Hina Kino, Rika Nagae & Konomi Kohara -- Three Piece（スリピス）/Inkya Impulse（インキャインパルス）

As my anime buddy was telling me last Sunday, this season especially seems to be chock-filled with some crazy comedy. Of the ones whose themes I've covered on the blog, there are "Back Street Girls" and "Grand Blue" with their catchy tunes. Then, I discovered this one that my friend has not shown to me at his place; I only found out through YouTube. But before I introduce this one, let me preface it by saying that over the years from time to time, there seems to have been this sub-genre of anime which involves high school girls getting involved in all sorts of nutty antics.

For example, there was "Love Lab"（恋愛ラボ）in 2013 centering on a group of girls who start up a club on how to handle the art of l'amour.

A bit earlier in 2011, there was "Nichijou"（日常）which kinda reached near-Kafkaesque levels of humour.

Now, in Summer 2018, I managed to come across "Asobi Asobase"（あそびあそばせ...Let Fun Have Fun）, a title that has popped up frequently on YouTube over the past several weeks. I finally gave in to my curiosity and took a gander at a few of the videos. Frankly, I had to wipe up the saliva spray off the screen since I was laughing out loud at some of the insanity. As I said in the article for the "Love Lab" ending theme, my anime buddy seems to enjoy comedy but only to a certain level; if it gets too crazy, he loses interest. The fact that I have openly threatened to dislodge several internal organs on watching scenes from "Asobi Asobase" probably means that he will never show this. His loss.

"Asobi Asobase" seems to have elements from both "Nichijou" and "Love Lab" with some fortified anarchy to boot. I did end up getting up a copy of "Love Lab" through Amazon last year, so I wouldn't mind getting "Asobi Asobase" as well in the next several months.

To be honest, I'm glad that I immediately stumbled onto the scenes rather than the opening credits since the latter has cleverly cloaked the show as a super-cute slice-of-life anime based on friendship and learning about life. The three main seiyuu playing the Japanese equivalent of The Three Stooges, Hina Kino（木野日菜）, Rika Nagae（長江里加）and Konomi Kohara（小原好美）sing the sugary-sweet opening theme "Three Piece". As one commenter pointed out, this could be one of the most misleading opening credits sequences in anime history.

Rei Tanaka（タナカ零）was responsible for words and music for "Three Piece". Man, listening to the full version makes things even catchier and calming for me. It's almost like an opening theme with trap ambitions. Yes, let's relax for 30 minutes of meaningful conversations and splendid scenery, and enj...WHAT THE HELL?!

Of course, by the time viewers reached the end of Episode 1, the joke was out so the ending credits no longer had to put up pretenses. Instead, everything ends with the same seiyuu headbanging to some death metal and some cool graphics. "Inkya Impulse" is the title with Genki Mizuno（ミズノゲンキ）and Shuhei Mutsuki（睦月周平）behind its spawning. Ikepy & KSKN also feature in the song as well although I have no idea who they are.

Now, this sounds more like what "Asobi Asobase" really is in tone. Rock on! (I'm actually providing the devil horns with my hand as I type this...not easy to do) Mosh pit not included.

I will finish off with the very first scene that I saw that had me tearing up in laughter as much as Olivia did in disgust...for far worse reasons. All I can say is that all three seiyuu must need those throat lozenges regularly considering all the screaming that they have to do from episode to episode.

P.S. Konomi Kohara who plays the relatively least crazy Kazumi is a seiyuu that I remember from last year going into this year as she portrayed the adorable Kukuri in the updated version of "Mahoujin Guru Guru"（魔法陣グルグル...Magical Circle Guru Guru）.

Motoyoshi Iwasaki & WINDY -- Kimi ga Nokoshita Natsu（君が残した夏）/Kaze no Station（風のStation）

Back to the 9/10ths of the iceberg as I have found another pop group that I hadn't known about until sometime in the last few months.

According to J-Wiki, Motoyoshi Iwasaki & WINDY（岩崎元是&WINDY）was a band that had a brief time in the sun in 1986~1987. Led by singer-songwriter and guitarist Iwasaki, WINDY consisted of keyboardist Naohiro Inaba（稲葉直弘）, drummer Kazunori Seki（関和則）and bassist Yoshihito Muranaka（村中義仁）. Altogether, two original albums and four singles came from the group, with a 2012 box set being released titled "The all songs of WINDY".

(26:57)

"Kimi ga Nokoshita Natsu" (The Summer You Left Behind) is the B-side for Iwasaki & WINDY's 3rd single "Maru de Tenshi no You ni"（まるで天使のように...Just Like An Angel） which came out in April 1987. Although I saw an entry for the band in the book "Japanese City Pop", I think I would place this sunny song as simply a nice slice of summery pop, not really in the City Pop or AOR genres. Composed by Iwasaki and written by Toyohisa Araki（荒木とよひさ）, this was how I was introduced to the band's works and if I'm not mistaken, I think I heard it on Van Paugam's radio (glad that it and New J-Channel's radio are both back up and running). I guess I can say that it's a skippier type of Omega Tribe（オメガトライブ）...not so much by the beach but perhaps on a sun-dappled town road.

I actually found this one by Iwasaki & WINDY earlier tonight and liked it so much that I decided to feature it here as well. "Kaze no Station" (Windy Station) is a track on the band's first album "Heart Wash" from August 1986, and this track is quite a bit more dramatic with some snap to Seki's drumming and the arrangements taking things deeper into the city with added sax appeal. I think Iwasaki sounds rather similar to Kiyotaka Sugiyama（杉山清貴）and Yasuhiro Abe（安部恭弘）but surrounded by a Junichi Inagaki（稲垣潤一）love song. "Music Avenue" put it best when kaz-shin remarked that this would have made for a good number to put into a Japanese TV drama during the 1980s.

Yuzu -- Hey Wa（Hey和）

Almost a couple of weeks ago, there was a special concert program in honour of Hiroshima broadcast through NHK. It was all J-Pop so I think some of the alphabet aidoru groups were represented.

There was also a female vocal group called Little Glee Monster who I first heard about when they were selected for last year's Kohaku Utagassen for the first time. And they did a rousing number with the rest of the other singing guests called "Hey Wa" which was originally performed by the pop duo Yuzu（ゆず）.

Written and composed by one-half of Yuzu, Yuujin Kitagawa（北川悠仁）, it was released as their 33rd single in January 2011. I've never thought that Japan was particularly all that religious, and perhaps it may be the only really secular nation among the G-7 nations but "Hey Wa" is quite spiritual in words and music. The title can be a pun on the term heiwa/平和 which means "peace" but perhaps it can also be translated as "Hey Japan" or "Hey Harmony".

Right from the start, Kitagawa sings about having God in everyone's hearts and so no one is truly alone on Earth. Not being religious myself, I still found myself quite entranced by the Yuzu original and the cover by Little Glee Monster. It reached No. 3 on the Oricon weeklies and Yuzu even performed it at the 2011 Kohaku Utagassen. "Hey Wa" was also used as the campaign song for the Japan Red Cross.

Well, it looks like that Little Glee Monster performance at that Hiroshima concert is up on YouTube. I will have to write up about one of their singles very soon.

Yumi Seino -- Gin no Koibito（銀の恋人）

One of those lovely rarest of the rare discoveries, it's not all that easy to track down a Yumi Seino（清野由美）album and perhaps it's even harder to find a song that only made it onto a 7" single by her as a B-side.

"Gin no Koibito" (Silver Lover) was on the flip side of Seino's 1982 single "Wet Morning"（ウェット・モーニング）, and it's quite irresistible to me. I couldn't find out who wrote and composed the song but it's got a great horn section and a City Pop/J-AOR arrangement that reminds me of those high-flying 1980s and Burt Bacharach. I'm not sure if "Gin no Koibito" had ever been used as a jingle for a commercial or as a theme song for a radio program, but it would have made for some fine musical backup for any sort of scene. Keep on browsing through YouTube for those hidden gems.

January 19 2022: Thanks to Ace below, those songwriters are lyricist Ayumi Date（伊達歩）and composer Keitaro Miho（三保敬太郎）.

Shinichi Mori -- Toshiue no Hito（年上の女）

It's the middle of the week and I'm feeling rather shibui, so perhaps it's time for a spot of enka. Not being much of a drinker, I never really got to explore too much of the side street nomiya or other watering holes during my life in Japan. However, perhaps it is because of this fact that I've managed to retain some feeling of romanticism about the image of a regular seen-it-all and done-it-all patron entering his favourite bar somewhere deep in the city or town.

Veteran Shinichi Mori（森進一）doesn't make too many appearances on the music shows that appear on TV Japan anymore, so it's always nice when he does come on and sing some of those oldies. He did make an appearance on last weekend's "Omoide no Melody"（思い出のメロディー）, though.

I came across this very early record from his discography titled "Toshiue no Hito" (An Older Woman) which was released as his 11th single in November 1968. It's one of those classic tenderhearted enka ballads about a man and the titular older woman who have enjoyed a torrid affair but now have to part permanently. There isn't anyone out there who can render such heartbreaking sadness in an enka song (with the exception of Hibari Misora) than Mori when it comes to sweet sorrow. Crying in one's sake is definitely a thing here.

Written by Takami Nakayama*（中山貴美）and Takeshi Mizusawa（水沢たけし）and composed by Masao Saiki（彩木雅夫）, this was another hit for the young Mori as it made it up to No. 4 on Oricon and became the 14th-ranked single for 1969. The record sold a total of 800,000 copies, but it wouldn't be until 2014 when the singer finally sang it on NHK's Kohaku Utagassen.

Michiru Hoshino -- Discotheque ni Tsuretette（ディスコティークに連れてって）

Apparently, disco never died...it just went into the Witness Protection Programme. Not that I mind. I've always remembered and enjoyed the genre as being part of my childhood growing up. Heck, even the early morning kids' show that I watched on the Buffalo ABC affiliate "Rocketship 7" had a disco-dancing robot.

I gather that Japan was always a haven for disco. It's been unironically loved there and the arrangements have made their way into various J-Pop songs over the decades. There is Morning Musume's（モーニング娘。）megahit "Love Machine"（LOVEマシーン）from 1999 and another one is microstar's "Tiny Spark" which was the final spark for me to get their album "She got the blues" from 2016.

And then I found this one by ex-AKB48 member (graduated in 2007) and current singer-songwriter Michiru Hoshino（星野みちる）. This is her 13th single from May 2016, "Discotheque ni Tsuretette" (Take Me To The Discotheque), and both title and arrangements fairly scream mirror ball and "Saturday Night Fever".

According to the JASRAC website, Hoshino came up with the melody while Hajimu Hase（はせはじむ）provided the lyrics. Although the singer was born several years after disco had allegedly gone into music history, it certainly looks like she had the disco style down pat when she thought up the music, although perhaps "Discotheque ni Tsuretette" has some aidoru-like lightness mixed in.

"Discotheque ni Tsuretette" was also the opening track on Hoshino's September 2015 album "You Love Me". It didn't make too much of a dent in the charts, going up as far as No. 123. Still, I haven't had a problem with the music that she has given us since there are some nice hooks in there, and I am still grateful to Marcos V. for first introducing Hoshino back in 2015 with her “Seikan Renrakusen ~Night Voyage~” (星間連絡船 ～Night Voyage～) which has a different but appealing vibe.

Since we're on the topic of disco, let's go back 40 years or so, shall we?

trf -- GOING 2 DANCE/OPEN YOUR MIND

As I said back in the very first article for the song-and-dance group trf, "Boy Meets Girl", it was a couple of siblings who had introduced me to the group and the song. This was when Tetsuya Komuro's（小室哲哉）creation had already been well into ascent into the pop music troposphere. So when I did hit Japan in late 1994, I had to play some catch-up to find out more about what made trf tick.

Strangely enough, after putting up a lot of their discography onto the blog over the past 6 years, I had yet to write about their debut single. So here it is, "GOING 2 DANCE/OPEN YOUR MIND" from February 1993.

Listening to "GOING 2 DANCE", I felt that at the beginning, trf and Komuro really wanted to HIT the dance floor running, jumping and all of that other athletic stuff. Komuro and vocalist YU-KI wrote the lyrics while the former took care of the melody. As the lyrics state, trf did go to town with "GOING 2 DANCE" that was definitely the most dance clubbiest of the singles that I've heard by them. Was gonna make me sweat (although at my size this summer, picking up a paper clip from the grass can do that).

"OPEN MY MIND" did open my mind since that music video was probably the sexiest and strangest take that I had ever seen of trf. I wasn't quite sure whether YU-KI was going for a hybridized look of the Borg Queen and Betty Boop, though. But like its companion song, it definitely had more of the dance music and less of the pop that I would hear when the group really hit their stride. Komuro took care of both words and music here. Both songs would make it onto trf's debut album "trf 〜THIS IS THE TRUTH〜" which was released in the same month as the single. It would peak at No. 14.