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.
Over the past weekend, the movie channel Showcase was running multiple viewings of "Man of Steel", another reboot of the Superman franchise. I did see it on the big screen and my good friend actually gave me the DVD but until this past weekend, I hadn't bothered seeing it again. Watching it with relatively fresh eyes again, I could appreciate certain scenes (Krypton, the battle scenes) but I thought it was basically a movie of some good scenes which wasn't quite more than the sum of its parts. I am hoping that "Batman vs. Superman" which comes out in a few months brings something far more magical and is perhaps somewhat even better than the past year's "Avengers" entry.
Well, let's make a cheap segue to YMO or perhaps for this song anyways, YMO. I first came across "Be A Superman" on my purchased "YMO Go Home!", and I had never heard of this entry since it came out in August 1993, well over a decade after my awe for the Yellow Magic Orchestra had dissipated. The title was certainly intriguing enough. Were Sakamoto and the boys paying tribute to the American superhero or were they going for the more philosophical Man/Superman (not that I know much more about it)?
It was indeed a single created by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi（坂本龍一・高橋幸宏）, and I was impressed by the nice little R&B groove added to the percolating techno. Would have loved to have seen this performed at a rave in the later hours. As for the "Superman" part, the lyrics didn't go either way. Instead it was just a gravelly voice (and a pretty voice) exhorting what seemed to be a perpetual hikikomori to get off his or her duff and make something of himself or herself.
Imagine my surprise on finding out in the liner notes that the gravelly voice belonged to the late William S. Burroughs. "Naked Lunch" W.S. Burroughs?! Did YMO actually lure this guy out to the recording booth? I'm not totally sure but I think the band just pulled out a few samples although I don't know which speech or lecture the phrases came from. Whatever the case may be, it was quite the inspired song.
"Be A Superman" was indeed on YMO's 7th and final studio album, "Technodon" from May 1993 which peaked at No. 2. As for the single itself, it only got as high as No. 76. But hey, that doesn't take away at how cool it still sounds.
I thought it was about time I write an entry on Kaori Mizumori (水森かおり). She's one of those "Kayo Concert" regulars that I'd see about once a month, appearing on the Kayo stage in (more often than not) elaborate strapless gowns with a jovial expression. But I don't really mind as Mizumori's smooth and clear vocal delivery is enjoyable to listen to, plus it's hard not to like that bright smile of hers - sort of like Haruo Minami (三波春夫), I dare say. And you know how I always say that enka largely features the prefectures and their landmarks? Well, here's the queen of this category of enka. Browsing through her discography is like having a crash-course in the Geography of Japan.
Gifu, Hokkaido, Shimane and Tottori are some examples of the prefectures Mizumori had sung about. As for her 24th single, "Yamatoji no Koi" the place of interest is Nara, or more specifically Yamatoji. I did some research on this area in Nara - Mom helped in translation as the J-Wiki had too many Chinese characters for me to understand - and it turns out that Yamatoji is supposed to be a path to Yamato, which was where the emperor's seat way back then and is now current-day Nara. In Toshiya Niitani's (仁井谷俊也) lyrics, there are shout-outs a couple of landmarks in the city of Sakurai, like Mt. Miwa, all while talking about a woman reminiscing (?) a past love. Composing "Yamatoji no Koi" was Tetsuya Gen (弦哲也), who put together an airy and grandeur melody that sounds more joyful than the lyrics.
"Yamatoji no Koi" was released on 1st April 2015 and it commemorates her 20th year in show business. It did well on the charts, peaking at 10th place and settling at 101st place by the end of 2015, and it won an award for excellence at the 57th Japan Record Awards as well as a nomination at the 48th Japan Lyricist Awards - Niitani is really on a roll here, having many of the songs he penned nominated. Mizumori sung this song on the 66th Kohaku last year while riding on an animatronic phoenix with the view of Nara in the background. Her performances seem like they are getting more impressive over the years; not to Sachiko Kobayashi's (小林幸子) level yet, but she's getting there.
I've visited Nara a couple of times on package tours... Well, more like the deer park and the temple that resides in the deer park. It was fun being able to touch the free-roaming deer that walk up to you hoping for hand-outs, but boy the hoards of high school students that came as we were leaving were scarier than a herd of deer coming after you for food.
I think I've only written one other article on a song that originated from a computer game: "Ame no Musique"（雨のmusique）for "Symphonic Rain".
This game is quite a bit more esoteric than "Symphonic Rain" but has a more personal connection with me. Soon after I moved into my Ichikawa apartment from the mid-1990s, my place soon became a frequent drop-in place for some of my then-single buddies. And one old friend often made pilgrimages from Mie Prefecture to come to the big city to spend a week with me while bringing over his massive array of game platforms. Of course, one of those platforms was the blockbuster Sony Playstation 1.
I have never been a computer game geek but even I have to admit that I was slowly getting seduced by the PS1 until I finally succumbed to its digital charms and bought it one day in Akihabara for about 20,000 yen. And having usually been the one odd fellow in my group, my very first PS game was the weird-but-wonderful "I.Q." Basically, a game about eliminating huge blocks through a lot of running and strategic pressing of buttons, it was quite the engrossing challenge.
But what really got me was the game music. For something like "I.Q." which first came out in 1997, I had expected some minimalist techno on the level of Philip Glass. Instead right from the introduction, I got this epic orchestra with some really haunting choral accompaniment. I thought John Williams crashed the party here. And although I long abandoned the game after peaking at the Fifth Stage, the soundtrack managed to stay with in my head all these years.
And I only just found out that it was famed Japanese composer, arranger and conductor Takayuki Hattori（服部隆之）who came up with the music for "I.Q.". He's done a number of soundtracks for dramas and movies, and most recently he even got his own article on "Kayo Kyoku Plus" for the recent drama "Naoki Hanzawa" thanks to JTM.
Above is the appropriately titled "Opening Chorus" for the album "I.Q. Final Perfect Music File" which came out in 1999. It all starts out rather ominously before Hattori introduces a bit of "Vertigo" music and then the triumphant chorus yelling "I.Q." I was half-expecting a huge obelisk to pop up on the moon Titan! When I first heard this, I just felt like this was pretty darn epic for a weird game about blocks.
"The First Tide", as the title indicates, is the music that provides background for First Stage for the game. It has that feeling of the player kinda making his baby steps into the game and gives that hint of thinking things through. Definitely not Philip Glass. I could imagine this track providing musical accompaniment to that famous scene of how to destroy the Death Star in the very first "Star Wars".
"Courage and Hope" was the one other piece of music in "I.Q." that really caught my attention. In fact, I distinctly remember popping my eyes and letting a whoosh of air when I first heard the triumphant notes on one of the stages. Did I just win something? This sounded more appropriate for the final victory rather than for one particular stage. Still, the jaunty march did offer me some of that courage and hope while I was trying to melt the blocks without being stomped by them.
Of course, I never did reach the final stage so it was interesting (and enviable) to watch the fellow in the video above finally reach I.Q. Nirvana. And although "I.Q." was one of the many games that I finally sold back to a resale store in Akihabara when I decided to return to Canada for good, I still had some good memories of the game with that epic soundtrack.
Don't those two above make a nice couple? I can envision them easily spending the night hours at a swanky nightclub sharing martinis.
I saw "Yoru no Meguriai" (An Evening Affair) performed on last week's "Kayo Concert"（歌謡コンサート）between Aki Yashiro（八代亜紀）and Keisuke Yamauchi（山内恵介）. If I'm not mistaken, I think the performance was part of a "lightning round" medley of songs that the guests did...which actually did work for me in that the songs intrigued me enough for me to take a search on YouTube. And glad I did, too, for "Yoru no Meguriai", since it was The Big Man who originally handled the other half of the duet with Yashiro.
Up to this point, the veteran Yashiro has performed 10 duets in her enka career, the first three being with Yujiro Ishihara（石原裕次郎）. "Yoru no Meguriai" was the middle Yashiro-Ishihara collaboration released in November 1979. Written by Mitsuo Ikeda（池田充男）and composed by Shinichi Nozaki（野崎真一）, the ballad spoke of that nighttime tryst in the bar areas of Tokyo. Being a geek, and never being particularly endowed with money, I've never experienced the night life that I've seen portrayed on old episodes of "Enka no Hanamichi"（演歌の花道）or the karaoke videos for the enka tunes, and I have a feeling that scenes of well-to-do couples drinking and dancing the light fantastic in areas like Ginza or Akasaka have become rather rare in the last few decades. So I think listening and envisioning songs like "Yoru no Meguriai" rather evoke a time long past, even before the Bubble Era.
Heck, even Nozaki's melody seems to paint all of the twirling on the dance floor that Yashiro and Ishihara could have done way back when. I definitely would love to hear this played on the in-house speakers if I were back in an established izakaya or bar. The accompanying sound of a bartender shaking a martini to fruition would be perfect.
"Yoru no Meguriai" made it all the way up to No. 51 on the Oricon charts, and I'm sure it's still a favourite on shows like "Kayo Concert". Not sure how long it will stay up, but here is the performance of the song with Yashiro and Yamauchi. I have no particular problems with Yamauchi being the partner but I think Ishihara will still be the definitive half for this duet.
Speaking of which, for many years, I've often come across Mood Kayo tunes with "meguriai" included in the title so I'm glad for starting this blog since it finally forced me to find out what it meant.
Let me start off with the official Wikipedia intro for the fellow:
"Tetsuya Komuro (小室哲哉 Komuro Tetsuya?), born November 27, 1958 in Fuchu, Tokyo, Japan, also known as TK, is a Japanese musician, singer-songwriter, composer and record producer. He is recognized as the most successful producer in Japanese music history and introduced dance music to the Japanese mainstream. He was also a former owner of the disco Velfarre located in Roppongi, Tokyo. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in pop throughout the 1990s."
Pretty good result for a guy who, as a kid, sold off his violin, guitar and electone without his family's permission to get a Roland SH1000 synthesizer for over 160,000 yen (according to the J-Wiki article). He knew where he wanted to go in music. Not sure I wanted to be in his house when his family did find out, though.
I did not know about his ownership of Velfarre, but with the help of a well-connected student, she was able to get a small bunch of us teachers and students into the happening nightclub years ago on a Saturday night. It wasn't quite as glitzy as I had imagined it would be, and considering how young some of those folks writhing on the dance floor appeared, I felt more like the parental chaperon ("Hey, dude, where are you putting those hands on my student?!"). As you can imagine, I didn't get anywhere near the floor.
Anyways, I figured with the "Creator" category, Tetsuya Komuro was due for his article. As with the other creators that I've written about, I can't give much in the way of a deep analysis of his musicality, but to paraphrase an old friend who heard the first several bars of Akina Nakamori's（中森明菜）"Aibu"（愛撫）on her 1993 "Unbalance+Balance" album, "Ahh, that's Tetsuya Komuro...that's HIS sound, it's just gotta be him". And of course, he was right. And that was a year before I left for Japan on my long journey and splashed right into the Komuro Boom years where he brought in a mainstream dance sound for J-Pop.
The first time I heard of TM Network was through a performance the band did on one of the music shows on a video tape that one of my very first students had brought back for me from Japan. At the time, I didn't know who the three guys with the super hair manning the instruments were at the time, but I noticed that the keyboardist had hair as tall as that pile of whipped cream that's being put on pancakes that are all the rage in Japan now. I know that the performance wasn't of "Get Wild", one of TM Network's greatest hits but I would later find out that the keyboardist was indeed Komuro.
TM Network had been around since the early 80s so Komuro was already creating tunes for other singers (for the purposes of this article, I'm really going with his work as a composer more than as a lyricist), and one of his earliest creations was for the bashful teen above. The 1985 song was "Kimi ni Aete"（きみに会えて...Being Able To Meet You）with Norie Kanzawa（神沢礼江）as the lyricist.
Of course, that bashful teen was soon identified to the masses as big-eyed and boom-voiced Misato Watanabe（渡辺美里）who had her breakthrough hit of "My Revolution" thanks to TK and Masumi Kawamura（川村真澄）a year later.
"My Revolution" is one of my favourite Komuro creations, and this is where I made one observation of his style. As much as those five years in the 90s were all about the Komuro dance-pop sound, my impression was that when he was not doing his techno-pop-rock thing with TM Network, he was making these spunky inspirational and uptempo songs for female singers such as Watanabe. "Sweet Planet" for Yukiko Okada（岡田有希子）from her 1985 album"Juu-gatsu no Ningyo"（十月の人魚...October Doll）was another example. Listening to it, I got that same feeling that I did for "My Revolution"; it sounded like TK was distilling Judy Garland or Reese Witherspoon in ever-optimistic Student Council President mode into every song back then. Yoshiko Miura（三浦徳子）took care of the lyrics here.
Example No. 3: Yoko Oginome's（荻野目洋子）"Non-Stop Dancer" from her top-selling 1986 "Non-Stopper" album. I heard this in the background of one of her videos from way back and just found it so chirpy and cheerful. Couldn't believe this was a Komuro tune at the time. Masumi Kawamura, TK's collaborator on "My Revolution", also worked on the lyrics here.
Yep, I just had to include "Aibu" by Akina Nakamori, the song that my friend immediately pegged as a TK invention just on sound. The above video doesn't have the greatest version but even then I could finally understand what my friend was on about. You might say that it's the prelude to the Komuro Boom.
And landing right at the beginning of that boom, we were all off to the races with TRF's "Boy Meets Girl"from 1994. The song just took me on its wing and soared off. I'm not the techno/dance music expert here but I think Komuro really enjoyed his House. TM Network (or as it was then called TMN) had disbanded that year but it looks like the songwriter had plenty on his plate to keep him busy and happy for a few years. And I think that TMN sound slid over with some more glitz added to be adopted by some of his family.
The first Komuro Family-connected CD I bought shortly after arriving in Japan was "Chase The Chance" by Namie Amuro（安室奈美恵）. With its zippy melody and epic refrain, I thought it was the theme song for a detective or spy series. Instead, the show was about a mystery hero chef. Go figure. Still, it was the first song by Amuro that really caught my attention.
I remember one New Year's Eve that I stayed in Japan and was watching the telly after gobbling down my annual bowl of toshikoshi soba. There was one special rivaling NHK's Kohaku Utagassen which featured a good majority, if not the totality, of the Komuro Family. It was basically a Who's Who on the stage: TRF, Tomomi Kahala（華原朋美）, Namie Amuro, Yuki Uchida（内田有紀）, dos, globe, etc. And I just thought that Komuro was really on top of the Japanese entertainment world at that time. During much of the 1990s, there would be at least a few members of the family that would be showing up on a weekly music show or promoting a new release via commercial.
Of course, all good things must come to an end, and by the time the century drew to an end, it looked like a new era of R&B and a new breed of aidoru represented by Johnny's & Associates and Hello Project was coming to the fore. But between 1994 and 1999,Komuro had a fine run of it.
My impression about the 80s aidorus was that it was a conveyor belt of young girls and cute ditties being churned out 24/7 with all sorts of names thrown out all the time in the various Myojo and Heibon magazines never to be seen or heard again. Of course, there was the rich cream that went to the top like Seiko Matsuda（松田聖子）and Akina Nakamori（中森明菜）, and then perhaps in the layer below, I saw lasses like Yu Hayami（早見優）, Miho Nakayama（中山美穂）and Kyoko Koizumi（小泉今日子）. Below that was the milk where all the names got mixed up.
Mind you, some names did pop up for air in my memory from time to time. Noriko Ogawa（小川範子）was one of them. I couldn't tell what she looked like nor could I inform you of any of the songs she sang up until this one, but it was a name that I used to see in the aforementioned music magazines and on aidoru compilation albums from time to time.
So, coming across her name again on YouTube, I gave this one a whirl. And it turned out to be her debut song, "Namida no Tabanete" (Hold Your Tears) from November 1987. The lyrics by Masumi Kawamura（川村真澄）are the usual ones about that kataomoi (one-sided love) and the inevitable heartbreak that follows. However, I did enjoy the melody by Hideya Nakazaki（中崎英也）which mixed in a bit of urban contemporary with the bouncy aidoru-ness of it all, although I wouldn't go so far to say it was City Pop. As I mentioned in one other aidoru article, I think the late 80s were a time when songwriters were somewhat more ambitious in their song crafting for even the teenybopper set. I even picked up a hint of Taeko Ohnuki（大貫妙子）in the song.
Watching the performance of Ogawa in the video (from 1994 according to the description) which begins at about 1:45, I got hit by a bolt of nostalgia watching the old aidoru arm-stretching and profile-turning. Plus, Ogawa's vocals sounded a bit richer and more polished.
Noriko Ogawa was born Shigemi Tanimoto（谷本重美）in 1973 in Tachikawa City, Tokyo. Her career in show business started almost a full decade earlier than her aidoru career when she became a child actor under her real name. However from 1987, she got that name change for both the acting and singing parts of her career. Although she released many singles and albums going well into the 2000s, she scored a long-running role as the daughter of the star detective in "Hagure Keiji Junjoha"（はぐれ刑事純情派...The Rogue Detective[?]）which lasted from 1988 to 2009.
Last night, I watched the pilot episode for the 2013 anime "Uchoten Kazoku"（有頂天家族）once again after a couple of years. It was one of those shows that got differing reactions depending on where it was broadcast; in North America and other places, it apparently got a lot of praise for at least the visuals, while in Japan, it merely got a lot of....meh. That's too bad since I certainly enjoyed it for those gorgeous scenes of Kyoto (indoors and outdoors), the acting by the seiyuu especially by the triangle of main protagonist Yasaburo Shimogamo, the beautiful if dangerous Benten and Professor Akadama the crabby tengu, and some of the more exciting sequences which almost reached Miyazaki-esque heights.
Between the opening and ending themes for "Uchoten Kazoku", I preferred the latter theme of "Que Sera Sera"（ケセラセラ）by fhana, but on seeing the anime again, I felt like writing about the opening theme by pop punk duo milktub, "Uchoten Jinsei" (Eccentric Life). While the lovely "Que Sera Sera" makes the perfect musical backdrop to the ending credits focusing on Benten's evolution from callow high school girl to intimidating dragon lady, "Uchoten Jinsei" is the raucous introduction to the weird/wonderful world of the Shimogamo family of shape-shifting raccoon dogs. With lyrics by milktub and music by Kyoichi Miyazaki（宮崎京一）, the duo of bamboo and Ichiban Boshi Hikaru（一番星☆光）exhorts listeners to put some spice in their lives and not get dragged about by anyone else. The Shimogamos (and their allies/enemies) are definitely a good example of that.
milktub had its beginnings in the late 80s when 16-year-old bamboo was inspired by the then-band boom in Japan which resulted in him coming up with the name milktub in 1991. However, it wouldn't be until 1999 that the band would push forward in earnest with a set of indies singles before their 1st major album was released in December 2008, "Smile Energy". "Uchoten Jinsei" isn't one of their 4 major singles, though.
I've been to Kyoto twice with my first time being during that summer 1981 trip to Japan. "Uchoten Kazoku" premiered in the summer of 2013 and the show reflecting that season reminded me of my time there. The old capital being in a bonchi basin made things truly sunny and supremely hot there, and trying to view the Gion Festival from a three-deep sidewalk probably had me sweat off a kilogram or so. The skies I remember from that day were portrayed exactly as they were right from Episode 1 of the anime so there was a reason for me to fall for its charms. And scenes like the one above sealed the deal for me.
