide no Uzu（思い出の渦）

One of the more famous marine phenomena in Japan involves the Naruto no Uzushio（鳴門の渦潮...The Naruto Whirlpools）between the smaller island of Shikoku and the main island of Honshu in the Naruto Strait. Not surprisingly, it's a tourist attraction and it has even been given the shoutout in anime and has shown up in some of my translation assignments.

I was lucky enough then to find this uzu-themed song titled "Omoide no Uzu" (Whirlpool of Memories). Recorded by the band Mari & Red Stripes for release in March 1977. I would also like to point out that this was Masamichi Sugi's（杉真理）debut single (Mari being another reading for the kanji for Masamichi), and his backing group Red Stripes happened to include Mariya Takeuchi（竹内まりや）and Yasuhiro Abe（安部恭弘）as backup singers before their own debuts, and Jun Aoyama（青山純）on drums, according to Sugi's J-Wiki profile. Quite the informational discovery!

Mari & Red Stripes' self-titled debut album, which also came out on the same day as the single, also has "Omoide no Uzu". The song was written and composed by Sugi, and unlike the 2nd single "Hold On" which I compared to ballads by The Eagles and Carly Simon, "Omoide no Uzu" has more of a happy-go-lucky feeling of the 1960s as if the songwriter had been inspired by The Beatles taking a brisk hike through sunny Paris. I point this out only whimsically but maybe this debut could also have been a prototype for Shibuya-kei.

"Omoide no Uzu" was also a track on a double-LP production jointly called "Nice Pair" which consisted of the 1977 "Mari & Red Stripes" and the band's 1978 sophomore album "Swingy". I really do like that cover for "Nice Pair". Reminds me of a photo I took back in Shinjuku.

Higurashi -- Kaze no Oto wo Kikitai（風の音を聞きたい）

This isn't one of those high-energy City Pop tunes of the 1970s accompanying the grab of a coffee and a danish while rushing to work.

For those who know the 1970s folk band, Higurashi（日暮し）, this is a song that is right up their tree-lined alley. "Kaze no Oto wo Kikitai" (I Want to Hear the Sound of the Wind). A track on their third album "Machikaze Kisetsu"（街風季節...Town Wind Season）released in November 1974, "Kaze no Oto wo Kikitai" is definitely more for sitting down in a quiet cafe and sipping the coffee slowly while contemplating what has come before and what will happen.

Written and composed by Higurashi guitarist Seiichi Takeda（武田清一）, the song centers around someone who seems to be going through some doldrums while living in the big city and is searching for some solace from the wind blowing outside. The music is calming enough with main vocalist Naomi Sugimura's（杉村尚美）cottony-soft voice but when the whole band joins in the chorus, the atmosphere gets downright hypnotic for me. It's a folk tune but there are elements in there (keyboards for example) that further make me feel that the setting is somewhere in the metropolis rather than out in the countryside. In a number of ways, "Kaze no Oto wo Kikitai" reminds me of the very first Higurashi song that I had ever heard, "Aki no Tobira" （秋の扉）.

A couple of things of the nomenclature involved here. As I also mentioned in the second Higurashi article for "Inishie"（い・に・し・え）all the way back in 2013, I was never quite sure about how to read Takeda's first name since the kanji has a number of readings but for now, that's what I'm going with unless someone corrects me. Also, the first pair of kanji for the title for that third album has been romanized as machikaze for one entry after a Google search of the album, but according to Jisho.org, 「街風」is also the proper family name Tsumuji. However, not quite seeing the significance of "The Season of Tsumuji" and with none in the band with that name, I think I can stand my ground with "Machikaze Kisetsu".

Yuji Mori and Southern Cross -- Suki desu Sapporo（好きですサッポロ）

Though I did make that one trip to Sapporo on the northernmost major island of Hokkaido many years ago, that was in June since I was trying to make some attempt to escape some of the humidity of Tokyo. I loved the city but one thing that I've regretted is that I never got to attend the annual Sapporo Snow Festival in February. My experience with it has merely been through news highlights with the festival highlights being the massive and expertly carved ice sculptures. I can only imagine that reservations are scarce and prices are pretty high during that time which has fairly blunted any keen desire to attend it.

Apparently this song was used as the theme song for the Sapporo Snow Festival way back when and became a huge hit for the Mood Kayo group Yuji Mori and Southern Cross（森雄二とサザンクロス）. Released in 1981, "Suki desu Sapporo" (I Love You, Sapporo) is a pretty jaunty example of the genre. Often when I think of Mood Kayo numbers with famous place names in the titles, the music is somewhat languid introspective and even sorrowful, but "Suki desu Sapporo" has a beat and a boss horn section which remind me of some theme songs for tokusatsu shows. Indeed it works as something advertising the merits of a festival.

Written by lyricist Tetsuro Hoshino（星野哲郎）and composed by Hiroyuki Nakagawa（中川博之）, "Suki desu Sapporo" has become one of the trademark songs for Southern Cross. You can also take a look at one other song by the band, "Ashide Matoi"（足手まとい）which had also been created by Nakagawa a few years earlier.