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.
Earlier today, I did my weekly ROY article featuring Randy Newman's"I Love L.A." and one kayo that hit No. 3 on Oricon in the same month that Newman's album "Trouble in Paradise" was released was enka singer Eisaku Ohkawa's（大川栄策）big hit "Sazanka no Yado"（さざんかの宿）. In fact, I'd say that "Sazanka no Yado" is the song that Ohkawa is probably known for the most.
It has been a very long time since I put up an article featuring one of Ohkawa's songs (maybe 5 years) so after doing the ROY article, I figured that Ohkawa was due for some more attention. And so I opted to go with one of his very early singles, "Yanagawa no Hito" (Man of Yanagawa). This was his 3rd single from April 1970, and it was written by Miyuki Ishimoto（石本美由起）and composed by the late Masao Koga（古賀政男）, Ohkawa's mentor.
What caught my ears was Koga's enka melody which has an arrangement by Mitsuru Kotani（小谷充）that seems as if it was given a slight contemporary lift from what I've heard of the instrumentation and subtle key shifts. Ishimoto's lyrics first struck me as a story surrounding what I think is one of the quintessential traditional scenes in Japan, whether it be through karaoke videos or a historical drama: the slow cruise down a river lined by willow trees, and indeed, yanagawa translates into English as willow river.
However, after going through the lyrics, I've realized that "Yanagawa no Hito" is actually a go-tochi（ご当地）enka or traditional song about a specific region in Japan. In this particular case, Ohkawa is singing about the city of Yanagawa in southern Fukuoka Prefecture which is known for its canals. The key word in the lyrics which corrected my path about what the song was all about was Gonshan（ゴンシャン）, written in katakana. Putting it through the Yahoo Japan search engine pulled up multiple hits about a certain coffee shop known as Gonshan in Yanagawa. It's all quite poignant since the protagonist in "Yanagawa no Hito" is planning on leaving the city for a bigger place...perhaps Tokyo. The video below incidentally is of Yanagawa and it was created by Kevin Caption.
As I mentioned in the article for "Sazanka no Yado", Ohkawa had to go through many years without a hit before that big song from 1982 finally reached him. However, just judging from "Yanagawa no Hito" alone, I think perhaps a reappraisal of those perhaps forgotten tunes of his throughout the 1970s might be considered.
Welcome to another Reminiscings of Youth with your cordial host, J-Canuck. On today's article, we take a look at what has been determined to be the 3rd-largest economic area on the planet after Tokyo and New York City, according to J Utah, the fellow above with all those wonderful driving videos on YouTube.
I've only been to Los Angeles once and that was back in the summer of 1989. On top of that, it was purely by happenstance that we ended up in the City of Angels since on my way to Tokyo to start my career on the JET Programme, the United flight from Chicago had some technical issues (something about an engine falling off) which meant that we Toronto recruits into the programme had to stay over in LA for a night. Well, as it turned out, it wasn't too difficult making lemonade from lemons because apparently several of us had never been to the city before so we got a nice little tour through Hollywood, Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills and Venice Beach. Plus, what we heard when we eventually did get to the Keio Plaza Hotel was that the welcome ceremony for everyone on the first day (that we "unlucky" Canadian JETS had missed) had been about as exciting as watching paint dry.
However, that little spark of interest in Los Angeles had been lit several years before, thanks to a video that I'd caught on television. Randy Newman is probably most well-known now for all that music that he provided to the "Toy Story" franchise, but my first remembrance of him was through a song in the late 1970s called "Short People". It wouldn't be for many years but I eventually heard and realized that Newman had a pretty sardonic/sarcastic streak when it came to his lyrics.
Anyways that video I saw was for Newman's 1983 song"I Love L.A.". As a teen who was not particularly all that aware or sharp when it came to song lyrics, I really did think that this catchy pop/rock number was a love letter to this huge metropolis in California instead of this Gibbs slap upside L.A.'s head criticizing citizens' self-absorbed nature and ignorance of the problems hitting the outside world. Dang, as nasty as Newman's words stung, Newman's music (and the chant of "WE LOVE IT!") was as inviting and fun as that cool convertible he's driving in the video. And he had good chunks of the bands TOTO and Fleetwood Mac helping out in the recording booth, too!
But it wasn't just me who had fallen for the melodic charms of "I Love L.A.". Even the residents of Los Angeles were more than happy to welcome the song as their new anthem, and from what I've seen of the comments on YouTube, the fans of the local sports teams there have also been unhesitating in their love of the song. I remember that it was used in connection with something for the 1984 Olympics which just happened to be held in Los Angeles. Watching the music video and then all of the footage from the city during the Olympics, there was something that did make me wonder about visiting the place someday. Well, fortune favoured the foolish when it came to me several years later.
"I Love L.A." was a track on Newman's January 1983 album"Trouble in Paradise", and so how was the Oricon chart for that particular month faring? Here are the Top 3 songs.
Well, a third of the way into "Kobayashi-san Chi no Maid Dragon S"（小林さんちのメイドラゴンS...Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid S） and it appears as if the fans are happy with what they've seen so far including the inclusion of the newest resident in the Kobayashi household, the foe-turned-friend Ilulu. Yup, that second season opening "Ai no Supreme!"（愛のシュプリーム！）is a bona fide earworm in the same steps as "Aozora no Rhapsody"（青空のラプソディ）.
As much as the tradition of having the band fhana come up with the opening theme, the ending theme custom of having the female dragon portion of the cast perform it is also continuing. However, Chorogons have been upgraded to Super Chorogons（スーパーちょろゴンず）with the addition of seiyuu Tomomi Mineuchi（嶺内ともみ）as the aforementioned Ilulu, joining Yūki Kuwahara（桑原由気）as Tohru, Maria Naganawa（長縄まりあ）as Kanna, Minami Takahashi（高橋未奈美）as Lucoa, and Yūki Takada（高田憂希）as Elma.
"Maid with Dragons" begins with a bit of that vaudevillian feeling that infused the ending theme for the last season, "Ishukan Communication" (イシュカン・コミュニケーション), but then it shifts over to a more conventional pop style although the upbeat nature is retained. As was the case with "Ishukan Communication", Yohei Matsui（松井洋平）is the lyricist but the composer this time is Ginnojo Hoshi（星銀乃丈）.
Gotta have the live-action video, too. And it looks like Super Chorogons have followed up on their cover of fhana's "Aozora no Rhapsody" by even performing their version of this season's opener "Ai no Supreme!". No need to ingest any desserts tonight.
Of course on YouTube, he's known as Island Fantasia and it was through his channel that I discovered a band that I had never heard of before. With the unusual name of Cotton Time, according to our fellow KKP contributor, their 1998 release"Lost Season" may have been the only album that was released by them, and further information on Cotton Time is rather sparse.
From the band's official site (now non-existent), I'm informed that "the Cotton sound" as the writer puts it is mellow, jazzy and comfortable, and has hints of what female vocalists in the 1980s including Ami Ozaki（尾崎亜美）and Miki Imai（今井美樹）were delivering. Yukiko Nagao（長尾由起子）was the vocalist with Cotton Time, with Masashi Hino（日野雅司）on guitar, Hiroshi Nagino（奈木野浩）on bass, Minako Yamashita（山下美奈子）on keyboards and Naoki Iwata（岩田直樹）on drums. According to Island Fantasia, "Lost Season" generally has a mellow City Pop sound reminiscent of the early 1980s, although he also says that the particular track featured here is not representative of that sound but is one of the better tracks.
And that track is "Ame Agari ni Dance" (Dance When The Rain Stops). I would agree that though it doesn't really sound like an early 80s City Pop song, Yamashita's keyboards still hint at that champagne-and-caviar feeling of the late 80s version of City Pop with the inclusion of sophisti-pop. In that respect, there is something that reminds me of the aforementioned Imai, specifically with her great album "Retour" from 1990. That piano solo near the end also impresses me as it has Island Fantasia. The lyrics were provided by vocalist Nagao with the music coming from Yamashita.
Just some late "breaking news" that I found while riffing through the rest of Cotton Time's site, the band did release a maxi-single of 3 songs in 2002 and then finally broke up in 2006. I also found out on their home page that they included the word "cotton" in their name since, aside from the original meaning of the plant, they also discovered that through colloquial English, it has been used to mean "to come to like", as in "I'm really cottoning onto Cotton Time".
The very first song that I had ever heard from City Pop/J-AOR crooner Junichi Inagaki（稲垣潤一）was "Natsu no Claxon", this very relaxing end-of-summer ballad that I saw performed by the Sendai-born singer-songwriter on an early morning episode of Fuji-TV's"19xx" while I was shivering in my futon in snowbound Gunma Prefecture. Listening to this one was enough for me to get my first Inagaki album which turned out to be "TRANSIT", his 2-CD BEST compilation released in December 1990. "TRANSIT" was actually his 6th collection of his best stuff and it hit No. 7 on the Oricon weeklies.
Seeing that cover of him in the cool pale clothing and the tasteful silhouette, I figured that Inagaki was going to be about the classy urban contemporary. But as I gradually discovered over repeated playings of the discs, within that particular genre, the singer touched upon a number of influences whether it be Doobie Bros. AOR, some light doo-wop or down-home City Pop.
In any case, because of the number of total tracks involved, I've decided to do this first entry for "TRANSIT" by focusing on the entries for Disc 1 only today. Several of those have already gotten their own articles so you can click on the links. By the way, all of the tracks featured here were arranged by Akira Inoue（井上鑑）.
First off is "Aoi Tsuioku" (Blue Recollections) which was the B-side to Inagaki's 3rd single"Dramatic Rain" released in October 1982. Written by Reiko Yukawa（湯川れい子）and composed by Akira Mitake（見岳章）, as the title hints, it's a minor-key mid-tempo song about picking up the pieces after a breakup and realizing that there so many pieces remaining on the wet ground. It's got all of the feeling of a modern film noir in 1980s Tokyo but there is one passage near the end which actually shows a melodic beam of light shining in through the clouds for some reason. "Aoi Tsuioku" also ended up on Inagaki's debut album"246:3AM".
The opening notes for "Getsuyoubi ni wa Bara wo" (Monday Rose) struck me as being so Boz Scaggs or Bobby Caldwell. Also a track from "246:3AM", this is a gentle ballad over what seems to be a disagreement in the philosophy of love with one believing that love is nothing but a fleeting little game while the other feels that their relationship should be taken with the seriousness it needs. With lyrics by Yoshiaki Sagara（さがらよしあき）and music by Toyonobu Ito（伊藤豊昇）, I especially like the part near the end where Inagaki stretches out the title phrase of "Monday Rose".
"MARIA" is West Coast AOR concocted by lyricist Masao Urino（売野政男）and composer Tetsuji Hayashi（林哲司）and the message is clear as a bell...a guy is in love with a lass named Maria. Hopefully the lucky fellow and Maria are in that convertible bombing down the Ventura Freeway. "MARIA" was a track on Inagaki's 1983 3rd album"J.I.".
When I hear "Natsu no Yukue"(Summer Whereabouts) which followed "MARIA" on "J.I." and is the B-side to "Long Version", I gather that Inagaki had wanted to infuse some of that 1950s/1960s balladry into the music, thereby joining the likes of singers like Mariya Takeuchi（竹内まりや）. Once again, that oft-traveled theme of the end of summer meaning the end of romance is parlayed again as a man stands alone at the countryside cottage after his paramour has gone back home to the city. Maybe they'll have that tryst again next year or maybe not. AKB48 Svengali and lyricist Yasushi Akimoto（秋元康）provided the words while Kazuhiko Matsuo（松尾一彦）came up with the sweetly lilting melody.
This time, it was Akimoto and Hayashi working together to create "Iidasenakute" (Can't Say It) for "J.I.". A breakup doesn't sound much more bittersweet than this one, and with the shimmering strings and the electric guitar solo working with Inagaki's high-toned and resonant vocals, I wouldn't be tremendously surprised if there were quite a few fans who grabbed the nearest box of Kleenex. There are also some similarities between this one and "Long After Midnight".
From Inagaki's May 1984 4th album"Personally" comes "Kanashiki Diamond Ring" (Melancholy Diamond Ring) which has the singer returning to some of that old-fashioned vocal group pop. This song starts off the album and though it can be called bittersweet, there is more of the sweet rather than the bitter in this one written by Urino and composed by Hayashi. A man returns to his hometown to see an old flame getting married to another fellow and the wedding has him thinking about opportunities lost but well wishes given out all the same.
I really love the epic intro and the rich piano behind "Dare ga Tame ni..." (For Whom...) as Inagaki takes on a slightly more measured delivery and he sings about a happy relationship going through the usual things before the vows are taken. Also, a track on "Personally", Sagara was the lyricist with Hayashi on music. I think among the ones that I've covered on this Disc 1, "Dare ga Tame ni..." is about as straight-ahead pop as I've heard so far.
But then we come to "J no Kanojo" (J's Girl) which is an upbeat pop number which launches his May 1985 5th album"No Strings". In fact, there is one frantic instrumental bridge that almost takes things into New Wave...and maybe a bit of Dire Straits thanks to the guitar. However, generally speaking, this is a good-time pop tune about having some risky thoughts for J's girl on the dance floor. I have no idea who this J is. Is it Junichi himself or is it someone with a scarier name like Jaws or Jack the Knife? It was lyricist Akimoto and composer Yasuhiro Kido（木戸やすひろ）on this one.
(I'm sorry but the video has been taken down.)
At 1:04:40, there is "Traces" which ends Disc 1 on "TRANSIT". It is not only the B-side to Inagaki's April 1987 11th single"Omoide no Beach Club"（思い出のビーチクラブ...Beach Club of My Memories）, but it's a cover of the original 1968 ballad by the American band Classics IV that ended up becoming its biggest hit.
Hopefully I'll get Disc 2up and running sometime in August.
Early on last decade, shortly after returning from Japan for good, my family doctor informed me that I should be laying off the bacon. You can imagine how accepting of that advice I was. Not very. I will always be an omnivore and happily devour the famous breakfast meat.😈
The reason that I'm even starting this article with one of my foodie loves is that I encountered this jazz musician and his band which has been dubbed Bacon Egg. The Japanese love to say this gastronomical combination made in heaven as "Bacon Egg" and not "bacon and eggs". Anyways, the leader of this group is jazz saxophonistGenji Sawai（沢井原兒）who has worked in session with singers such as Masayuki Suzuki（鈴木雅之）, Eikichi Yazawa（矢沢永吉）, REBECCA, and Miki Imai（今井美樹）, etc.
Sawai released this 1981 album with Bacon Egg called "Skipjack" and I'm not really sure whether the album was named after one of the species of tuna out there. Still Sawai's title track which launches the LP seems to follow the titular fish with its speed and energy. It's funky and jazzy as any fusion song ought to be and possesses that fun feeling of striding through downtown New York or Los Angeles. As well, I get reminded of what I wrote about a few days ago through Teruo Nakamura（中村照夫）and Rising Sun Band's"Mr. & Mrs. Funk".
A couple of days ago, I also whipped up an article about veteran saxophonist Sadao Watanabe（渡辺貞夫）for his 1993 "Till We Meet Again", and I found out that Sawai studied under Watanabe when he first started his career in 1973. Couldn't find out much otherwise on the musician aside from what I've read on a Japanese website called "The Sax Online". Sawai was a big fan of John Coltrane which got him onto the saxophone and his time with Watanabe lasted for a year during his days in university after which he participated in several bands and other units. In 2016, he released another solo album, "Tokyo Kaihouku"（TOKYO解放区...Tokyo Free Zone）.
To finish off, let me say that having those traditional Sunday morning strips wasn't the only form of bacon that I had eaten during my 17 years in Ichikawa. From time to time, when I hit a patisserie such as Vie de France in Tokyo, I also bought something called a Bacon Epi. And yep, it absolutely was epi(c)!
It was a few months ago, but NHK's "Uta Con"（うたコン）featured Leo Ieiri（家入レオ）. I'd never heard of her but this singer-songwriter comes from the city of Kurume in Fukuoka Prefecture. Kurume is a familiar place to me because the city has had quite a few famous people in the Japanese music industry hail from there over the decades including 80s aidoru Seiko Matsuda（松田聖子）, Checkers' leader Fumiya Fujii（藤井フミヤ）and kayo composer Hachidai Nakamura（中村八大）. According to her Wikipedia article, Ieiri started her career in 2012 and she gained her stage name of Leo from a couple of sources in pop culture: 1) the movie "Leon: The Professional" and 2) the character of Leo from the Osamu Tezuka（手塚治虫）manga classic "Kimba The White Lion". Her actual name is Wakana Ieiri（家入わかな）.
On "Uta Con", Ieiri performed her most recent 17th single"Sora to Ao"(The Sky and the Blue) which was released in January 2021 and peaked at No. 9 on Oricon. What attracted me to the song was the uplifting feeling of the song during a pretty dark time in the pandemic and the guitar pop arrangement which reminded me some of the similar music from the early to mid 1990s. The lyrics seem to talk about one half of a couple which has separated under unknown but perhaps not permanent circumstances, talking of the day that they can be back together again.
Although Ieiri is also a songwriter, "Sora to Ao" was handled by different folks this time around. Yohei Kawakami（川上洋平）, vocalist/guitarist of the band ALEXANDROS composed the music and the band itself took care of the arrangement along with Takeshi Saze（佐瀬貴史）. Meanwhile, the lyrics were written by movie director and TV scriptwriter Eriko Kitagawa（北川悦吏子）. Kitagawa was also behind the script for the NTV romantic drama "Uchi no Musume wa, Kareshi ga Dekinai!!"（ウチの娘は、彼氏が出来ない!!...Date My Daughter!!）, the show for which "Sora to Ao" became the theme song. I recall seeing the ads for the show via TV Japan and it stars Miho Kanno（菅野美穂）in the mother role this time. Time has really flown when I actually see Kanno as Mommy rather than as the wayward daughter.
