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 only discovered the duo sucola a few months ago. They apparently started in 2021 in Nagoya during the height of the COVID pandemic, and according to their website, vocalist-songwriter KiBi and producer yopeco opted to create a sound and words that they describe as "traveling J-Pop" which would make listeners want to take a look out the window and go off on a journey. Considering all of the lockdowns, KiBi and yopeco probably attracted a lot of sympathetic attention.
The YouTube video for their single "Sentimental Journey" came out in February earlier this year. sucola has said that their sound transcends the usual genre labels...something that at least some of the commenters agree upon. Listening to this one, I get Neo-City Pop groove and indies pop (without a lot of jangly guitar). A song about a couple slowly finding each other and realizing the need for each other in a crowded and troubled world, there is a feeling of dreaminess, helped along by KiBi's soft, caressing vocals, that can resemble the sensation of traveling on a train for hours on end while staring out the window at the speeding landscape.
I've written on some of the discography of the late actress/singer Ryoko Sakaguchi（坂口良子）and found her to be thus far someone who had liked to sing some of the more refined material hovering around City Pop, Fashion Music, bossa nova and New Music.
Coincidentally enough, I'm posting this song by her just a week past what would have been her 71st birthday (she unfortunately passed away back in 2013). "Sayonara no Shitagaki" (Rough Draft of Goodbye) doesn't have absolutely strong vocals by Sakaguchi but I think that works in her favour considering the lyrical theme of the tune. The poor lass within the lyrics must have been wracking her brains and crying her eyes out over how to come up with a "Dear Jane" letter.
Those lyrics were provided by Takemi Shima（島武実）. Meanwhile, Ryudo Uzaki（宇崎竜童）came up with the melody which was arranged into a refined sunset bossa nova style by Mitsuo Hagita（萩田光雄）. I can't really see the letter being tearfully written and signed on a wooden desk in a lonely room. With this sort of music, I'm thinking well-constructed hotel desk with a bottle of vintage wine nearby. "Sayonara no Shitagaki" was Sakaguchi's 6th and penultimate single from February 1978.
Y'know, although I have heard (but never watched) a couple of J-Dramas titled "Attention Please" based on the seeming vagaries of the airline industry, I don't think I've ever heard an actual announcement at either a station or airport in Japan starting with "ATTENTION PLEASE". Maybe at Narita or Haneda, I have heard "May I have your attention please?" but nothing more terse than that.
Interestingly enough though, in my prep work to bring this song with this very title to a KKP posting, I've encountered a few songs titled "Attention Please", but let me focus on the one that I'd already pegged. This "Attention Please" hails from the No. 50-ranking May 1982 album"Image" by underrated singer and songwriter Mieko Nishijima（西島三重子）. Written by her frequent songwriting partner, lyricist Kenji Kadoya（門谷憲二）and composed by the singer herself, it seems to be another dramatic City Pop number based at an airport; I just wrote about another similarly-set song a few hours ago. This one though has a goodly amount of Latin percussion to add a bit more spice to the proceedings. Nice chord progressions in the chorus, to boot.
I have to give my compliments to photographer Kentaro Iemoto and his shot of Runway 16R at Narita Airport. That's quite the dazzling evening shot and it beckons a passenger to what may lie ahead of him or her.
The thumbnail from Wikimedia Commons is an ideal one to herald the arrival of Saki Kubota's（久保田早紀）"Saishuubin" (Last Flight) which is the final track on her April 1983 6th album"Nefertiti"（ネフェルティティ）. Written and composed by the singer with Kei Wakakusa（若草恵） handling the arrangement, it's quite the bouncy and whimsical City Pop number about a woman shedding her past life including her paramour to head up north, although in one later verse, she did wish briefly that the fellow would stop her egress and bring her back into his arms. Perhaps a very brief lapse in (in)sanity.
To be honest, after listening to "Saishuubin", I'd thought that the song was recorded several years earlier than it actually was. It feels more like a late 70s City Pop tune.
Commenter mopuchino2 reminded me of the Eriko Tamura（田村英里子）file when he left his thoughts on one of her singles "Process"（プロセス）a few days ago.
I hadn't posted an Eriko song in many years so I decided to take a look at the song "Soyokaze no Prologue"(Breezy Prologue) which mopuchino2 had recommended. It is a track on her 2nd album from February 1990, "Myself", and hearing it for the first time, it reminded me how fresh and optimistic she sounded through other songs that I had heard by her. Yoshiko Miura（三浦徳子）was behind the lyrics and Koji Makaino（馬飼野康二）, under his pen name of Mark Davis, composed the melody as a synthpop-driven aidoru tune of the times although some of that rumbling made me wonder about throwing in the Eurobeat tag.
Didn't want to write this at the beginning of the article since I would be bringing the atmosphere down a ton but as a longtime "Star Trek" fan, I was absolutely gutted on hearing of Sir Patrick Stewart's death earlier this afternoon. It was bad enough that we lost Walter Koenig a few days ago and now we lost him. Not only was he Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise but he was also Professor X in "X-Men", two huge characters in pop culture. Catching "Avengers: Doomsday" is gonna feel very different now.
I will try to pay tribute to him tomorrow. Nope, he doesn't have anything to do with Japanese pop music but I'd like to call my choice a "Captain's Prerogative".
Well, think of that while you're listening to "Obake Nante Nai sa" (There Ain't No Such Things as Ghosts) as sung by chanteuse Mieko Hirota（弘田三枝子）in a way that you've usually not heard her sing. You may have her jazz stuff when she was a teen and then some sultrier tunes later in her career, but over here, she sounds just like a boy stubbornly refusing to believe that he'd be scared of the supernatural...and perhaps failing a tad. Written by Minori Maki（まきみのり）and composed by Yo Mine（峯陽）, there is something of the cute Disney-esque arrangement here, not surprising considering that it was broadcast on an NHK "Minna no Uta"（みんなのうた）episode from 1966 for about a month in the summer.
"Obake Nante Nai sa" has been covered over the decades by a number of other singers but the first one I discovered on YouTube was Kaela Kimura's（木村カエラ）take on the song through her September 2015 22nd single"Egg". Kimura's version of the song has more of a slightly anarchic and technopoppy marching band vibe as if she were leading a Halloween parade.
Well, we're just a couple of sleeps away from Halloween 2026. I figure that it'll be chaos at Shibuya Crossing again and the kids will be trick-or-treatin' in the local neighbourhoods while the grownups will be planning their own cosplay debauchery. Of course, it also means that it's another Halloween-themed Reminiscings of Youth today.
It was in March 1988 when the first "Beetlejuice" hit movie screens, and in retrospect, I have to say that it'll go down as one of the most star-studded horror comedies that has ever existed although some of the cast weren't all that well known back then. But now, when I mention Michael Keaton, Geena Davis, Alec Baldwin, Catherine O'Hara and Winona Ryder among others, folks may gasp. There were many highlights in the movie but one of the funniest was the cast rendition of "Day-O". I was lucky enough to have caught the flick in the theatre in its first run.
For Keaton, I think "Beetlejuice" was probably his final movie as him being known primarily as a comedic actor. Once "Batman" and one other movie with him came out the following few years, he was heading into dramatic territory along the same lines as Robin Williams and Tom Hanks. Composer Danny Elfman was even less known to me at the time. The New Wave band Oingo Boingo was known to me only by name since I was never a fan of theirs but Elfman was the lead vocalist and songwriter.
Elfman then became a soundtrack scorer for movies from the middle of the 1980s, and the score for "Beetlejuice" is the one that first impressed upon me his mix of old-style oom-pah-pah Eastern European circus marching band and early 20th-century heroic classical overtures. The "Beetlejuice" theme is perfect for October 31st for its silliness and sinister overtones...and it even includes a prelude of the "Day-O" hijinks to come.
What else was coming out in Japan in that month of March 1988?
As a PS, allow me to introduce something related to another wonderful Halloween theme, "Ghostbusters", which has already gotten onto the ROY file. In the last several days, a YouTuber by the name of Bill McClintock has managed to create a great musical mashup with the famed Ray Parker Jr. song as the base. You can also see Elfman hamming it up as well.
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