Memories of My Standout Singers: 1981 (J-Canuck)

As I write this, Japan is currently celebrating the annual Tanabata festival (July 7th) with the prime focus on Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture. One of the customs during this holiday is writing wishes on colourful strips of paper known as tanzaku and tying them to the branches of a tree. For Tokyo, that is probably the biggest symbol for Tanabata although Sendai goes full throttle as you can see in the video above.

Personally, I am also celebrating an anniversary of sorts today. It was 35 years ago today that my plane dropped down onto the tarmac at Narita Airport so that my classmates and I could launch the graduation trip from Japanese Language School. And as I have mentioned numerous times, this was the trip where my love for kayo kyoku finally blossomed.

So as such, I've decided to plunk down the singers who I discovered during that fateful trip and afterwards that have forever stayed in my mind as being symbolic of my half-summer in Japan in 1981. I'm not placing specific songs here, just the singers. A few of them have had long careers while a couple of them to me are one-hit wonders. These singers are not going down in any specific order. Plus, I won't go on some sort of long serenade for each of them since they already have their own entries...just a few lines each.

1. Seiko Matsuda （松田聖子）

"Fresh, fresh, fresh...". The lady, the legend, the aidoru. For me, she was the introduction to that huge mass of unique Japanese teenybopping girls with the happy tunes and the snaggletoothed smiles.

2. Masahiko Kondo（近藤真彦）

His movie "Blue Jeans Memory" was all over the media and any external structure that could afford a poster. The supposed young tough who sent teenage girls into a frenzy by simply squeaking "Matchy desu!"

3. Jun Horie（堀江淳）

My one-hit wunderkind with the high-pitched voice who appeared on all those ancient VHS tapes of "The Best 10" and "The Top 10" that were played at my classmate's house during a post-trip party a couple of months after the event itself. I didn't hear anything more from him after his big hit of "Memory Glass"（メモリーグラス）but that particular technopop song has buried itself deep in my memories.

4. Hitomi Ishikawa（石川ひとみ）

Along with Seiko-chan, another early 80s aidoru with memorable hair. Her "Machibuse"（まちぶせ）was another frequently heard song on the rankings shows. My first exposure to Yuming even before I knew about Yuming.

5. Hiromi Iwasaki（岩崎宏美）

The supremely long hair and that wonderful voice for that gentle ballad. Since it was early days, I had no idea that she had once been an aidoru herself. She simply registered as a classy young lady who hit me right in the heart!

6. Yellow Magic Orchestra

Bought my first audiotape in Japan and it belonged to these guys. With their brand of "computer music", they absolutely stood out in my mind. As soon as I got my cherry-red SONY double-cassette recorder and their first album, I played it in my room at the Tokyo Prince. "Rydeen" may have come out a couple of years before my trip to Japan but it still finely represents the band.

I will be coming out with sequels to my memories in future entries to represent my history with "Sounds of Japan", my time in Gunma and then my long stint in Ichikawa.

Crazy Ken Band -- Tiger and Dragon (タイガー&ドラゴン)

I remember when I first saw Ken Yokoyama（横山剣）of the Crazy Ken Band (クレイジーケンバンド) on TV years ago. With that louche and thuggish appearance, in retrospect, I thought he was the epitome of a choiwaru oyaji (ちょいわるおやじ) which would translate as "slightly nasty middle-aged guy". This was a brief fashion phenomenon created by the Japanese men's magazine, LEON, to describe the usually staid and sober-suited guys from their forties dressed up in a cool set of sunglasses, open shirts and pastel suits...and often attached to a swirling goblet of brandy. There were segments on various variety shows on Japanese TV where the fashion experts would take ordinary guys or senior male tarento and transform them into these middle-aged "don't f*** with me" goodfellas.

However, I did qualify my above paragraph with "in retrospect" since I think the phenomenon started in the mid-2000s whereas the first time I saw Ken Yokoyama was a few years previously. Perhaps, he was the inspiration for LEON. Who knows? In any case, it was obviously not just about the looks with Crazy Ken Band. Yokoyama had also created quite the cool song back in December 2002 titled "Tiger and Dragon".

This was the 5th single of a band that has dipped into all sorts of genres since it got started in 1997. According to their J-Wiki entry, Crazy Ken Band has been into rock, pops, kayo kyoku, soul, jazz, funk, etc. with Ken and his 10 bandmates. And I think "Tiger and Dragon" is one of those songs that could fit into all of the categories I've just listed above. The official (and nifty) music video above also illustrates it, but the cool sound of "Tiger and Dragon" has that feeling of the urban 1970s.

From what I gather from Ken's lyrics is that he is begging, as that fellow from the wrong side of the tracks, his lover to give him those 5 essential minutes to explain himself and make things right. Whether he can right himself for good is anyone's guess but he is earnest with his pleas. Plus, he's got quite the kakkoii musical backing that could help out any Tarentino flick set in the decade of "Shaft" or "The French Connection".

However, the really notable thing about the song is how Ken delivers it. Until I decided to write about "Tiger and Dragon" a few days ago, I had always thought that the guy was channeling soul singer Akiko Wada（和田アキ子）, right down to the characteristic "Ha~!" he belts out at the end of a verse. The "Ha~!" is one of Wada's musical trademarks. Well, as it turns out, Yokoyama had composed the song so that Wada herself would sing it someday, and thus recorded it as such. And the legendary Wada did cover it the following year in 2003 as a coupling song to her single "Rumba de Bunbun"（ルンバでブンブン）. 

"Tiger and Dragon" was the theme song for a TBS comedy-drama of the same name (among other TV and radio programs) which started out as a 2-hour episode in January 2005 before getting a full run of 11 episodes later from April. The show starred a couple of Johnny's Entertainment mainstays, Tomoya Nagase（長瀬智也）of TOKIO and Junichi Okada（岡田准一）of V6 with Nagase portraying a gangster who decides to make a big shift in his career and become a rakugo comedian. The plot kinda reminds me of a recent anime's story.

In any case, "Tiger and Dragon" the song peaked at No. 17 on Oricon and was also a track on Crazy Ken Band's 7th album from 2005, "Soul Punch" which hit as high as No. 9 on the album charts.

Recomints (1991-2016)

I was answering a query from Noelle just now when I decided to take a look at how some of my old CD-hunting haunts were doing. And sad to say, one of my major destinations in Tokyo, Recomints, has gone the way of the dodo and the passenger pigeon. I looked up the website to find out that the used CD store closed up shop for good in April 2016.

When I visited Tokyo in late 2014, the store was still there (that is the photo I took at that time) at Nakano Broadway, albeit a little smaller than it used to be when I was living there full time. However, as they say, all good things must come to an end, and so was the case with Recomints. So my articles "Recomints in Nakano Broadway" from 2012 and "Revisiting the old shops" from 2014 will now have a more elegiac quality. She was a good shop.

At this point, I'm not sure if there is an equivalent CD store in the massive Nakano Broadway complex but I can still wholeheartedly recommend Broadway for all those who are interested in taking a time trip backward into the Showa Era whether it be models, manga & anime or even restaurants. And the place now has a fairly good English-language website.

I had been thinking about just inserting the news as a PS in one of the other two articles I mentioned but for a place that I once coveted monthly, I felt it deserved its own article.

Miharu Koshi -- Kardia no Umi (カルディアの海)

Within the last few minutes, I just finished an article on Miharu Koshi (コシミハル) as the New Wave gamine as she sang the rather bizarre "Petit Paradis". Therefore, to serve as comparison to that later 80s technopop incarnation of her, I give you her first version (as 越美晴) when she was the City Pop princess somewhat similar in tone to Junko Yagami（八神純子）.

Case in point, here is her 4th single from 1979, "Kardia no Umi" (Sea of Kardia). I've seen this video on YouTube fairly often but never got to profile it until tonight. Listening to it, quite the comparison can be made with what the aforementioned Yagami was singing at about the same time which was music with this dynamic Latin fervor. It would also fit in with the small boom in kayo kyoku that was also happening involving songs taking the listener to foreign lands. If I'm not mistaken, the Kardia in the title refers to some region near Greece. And I gotta say that Ms. Koshi was looking rather glamourous on the cover of the 45" there....it could have been taken right on a balcony overlooking the Aegean.

Miharu Koshi -- Petit Paradis

Mike Myers from "Saturday Night Live" fame may have become internationally famous for being Wayne Campbell from "Wayne's World" and as the titular swinging secret agent from the "Austin Powers" franchise, but he also had another memorable character in Dieter, the host of "Sprockets", a TV show that folks like us in North America imagine to be the regular fare on German TV. Who among us SNL fans can forget Dieter's famous sign-off of "Now is the time on Sprockets when we dance!"?

I can't help but feel that Miharu Koshi's (コシミハル) video of "Petit Paradis" would have been the perfect inclusion in an episode of "Sprockets"...and I think the video was actually on a German TV show from what I saw. With that strange circus-like melody, Koshi's high-falutin' vocals in English and that over-the-top New Wave-y makeup, it wouldn't take much for Dieter to utter his famous compliment "You are so beautiful and angular, Miharu!" And strangely enough, he'd be right.

Nope, "Petit Paradis" is not one of my favourite tracks on her 1983 album "Tutu" which served to be a re-debut of sorts for Koshi as this New Wave gamine after her previous incarnation as a City Pop princess from the late 1970s. And yet, that video can still be rather magnetic. Plus, kudos to her for taking such a huge leap into a new musical direction.

Now, if you like, you can take a look at how she used to be here.

Awesome City Club -- Don't Think, Feel

I had just picked up on Sing Like Talking's latest lovely single "Kaze ga Fuita Hi"（風が吹いた日）from YouTube when I saw this video to the side called "Don't Think, Feel" by a band called Awesome City Club. So, I decided to give that a spin. No regrets whatsoever.

"Don't Think, Feel" is the 2nd single by Awesome City Club released in April 2016, and true to the title and the music video starring the band looking like a bunch of happy college kids in GAP wear with a touch of United Colours of Bennetton, it's all about having the fun in the big city. I'm not sure but I think the video was at least partially filmed in tony Aoyama in Tokyo. There's some good ol' disco, some funk and a bit of technopop in there which kinda fits what City Pop has been about. At first, I had assumed that the genre was a direct Japanese translation of AOR but I think it's actually a melange of different genres that can be mixed in various combinations, as long as the finished product has that feeling of life in the metropolis. Encountering Awesome City Club, I'm reminded of Marcos V's article from March 2014 which spoke about some of those hidden urban contemporary gems. It just goes to show that City Pop has continued to survive from the 70s and 80s through folks like this band and other artists such as Junk Fujiyama and Hitomitoi.

Awesome City Club started its journey in 2013 with a major debut in 2015. Its members are atagi (guitar/vocals), Porin (synthesizer/vocals), Morishi (guitar/synthesizer/vocals), Takumi Matsuzaka (bass/synthesizer/rap) and Yukie (drums). All of them came from different bands in the past. "Don't Think, Feel" is also on their 3rd album "Awesome City Tracks 3" which came out within the last couple of weeks in June.

Minami Shinoda & Eri Suzuki -- Nichijo no Mahou （日常の魔法）

(Vocaloid version)

Well, the spring season of anime has just wrapped up so I managed to catch the finales for a few of them yesterday at my anime buddy's place. I've mentioned a couple of them already: "Kumamiko: Girl Meets Bear" (くまみこ) and "Flying Witch" (ふらいんぐうぃっち). The two of them have a commonality in that both of them are set up in Japan's northlands with the former taking place in the fictional hamlet of Kumade while the latter is in the very real-life Hirosaki City, Aomori Prefecture. Both shows also deal with magic to a certain degree for which the characters in both accept in the same way that they accept coffee or tea with their breakfast.

However, although "Kumamiko" never really lived up to its promise (we started getting fed up with the main character having her weekly mammoth nervous breakdowns) despite the fact that I liked the earworm-y ending (and perhaps opening) theme, "Flying Witch" was definitely the nicest way to wrap up a Sunday night and it is the only anime from this season that I will be missing (my buddy feels that most likely there won't be a sequel series for some reason). It stood out for being a magical girl series that really wasn't a magical girl series. It was really about the teenage witch Makoto's comfortable new life in a smaller regional city for which the magic didn't bombard us as a terrifying weapon or as this extremely dense and arcane philosophy; it was simply there to introduce some nice people and situations. Of course, this type of show won't attract absolutely everybody, but for me, I've always been a fan of the slice-of-life anime and "Flying Witch" provides it with slabs of life as thick as wonderful Japanese toast with the huge pat of butter soaking into the spongy nooks and crannies.

I've already written about the country-folksy opening theme for "Flying Witch", "Shanranran" (シャンランラン) by miwa, so here is the nice and mellow ending theme "Nichijo no Mahou" (Everyday Magic) by Minami Shinoda & Eri Suzuki（篠田みなみ・鈴木絵理）who played the roles of Makoto and her foster little sister Chinatsu. I think in one way, this ballad sums up what the series has been about....finding the magic in the everyday whether it be helping a classmate get over her fear of cooking at school or attending the annual summer festival in town. Although I was able to get the ending credits with the theme at the very top, I couldn't find the full version of "Nichijo no Mahou" with Shinoda and Suzuki but I did find a cover version starring a couple of Vocaloids, Miku Hatsune and Zunko Tohoku（初音ミク・東北ずん子）. The song was composed by Shuhei Mutsuki（睦月周平）and written by Natsumi Tadano（只野菜摘）.

After having read Noelle's adventures in northern Japan over the last few days and watching "Flying Witch", I wouldn't mind visiting good ol' Hirosaki or even Sapporo someday. And if you are interested in reading about some of the places that Noelle and I have visited over the days, and in my case, years, check out the new category in Labels called Sites.