Takako Shirai -- Someday

 

I've only mentioned this once or twice before so perhaps you the reader may not have noticed it, but for the past few years, I've been keeping tabs on the Labels (on the right side) specifically in the Years section right at the top. There's been a dogged horse race among the years of 1981, 1982 and 1983 nearing 500 and I can now say that this 1982 article has now hit number 500...indeed, this is the 500th article for the year 1982 and therefore it's currently the year with the most number of articles on the blog. It was quite the prolific year and my congratulations to the year (I don't think I've used the word "year" in this much in a paragraph before).

The auspiciousness of the occasion is all due to Takako Shirai's（白井貴子）"Someday" and after listening to it, if the melody does sound familiar to you, then you must also be a Motoharu Sano（佐野元春）fan. This is the cover of Sano's famous song that I covered when I posted the article for his May 1982 album of the same name all the way back in April 2015. Shirai's cover came out as her 4th single in August of that year with it being included in her 2nd album, "I LOVE Love" which was released later in October.

Back in the Sano article for the album, I noted that his "Someday" had that feeling of an American rock anthem. Shirai's version sounds somewhat softer even with the punchy percussion and there's a bit more of a breezy kayo lilt in there. Both versions are great.

Again, many congratulations to the year 1982. The Noritake dish set is on it way.🍽

Takuro Yoshida -- Soto wa Shiroi Yuki no Yoru（外は白い雪の夜）

Good Free Photos

I'd been hearing about this big snowstorm that was about to engulf the Kanto region all yesterday, but as of Sunday night (Monday morning in Japan), nothing had materialized on the ground or in the air. However all that changed when I woke up and watched "NHK News at 9". Looks like even Tokyo got hit with a few inches of the white stuff and there may be more coming in the next several hours. Not surprisingly, transportation systems have been paralyzed. Well, it appears as if my old stomping grounds got the snow that would usually be hitting my hometown at around this time but hasn't this year.

Entering this week, obviously I don't want to particularly celebrate the fact that people are being inconvenienced by Tokyo's Big Snow of 2024. However, I did think about putting up a kayo kyoku associated with the precipitation and I found an interesting one: Takuro Yoshida's（吉田拓郎）"Soto wa Shiroi Yuki no Yoru" (It's a Snowy Night Outside).

Written by Takashi Matsumoto（松本隆）and composed by Yoshida, it's definitely a folksy number lasting more than six minutes with that mandolin and even Masataka Matsutoya（松任谷正隆）was helping out on the original recording by playing the accordion. The sweet melody is presenting a bittersweet story of a romance that has run its course as a woman calls a man to meet at the restaurant where they first met. As soon as the man realizes the meeting place, he knows that the time has come for the breakup. And the tone from Yoshida as he sings it feels like a "That's the way life goes" elegy.

"Soto wa Shiroi Yuki no Yoru" was a track on Yoshida's November 1978 album "Rolling 30"（ローリング30）which hit No. 8 on Oricon. There's an anecdote on the J-Wiki article for the song which involves Yoshida's one and only appearance on NHK's Kohaku Utagassen in 1994. At the time, I'd been just several weeks into my second stint in Japan and I had friends over at the apartment for a hot pot party on New Year's Eve. I did have the Kohaku on for a little bit on my tiny television but hadn't been aware that Yoshida was one of the participants.

Anyways, Yoshida's lone appearance had him sing "Soto wa Shiroi Yuki no Yoru" and when I first read the J-Wiki anecdote, my assumption had been that he could no longer stand the song and no longer performed it. That was absolutely wrong...I read it a couple of more times and realized that he actually disliked being on the Kohaku and would reject any further invitations by NHK, according to a 2016 interview. Well, at least I'm happy that he still likes the song.

Please be warm and safe, citizens of Kanto!

Chiyuki Asami -- Tasogare Cinema（黄昏シネマ）

 

The above is a theatre near the Toei Animation Museum in Nerima Ward, Tokyo. My friend and I visited the museum in 2014 although we didn't actually see a flick at the T-Joy. As someone who's been catching movies for decades, a multi-year move to Japan didn't change my habits for the most part and so I continued to see the Hollywood blockbusters in Tokyo. I think in the last half of my stay in Ichikawa, I noticed that theatres were getting more advanced up to the level of VIP versions which I've gotten spoiled on. But before then, a number of the movie houses had been darn old with seats small enough that at one point, I was virtually wearing them like a diaper...yes, let's not imagine that, shall we? I don't think red velour is that absorbent anyways.

It's those old places of Ginza, Shinjuku and Ikebukuro that I used to frequent that get the spotlight in Chiyuki Asami's（あさみちゆき）"Tasogare Cinema" (Sunset Cinema). I first wrote about the Yamaguchi Prefecture native in November 2023 regarding her 2004 song "Inokashira-sen"（井の頭線）, and noted how her choice of music settled in that middle ground known as New Adult Music between folk and enka.

"Tasogare Cinema" was released as her 10th single in April 2010 and it's a poignant ballad about a woman returning to a neighbourhood for the first time in a decade where she and her ex-boyfriend used to hang out. An old theatre there was one of their haunts and she goes inside noting that her old flame is probably now still living in the neighbourhood with his current girlfriend or wife. Written by Mami Takubo（田久保真見）and composed by Masato Sugimoto（杉本眞人）, there is very much a "que sera sera" feeling in the song as if the woman has moved on with her life but still wants to remember old times. The single peaked at No. 40 on Oricon.

"Tasogare Cinema" also appeared in an earlier version as a track on Asami's 2nd album from June 2005 "Asami no Uta II"（あさみのうたII...Asami's Songs II）. The original version has an even more elegiac feeling with that orchestra backing the singer up. On the other hand, the later 2010 single feels more along the lines of some of the power ballads from the 1970s and maybe early 1980s such as Michael Johnson's "Bluer Than Blue" and Saburo Tokito's（時任三郎）"Kawa no Nagare wo Daite Nemuritai" (川の流れを抱いて眠りたい）.

Travis Japan -- Till the Dawn

 

The first time that I had ever heard of the first or last name Travis was on the 70s/80s CBS sitcom "WKRP in Cincinnati" through the character of Andy Travis. Since the fictional program director on the ailing radio station had that laidback and cordial attitude (most of the time), that feeling has been imbued into my image of the name.

So, you can imagine good ol' Andy popped up in my head again after so many years when a commenter told me a few weeks ago about the current SMILE-UP group Travis Japan. Until I got the comment, I had no idea about this sestet but they've been around for over a decade since 2012. As for how a former Johnny's group ever got a name like Travis Japan, it was due to a tribute to American choreographer Travis Payne who had helped the original lineup while the boys were being shown the ropes in Los Angeles.

Interestingly enough, the commenter recommended this particular song "Till the Dawn" which is a track on Travis Japan's very first album "Road to A", which only came out last December. It's already done well though by scoring a No. 1 ranking. "Till the Dawn" has some good dollops of the type of music that WKRP DJ Venus Fly-Trap would have played during his nighttime show: I can pick up on the soul, AOR and yep, even some City Pop. Erik Gustaf Lidbom and Alexander Marcus Karlsson were behind the melody while June and D&H took care of the lyrics. Y'know I can even hear some Bruno Mars in there, too.

I've read that Travis Japan had their fifteen minutes of fame on "America's Got Talent" but unlike the Japanese dance group Avantgardey which instantly wowed the AGT judges from the get-go, the path for Travis Japan has been a little steeper. To be honest, I had initially thought the album title stood for "Road to America's Got Talent" but actually, it stands for "Road to Authenticity".😏

Daddy Takechiyo & Tokyo Otoboke Cats -- Yuugata Friend（夕方フレンド）

 

Daddy Takechiyo & Tokyo Otoboke Cats（ダディ竹千代&東京おとぼけCATS）, led by Daddy, aka Go Kajiki（加治木剛）, was a comical and talented band which I discovered via a track in that "Light Mellow" CD series. That led to my first article about them for a breezy City Pop-esque 1980 song called "Itsuwari no DJ"（偽りのDJ）back in the summer of 2020.

I've now found a track from their 1980 first album, logically titled "First". "Yuugata Friend" (Sunset Friend) seems to be a playful pun on the Carole King song "You've Got a Friend" but that's where any similarities end. Written and composed by Daddy Takechiyo, it's a bopping track which starts out with what sounds like a polite rejection letter to the leader's confession of love from a pleasant-sounding young lady. The young lady just happens to be twentysomething Mariya Takeuchi（竹内まりや）, and I did mention in the "Itsuwari no DJ" posting that he and the Cats had some connections with not only Mariya but also her future husband, Tatsuro Yamashita（山下達郎）.

Hey, if I got rejected by the lovely Ms. Takeuchi, I would be crawling into a corner of my room (the one with the most dust and ant carcasses) myself for a certain amount of time, so I cannot blame Daddy for getting into the doldrums in the first verses of "Yuugata Friend" and thinking that he needs to drink his way into a stupor. There's something not surprisingly Tom Waits bluesy here but it doesn't take too long before he and the Cats get back on their feet and move on, thanks to some James Brown-style R&B. By the end of the five minutes and change, it's as if the rejection never occurred. Tats and Mariya are together and Daddy and his band are together as well.

Ichiro Fujiyama -- Sake wa Namida ka Tameiki ka（酒は涙か溜息か）

 

Welcome to the first weekend of February 2024. After getting through one of the grayest Januarys on record, we Torontonians are now bathed in brilliant sunshine. We could use a lot of that Vitamin D!

Therefore, it must seem a tad ironic that I'm starting this weekend session of KKP with an old kayo that's quite melancholy in verse and melody. And, true to my age and aging memory banks, I can't quite remember how I found out about Ichiro Fujiyama's（藤山一郎）"Sake wa Namida ka Tameiki ka" (Is Drinking About the Tears or the Sighs?). I very much doubt it was another discovery from the Weather News segment and the song hadn't been listed on the playlist during last week's episode of "Uta Con"（うたコン）.

Regardless, it's a good song to place onto the blog since it was a huge hit for the legendary Fujiyama after its release in September 1931 and probably one of the landmark examples of Showa era kayo kyoku. On J-Wiki, it's been designated as a form of ryukoka（流行歌）, which literally means "pop song", as well as a kayo kyoku (same meaning). However, despite coming to realize over the years through working on this blog and learning from fellow co-administrator Noelle that the genre of enka hadn't actually originated until the 1950s after the war, I still couldn't help but categorize "Sake wa Namida ka Tameiki ka" as a retrofitted enka tune because of the sound and the people involved in its creation.

For one thing, it was Masao Koga（古賀政男）, an up-and-coming composer at the time, who came up with the contemplative melody (powered by that famous guitar playing of his), something that has been a characteristic among that section of kayo kyoku known as the Koga Melodies (and you can get plenty of those through Noelle's Creator articles on the man himself at Part 1 and Part 2) although he has also been capable of jaunty tunes as well. Kikutaro Takahashi（高橋掬太郎）, who was also a newspaper reporter in Hokkaido, wrote the lyrics of heartbreak and loneliness. From the title, I'm assuming that the heartbroken lad in the song was trying to drown his sorrows in drink but not altogether successfully.

According to a 1997 issue of the "Kobe Shimbun"（神戸新聞...The Kobe Newspaper） via that J-Wiki article, "Sake wa Namida ka Tameiki ka" became a huge hit for the classically-trained crooner Fujiyama while the world was struggling through a major economic tempest. In fact, 800,000 records were sold which outpaced the sales of phonographs that year in Japan by a ratio of 4:1. In a foretelling of 1950s/1960s movies based on hit kayo, a couple of movies were inspired by Fujiyama's hit.

Yutaka Kimura Speaks ~ Japanese City Pop Masterpieces 100: Nanako Sato -- Shuumatsu no Highway（週末のハイウェイ）

 

Number: 043

Lyricist: Nanako Sato

Composers: Nanako Sato and Motoharu Sano

Arranger: Shouji Yokouchi

From Sato's 1977 album "Sweet Swingin'"

Just when she sings "...outside the window..." in her languid voice, the atmosphere suddenly shifts, and it's at that point when the world according to Nanako Sato（佐藤奈々子）unmistakably opens up. "Shuumatsu no Highway" is representative of the "Subterranean no Futari Botchi"（サブタレニアン二人ぼっち）honeymoon period between the singer and Motoharu Sano（佐野元春）due to the comfortably swinging melodies they contributed. The city scenes that she was looking for are always seemingly lonely and precious even now.

The above comes from "Disc Collection Japanese City Pop Revised" (2020).