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 wrote about Kumiko Goto's（後藤久美子）March 1987 "teardrop" a few months ago. It was the first of just two singles that she would record alongside a 1988 album before opting out of the singing part of her entertainment career. Noting her singing ability at the time (not even a teenager), I completely overlooked the fact on her J-Wiki profile that she had been treated as an aidoru.
The B-side to "teardrop" was "Wakaba no Illusion" (Illusion of the Young Leaves). It all sounds rather enigmatically poetic but the lyrics by Etsuko Kisugi（来生えつこ）simply relate the tale of a young student pining away for a boy without being able to approach him. As with "teardrop", the music for "Wakaba no Illusion" was supplied by Kyohei Tsutsumi（筒美京平）and then arranged by Motoki Funayama（船山基紀）. I'd say that there is a certain lushness to the arrangement that I felt was pretty common among a lot of aidoru tunes in the latter half of the 1980s.
The song was used for Fuji-TV's summer campaign in 1987 and as an insert song for Gokumi's own drama on the network, "Doukyuusei wa Juu-San Sai"（同級生は13歳...My Classmate is 13 Years Old）.
The anime "Grand Blue"（グランドブルー）has been one of the most hilarious anime I've ever seen, and from time to time, I like to watch it through again. Even within the show, Episode 11 will go down as one of the all-time classics in sexual innuendo and double entendres.
But how did I find out about those terms? Well for us in Canada and the United States, it was probably ABC's "Three's Company" which had its run from 1977 to 1984. The above scene was from one of the earliest episodes and I gather that it was the beginning for all of the double entendres that became part and parcel of the humour.
The theme song has also been one that has stayed in my head all these decades as John Ritter's accident-prone Jack Tripper fell off his bike in Santa Monica every week. Unlike some other catchy theme songs, I don't think "Come and Knock on Our Door" ever got a single release, although I recall that the opening credits did get an extended version of the theme playing over some of the funny scenes. "Come and Knock on Our Door" was sung by Ray Charles (and no, not the Ray Charles of "Hit the Road, Jack" and "Georgia on My Mind" fame) and Julia Rinker with the song being composed by Joe Raposo who earlier had created the iconic themes for "Sesame Street" and "The Electric Company".
One of the running gags that we enjoyed on the series along with the misunderstandings is whenever landlord Stanley Roper made a joke at the expense of his long-suffering wife Helen and he'd actually break the fourth wall as he looked into the camera. Sadly, almost forty years following the finale of "Three's Company", a majority of the cast have passed away including Ritter twenty years ago, and of course, I'm writing this ROY article due to the fact that Suzanne Somers who had played one of the original roomies died a few days at the age of 76. My condolences to her family, friends and fans.
Three singles came out when "Three's Company" made its debut that month, the last of which hit the record stores on the same day as the first broadcast: March 15th 1977.
Last Wednesday, I posted "The Works of Nobuyuki Shimizu"（清水信之）, Part 1 to pay tribute to this veteran musician and arranger. There were a lot of notable works so I'm going into a Part 2.
Although his arrangement of EPO's cover of "Downtown" may be seen as his first work, he was also quite busy crafting Mariya Takeuchi's（竹内まりや）"Fushigi na Peach Pie" in the same year. As far as I and J-Wiki know, this song was the only Mariya tune that he helped on, but in doing so, he helped in cementing her early career as one of giving tribute to the girl pop of the 1960s.
As noted in Part 1, Shimizu did like his City Pop and that was also the case with Yoshitaka Minami's（南佳孝）"Video City". I've usually seen Minami as the ballad crooner so it was surprising to hear this modern contemporary pop equivalent of taking that spree through the wonders of metropolitan living. Shimizu pretty much threw the mix of consumerism and Bubble Era out there.
Shimizu may have made Minami's"Video City" a welcome to the tourists coming to Tokyo, but his work on Junko Ohashi's（大橋純子）scintillating "Nemurenai Diamond" is an urban odyssey for the well-heeled and well-to-do on a Friday night when all things were possible and payable. This is one of the prime examples for the caviar-and-champagne wing of City Pop.
The aidoru genre also had Shimizu helping out. One example is Chika Takami's（高見知佳）"Kuchibiru Nude" from 1984 which was used as a commercial jingle for Shiseido. J-Wiki doesn't mention whether the arranger had done a lot of jingle production for companies, but he certainly made a catchy one for the famed cosmetics producer. With EPO composing the tune, "Kuchibiru Nude" has the EPO-tastic feeling along with the jangly vibe that I often associated Shimizu with in the early 1980s.
Eri Hiramatsu（平松愛理）and Shimizu had been married to each other for about eleven years from the 1990s into the 2000s. Just before the relationship got very personal though, the latter had helped arrange the former's trademark tune as a slow and adorable waltz about the family life.
Before my Labels for this tribute get completely stuffed, I'd also like to mention that Shimizu arranged a few of Misia's songs including the very catchy "Sunny Day". There's something contemporary and yet old-school about this one which suits me just fine. A melodic strut down the street on a sunny Sunday is how I would describe it. From EPO to Misia...that is quite the range, and of course, there are many other works that are listed in the Shimizu file on KKP.
A little over three years ago, I featured a song by a band known as The Last Show（ザ・ラストショウ）led by Koichi Matsuda（松田幸一）and Ritsu Murakami（村上律）which had been active during the late 1970s. "Blue Lonesome Lady"（ブルー・ロンサム・レディ）from their 1978 2nd album"Last Show 2" is a lovely country tune that could have made its way to the Grand Ole Opry, and according to their J-Wiki article, all three albums that they've released are extremely hard to track down.
That apparently even applies to their January 2010 album "Ieji ~ My Sweet Home"（家路）which was released after getting back together in 2008 and doing concert gigs. Despite the fact that it's been quite a few decades, the title track doesn't sound any different from how they sounded back in the 70s. Written by Kenji Kadoya（門谷憲二）and composed by band bassist Tetsuzo Kawai（河合徹三）, it's a folksy country tune about a couple of good buddies from a gang and how they've enjoyed each other's company over the past few years. Wouldn't mind hearing some more of the old-school stuff in the 2020s.
Among the many singers that I got to be introduced to via the radio program "Sounds of Japan" in the 1980s, one was singer-songwriter Mieko Nishijima（西島三重子）. She among the others were there to convince me in no uncertain terms that there was a large space that was pop in terms of music and not just enka, Mood Kayo, aidoru or technopop. I will always be indebted to her and them for that knowledge and their music.
"Bishonure Waltz" is a track on her 5th studio album"Silhouette"（シルエット）from 1979, and it was the usual combination of lyricist Kenji Kadoya（門谷憲二）and composer Nishijima behind this song which is definitely done in the style of a waltz. The direct translation is "Drenched Waltz" but that doesn't sound too appetizing or pretty so perhaps "Waltz in the Rain" is more romantic. Besides the arrangement is quite classy and overseas as a couple has their dance with one partner teasingly admonishing the other to keep on dancing for today since they may not be together the next day.
Oh, Nishi-Ginza Station (West Ginza Station)? Heck, I know that subway station...not too far away from the main intersection, eh?
Ahhh, no. Sorry, that wouldn't be correct since there is no station known as Nishi-Ginza Station on the Tokyo Metro. There is a Higashi-Ginza Station（東銀座駅...East Ginza Station） on the Toei Asakusa Line and the Hibiya Line that I've gotten off at, but putting in Nishi-Ginza Station into the search engines will only get you the title of an early film by the late Shohei Imamura（今村昌平）titled "Nishi-Ginza Eki Mae"(In Front of Nishi-Ginza Station) which was released in 1958.
Just from my observation, it seems as if the less-than-one-hour comedy has been given short shrift by about everybody including Imamura himself, according to this review at "Blueprint: Review". There's not even a J-Wiki article about the movie. Only the second movie that he directed, Imamura was apparently trying to go for some variant on "The Seven-Year Itch" (1955) by Billy Wilder and starring Marilyn Monroe.
The interesting thing is that Mood Kayo crooner Frank Nagai（フランク永井）seems to have a mystical role to play in the movie as not only the narrator but also a subway staffer and a lounge singer. Not surprisingly, he sings the titular theme song which is how I found out about the movie in the first place. Written by veterans Takao Saeki（佐伯孝夫）and Tadashi Yoshida（吉田正）, it's a brassy jazz piece with a bit of rockabilly guitar mostly about one fellow's frequent visitations to the club in the Ginza neighbourhood in search of drink and dames. I was a bit struck by that line of "ABC...XYZ" which I thought would have been ideal in a "Sesame Street" tune or something by an aidoru much later in the century.
When I first heard of this song recorded by 80s aidoru/actress Tomoyo Harada（原田知世）as the first track for her first mini-album, the No. 2-ranking"Birthday Album"（バースデイ・アルバム）from November 1983 and realized that Taeko Ohnuki（大貫妙子）was behind both words and music, my first thought that even for Ohnuki, that was one mighty ambitious title: "Chikatetsu no Zazie ~ Zazie dans le Métro".
As it turned out, the title translates into "Zazie on the Subway" and it was actually the title of a 1960 Louis Malle film based on the original 1959 Raymond Queneau novel. It all involves Zazie, a potty-mouthed pre-teen girl who gets dropped off in Paris suffering a transit strike and gets into a major farce of an adventure with various interesting characters throughout the movie. Looking at the poster at Wikipedia, I thought that if the movie had been remade in the 1990s, Natalie Portman would have been the ideal actress as Zazie.
But getting back to Harada's "Chikatetsu no Zazie", the Ohnuki creation was arranged by Nobuyuki Shimizu（清水信之）with a slightly blippity-bloppity technopop sheen. It's bright-eyed and bushy-tailed although I can't imagine Harada playing naughty Zazie. Remembering what Ohnuki's melodies sounded like at the time, "Chikatetsu no Zazie" fits right in.
Ohnuki and Shimizu got together again a few years later when the former was recording her 10th studio album"Comin' Soon" for its March 1986 release. The two included Ohnuki's own cover of "Chikatetsu no Zazie" which wasn't all that different from Harada's original. "Comin' Soon" managed to reach No. 26 on the charts as an LP, while its CD version went even higher to No. 21.
Many years later, Harada released her first self-cover album in July 2017 titled "Ongaku to Watashi"（音楽と私...Music and Me） which was arranged by Goro Ito（伊藤ゴロー）. In it is a more grown-up take on "Chikatetsu no Zazie" as if Zazie herself has shed her rough edges to become a more refined, less spiky and more accommodating young lady of The City of Lights. The album peaked at No. 11 on Oricon.
