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.
I think along with "arigato"（ありがとう）and "onegaishimasu"（お願いします）, the one other phrase that folks who want to start communicating with the Japanese should internalize is "osewa ni narimashita". That expression means "Thank you for your hospitality/help", and if you've had a service provided to you by friends or host family, this is the phrase to use.
Last week on "Uta Con"（うたコン）during the tribute to master composer Kyohei Tsutsumi（筒美京平）, I heard a very sweet oh-so-70s kayo with that same expression as the title. One of the princes of enka, Keisuke Yamauchi（山内恵介）, and veteran entertainer Masaaki Sakai（堺正章）took care of "Osewa ni Narimashita" as this friendly song that was made by Tsutsumi in such a way that would make it appealing to kids.
But it was Sakai's old bandmate from The Spiders（ザ・スパイダース）, Jun Inoue（井上順）, who sang the original version as his 2nd single from September 1971 after his successful solo debut of "Kino - Kyo - Ashita"（昨日・今日・明日）. Michio Yamagami（山上路夫）provided the lyrics about a fellow who is going after his dreams but also gives his thanks to the people who had taken care of him in the neighbourhood such as the landlady of the boarding house he lived in.
According to J-Wiki, Tsutsumi based the song on Inoue's own character with some influence from the happy-go-lucky opening theme song to the anime "Sazae-san"（サザエさん）that he also created (good golly, I forgot about that one...Tsutsumi has composed everything!). "Osewa ni Narimashita" peaked at No. 17 on Oricon.
Tsutsumi also did right by Inoue's buddy, Sakai, by giving him his own hit single.
Morning Musume（モーニング娘。）struck it rich with "Love Machine"（LOVEマシーン）right at the end of the century. So what do they do for an encore?
Well, they follow it up with some more DISCO! Their 8th single, released in January 2000, was "Koi no Dance Site" (Dance Site of Love), and I have just realized that this is the first time that I have ever seen the official music video for the song in its entirety (saw it within the last 10 minutes)! All these years, I've been seeing bits and pieces of it on the telly via the various music shows. The video itself is following the same pattern as the one for "Love Machine": background CG, group choreography, quick-cut close-up shots of each of the Musume...good way to keep tabs on everyone.
A few years ago, Marcos V. wrote an article about the band Dschinghis Khan and how it inspired a couple of J-Pop songs, "Koi no Dance Site" being one of them. Before I found out about this information, I'd always been reminded of the music of Boney M whenever I saw and heard "Koi no Dance Site". And since Boney M was a product of the mirror ball 1970s, I think Morning Musume and writer/composer/Svengali Tsunku（つんく）along with arranger Dance☆Man really hit upon the special formula with this disco thing.
"Koi no Dance Site" became the group's second-highest selling single and their second million-seller as it peaked at No. 2 on Oricon. It actually got stopped by a tsunami...Southern All Stars'"Tsunami"...so it didn't hit the top spot. But it was one of the yearly Top 10 in 2000 by placing at No. 7. The song was also a track on Morning Musume's 3rd album "3rd: Love Paradise"（3rd -LOVEパラダイス-）which also has the aforementioned "Love Machine". That album also hit No. 2 on the weeklies and became the 24th-ranked album of the year.
Time truly flies by fast. Morning Musume actually celebrates its 20th anniversary this year.
Happy weekend! I've already got a few of the tracks from this great release up but I figured it was time to cover Junko Yagami's（八神純子）7th album"Full Moon" as a whole. Released in December 1983, this is something from her discography that continued to show her City Pop side when contrasted with some of the more Latin-tinged hits from the decade before. The late Keisuke Yamakawa（山川啓介）provided the lyrics to most of the tracks with Yagami providing the melody for all of them. Ichizo Seo（瀬尾一三）did all of the arrangements.
What finally triggered me to write about "Full Moon" was frankly all of the recent YouTube attention lauded to one of the standout tracks and her 18th single"Tasogare no Bay City"（黄昏のBAY CITY）. It's become quite the Japanese Future Funk favourite, and I've read that folks who initially found out about it via its Future Funk conversion have actually started to enjoy the original even more. As I said in the original article, it doesn't seem to have any reference to any particular bay in Japan, but listen to it and then see if you don't get that urge to fly over to Tokyo Bay or Yokohama Bay.
I listened to the whole album in the last hour and have become happily re-acquainted with the rest of the tracks. "Follow Me" starts the album off nicely with some good old-fashioned 80s pop and a sweet story about two people who have probably known each other since childhood finally realizing that their relationship is about to get a romantic upgrade.
Track 4 is "Hidamari no Anata"（陽だまりのあなた...You In The Sun）. As much as a lot of folks have enjoyed her high-energy songs, Yagami still has that voice which can knock it out of the park in her ballads. And this one is short but quite sad as she sings about a girl's regrets over a one-sided love for someone who is now in the arms of someone else. It deserves that one spotlight over Yagami and her piano on a darkened stage with perhaps some tissue nearby.
The following track is "Dakishimeteageru"（抱きしめてあげる...I'll Hold You）which reminds me of all of those sappy radio-friendly ballads that I used to hear back in high school. Notably, I can't help but remember "Never Gonna Let You Go" by Sergio Mendes from the same year.
The last one I'm going to feature here for today is "Heartbreak Hotel de Choshoku wo"（ハートブレイクホテルで朝食を...Breakfast at the Heartbreak Hotel）. This is another one of those "love-done-wrong" tunes with plenty of funk as a woman is at a restaurant by herself at a seaside hotel already knowing that her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend will not show up as scheduled. At least, I hope the corn soup was good.
The title track from the album will be something I may cover in a future article on its own. I'm treating that one as a possible "grow-on-me" but after having listened to it, I think it has somewhat of a split personality problem. It starts off as if it's going to be another epic Yagami ballad but then does an abrupt gear shift into 80s disco a la Bonnie Tyler before then going spacey. A few too many "heartstopping" moments and I don't really like amusement park rides. Maybe Yagami, Yamakawa and Seo created it under a full moon.
I couldn't find out how "Full Moon" fared on the Oricon charts but it's hard for me to imagine that it didn't rank somewhere fairly high on the weekly rankings. Aside from the title track, "Full Moon" is a great album. The other songs that I have already covered along with "Tasogare no Bay City" are the sultry/hopeful "Naturally" and the Christmas tune "Cotton Snow and Paper Stars" which also has its own slightly weird tempo shifts but I've gotten used to it over the years so there is every hope for "Full Moon" the song.
I don`t think this has ever been the case here in Canada but in Japan, one of the signs of a youthful romance is having a boy and a girl share an umbrella during rainy weather. Heck, I found out during the JET Programme that this could also be graphically represented by drawing a simple umbrella on a piece of paper and then writing the names of the boy and girl under it. I guess it`s the equivalent of the valentine with an arrow through it with the initials of the lovey-dovey couple on it.
I`ve mentioned this over the past week or so, but there's been a relatively new music-variety series on NHK called "Gogo Uta"（ごごウタ...Afternoon Songs） since April this year. It's a smaller-scale version of "Uta Kon"（うたコン）with the balance tending more for the talk over the music, although the performances are still done. My parents get kinda annoyed about it since they very much prefer the latter.
Anyways, on one episode of "Gogo Uta", there was an enka singer that I had never seen before. His name is Takashi Ichikawa（市川たかし）and I gotta say that he has one of the finest set of teeth I've ever seen on a fellow. Orthodontists in Japan ought to hire him for a campaign poster. Also, I do like his latest single, "Onnagasa" (Woman Under An Umbrella).
Coming out in May 2017, I think that whole thing about romance blossoming under an umbrella probably started in the feudal age with those very traditional kasa. Aki Chikura（千倉安稀）came up with the lyrics about love under the brolley while Kohei Miyuki（幸耕平）composed "Onnagasa".
(karaoke version)
Takashi Ichikawa was born Hirokazu Maekawa（前川浩一）in Hokkaido in 1983. He decided to become a singer during his freshman year of high school and so dropped out then and there. Usually the story for a number of these singers is that the parents would be furious and be dead set against the career decision, but in Maekawa's case, they were quite supportive of their son since they were huge enka fans. So for the next several years, he would study music in Sapporo before making his debut in 2007.
As for how his stage name came about, apparently it was decided through seimei handan（姓名判断）software. To explain, seimei handan refers to telling one's fortune through the writing of one's name. Over the years, I've heard how prospective parents in Japan would wring their hands on deciding their baby's name based on a lucky number of strokes for the kanji of a name, and I think that would include how the first name meshes with the last name. If I'm not mistaken, the patriarch of a family or a respected Buddhist priest would do the calculations. Apparently, technology has now taken over.
Always the mysterious beauty, Kahimi Karie（カヒミ・カリィ）. Plus her eyes can slice through rock with more force than any Type X phaser.
I've mentioned in past articles about how I used to watch this midnight program on MuchMusic (Canada's equivalent of MTV) called "City Limits" which presented the more avant-garde or just plain weird music videos out there.
I think the video for Karie's 5th single"Tiny King Kong" might fit the requisite conditions to get onto "City Limits". Released on Valentine's Day 1997, the video has Karie all glossed up and dressed up in a skintight leather bodysuit while slinking around on an austere set which includes a microscope. Apparently, the song written by Momus has the singer purring about turning the tables on the famous King Kong by just turning the microscope and making him look like an ant that she can control while she scales the Empire State Building.
Japanese accordionist Coba composed the melody that slinks just as much as Karie does in the video. I've put the "Shibuya-kei" tag onto "Little King Kong" but there's more of a technopop quality to the proceedings. I'd say that she was perhaps even filtering a bit of Bjork.
"Tiny King Kong" was also placed on Karie's first full studio album"Larme de Crocodile" from March 1997. I didn't get the album but I did purchase the single, and to be honest, the reason I did so was that the flyer advertising the single had the full body shot of heavily made-up Karie in her Louise Brooks hairdo looking over her shoulder...and it was just her in her birthday suit. Well, that's not exactly true. She did have a string of pearls around her neck.
According to Oricon via J-Wiki, the top five lyricists in terms of singles sold are Yasushi Akimoto（秋元康）, Yu Aku（阿久悠）, Takashi Matsumoto（松本隆...the rankings are in his article）, Tetsuya Komuro（小室哲哉）and Tsunku（つんく♂）as of December 2015. I've got a feeling that since then Akimoto has further left Aku and Matsumoto in the dust considering all those songs that he's created for his alphabet girl groups, and he was already in the hundreds of millions.
Lyricist Toyohisa Araki is not within that august group and I don't know where he ranks but considering the breadth of who he has provided words for over the past few decades, he can't be that far behind. I decided to write a Creator article about him one night when I took a look at his file on "Kayo Kyoku Plus" and noticed the wide variety of singers that he has collaborated with.
Araki was born in what is now Dalian, China in 1943. He attended the Nihon University College of Art in Tokyo where he was also a member of the ski club. Starting out as a writer, he broke his leg one time while skiing and ended up in a hospital. In gratitude to the nurses who helped him, Araki came up with a tune about a Niigata Prefectureonsen. The popularity of the song then started to spread around although the author behind it had remained unknown at the time until Araki finally admitted his participation.
That song turned out to be "Shiki no Uta"（四季の歌...Song of the Four Seasons）which was officially released as a single in February 1972 by Yumi Inui（いぬいゆみ）. Listening to this original version, I wasn't quite sure whether it wanted to be a gentle folk tune or something with a bit of urban pizzazz. Not sure how it did on Oricon but the fact that it didn't seem to make a huge splash was perhaps not that surprising.
However, "Shiki no Uta" has been heavily covered over the years by folks such as Yujiro Ishihara（石原裕次郎）, Chieko Baisho（倍賞千恵子）and the Dark Ducks（ダーク・ダックス）, but the most successful cover was by singer Yoko Seri（芹洋子）as a 1976 single. Her version broke the Top 10 by hitting No. 8 and it even became a million-seller. Seri's take was a uniformly innocent pop ballad which most likely was more pleasant on listeners.
Since then, Araki has provided lyrics for many singers. In fact, the reason that I finally pulled the trigger to devote an article for him was re-discovering that he had written the City Pop classic "Fly-Day Chinatown"（フライディ・チャイナタウン）for singer and composer Yasuha（泰葉）in 1981. I've also discovered recently that "Fly-Day Chinatown" has also become another favourite one for all those Japanese Future Funk/Vaporwave enthusiasts (Round One, indeed).
He's also provided some pretty refined material for aidoru such as Yoshie Kashiwabara（柏原芳恵）. The song here is the classy "Machikutabirete Yokohama"（待ちくたびれてヨコハマ）from 1985.
I think, though, Araki has tended to hover in the enka/Mood Kayo field. He wrote a number of songs for the late Teresa Teng（テレサテン）including one of my favourites by her, "Tsugunai"（つぐない）. For me, it was one of the great examples of what I've called European enka.
The above songs have all been covered in the blog but I also found some new entries. "Nageki no Melody"（嘆きのメロディー...Melody of Grief） was sung by Yujiro Ishihara as a 1984 release. Takashi Miki（三木たかし）, a frequent songwriting partner for Araki, came up with the melody so Mood Kayo that the record probably smelled of cigarette smoke and scotch as soon as it was taken out of the sleeve.
In 1990, Araki wrote the lyrics for this contemporary ballad sung by Yuiko Tsubokura（坪倉唯子）titled "Koufuku Game"（幸福ゲーム...The Happiness Game） as her 3rd single. Hiroshi Terao（寺尾広）composed the ballad which was used as the theme song for the TV Asahi drama "Utsukushii Uso Tsukemasuka"（美しい嘘つけますか...Can You Make A Beautiful Lie?）. Love lost and gained seems to be a favourite topic especially for Araki and surrounded by a classy melody.
Another example of that theory also popped up in 1990 through Yoko Minamino's（南野陽子）"Double Game"（ダブルゲーム）which was also another collaboration between Araki and Miki. This was Nanno's 17th single from June 1990 and it peaked at No. 3.
Now, the last couple of Creator articles that I've written for the blog have been on songwriters who unfortunately left this mortal coil recently. Happily, though, it seems like Araki is still quite happy and kicking. Although it's not listed on his own J-Wiki entry, Araki, who is also a bassist, came up with his own release in 2015 titled "Sha Ba Da Ba Da"（シャバダバダ）, a jolly song of party-hearty with the video showing the man himself enjoying the good things in life. I can only hope to be that lucky at his current age of 73. I just hope to be alive at 73.
As I said, Araki has written for a wide group of singers since 1972 so you can take a look at the rest of his works listed under his name in the Labels.
A couple of years ago, I did an article about a singer by the name of Michiyo Kitajima（北島美智代）who seems to share one thing in common with the mysterious City Pop chanteuse Takako Mamiya（間宮貴子）: her career was also very brief, she sang pretty well and there's not much out there in terms of information about her.
As I said in that article for her 1st single, "Telepathy Kudasai"（てれぱしいください...Please Give Me Your Telepathy）, from November 1985, she only released those 2 singles and zero albums before she went off into the ether. The interesting thing is that on some of those websites that actually mentioned her (she doesn't even exist on J-Wiki), she's been placed as an aidoru (probably due to her looks) but listening to her remaining single, "Natsu no Buranko" (Summer Swing), which came out almost 10 months after "Telepathy Kudasai" (which I think is an eternity in the world of aidoru), I think she's anything but.
I'm referring to the same source that I did in "Telepathy Kudasai" when the writer mentioned there that Kitajima had a voice that set her apart from other newbies. She certainly didn't sound cute in "Natsu no Buranko". I would say that her voice had a certain maturity that would almost place her in potential Hiromi Iwasaki（岩崎宏美）territory with that lovely bossa nova arrangement. Unfortunately, I couldn't find out who wrote and composed the song but it was a wonderful match between her and the music.
The writer also remarked that she "...debuted too late". I'm not quite sure what he/she meant by that exactly but it was also pointed out that, and I'm paraphrasing here, Kitajima had the aidoru looks but she was a genuine singer. Perhaps her management company didn't quite know what to do with her in terms of marketing or Kitajima may have been mature enough to set down her opinions about how her career should go which could have chafed with the rigid patriarchal structure of a typical company. Obviously pure speculation on my part, but she left the geinokai with only those two singles.
So, basically, this will be the end of the Michiyo Kitajima file...at least, until I decide to cover the B-side to "Natsu no Buranko" which does exist on YouTube.
