Okay, okay, one more, and then I'll take a break from this project for a while. (The wife and kids have returned after their week away, so it's back to the usual chaos over here.)
This is another Japanese oldie. I found it when systematically working my way through the yearly billboard hits. This one charted in the late 1970s.
This song is also a good example of the genre known in Japan as enka.
I wrote about enka once way before way back in 2005. To quote myself from that post:
And then there in any given year there is always Enka. Enka has been called “Japanese Soul” or “Japanese blues”, the idea being that it is distinctively ethnic Japanese music like Soul or Blues was once distinctively African American music. The most common description, and one I tend to agree with, is that Enka is “Japanese Country.” In the sense that it is popular in rural areas, in that old people love it and young people hate it, and in that it is always popular and always on the charts but the sound never seems to evolve from year to year, Enka is perhaps most similar to Country music.Of course all of these descriptions are based on Enka’s place in Japanese culture, and not the sound of the music itself. It is always difficult to describe a musical sound with words, but the best description I can give is to imagine traditional Japanese music fused with the big band sound of the 1920s. I’m told Enka actually originated in the 1920s, and that before it degenerated into sappy love songs, it was actually a form of protest against the imperialist government of the time. But that’s in the past. Just as country music in the US, Enka is only sad love songs today. Japanese young people hate it, but many foreign people, including myself, find ourselves strangely drawn to the distinctively Asian sound, which, if one can forgive the sometimes over the top big band sound, has a sort of mystic beauty to it.
There's also the Wikipedia post:
Enka (演歌) is a Japanese music genre considered to resemble traditional Japanese music stylistically. Modern enka, however, is a relatively recent musical form, which adopts a more traditional musical style in its vocalism than ryūkōka music, popular during the prewar years.[1]
Modern enka, as developed in the postwar era, is a form of sentimental ballad music. Some of the first modern enka singers were Hachiro Kasuga, Michiya Mihashi, and Hideo Murata.[2] The revival of enka in its modern form is said to date from 1969, when Keiko Fuji made her debut.
As I noted in 2005, young people in Japan hate enka. The most uncool thing you could ever do as a Japanese youth is to be caught listening to enka. (Part of this hatred stems from over-exposure. They're just sick of their grandparents playing enka all the time.)
I never hated enka that much, but I was never a huge fan either. Most of the enka songs didn't grab me.
But this one I thought was catchy.
If memory serves, the first time I heard this song, I didn't fall in love with it. I first listened to it when I was going through the collections of yearly billboard hits. At that time, it didn't strike me as anything worth noticing.
But, then I was out with some older Japanese co-workers, and one of them sang this song on Karaoke. And I thought, "Ah, I know that song. I have it on the yearly billboard collection albums. Actually, now that I'm listening to it, I can see how it is kind of catchy."
The lyrics of this song are very simple. The Japanese vocabulary, at least for the chorus, is all easy low-level words, and it's so slow that it's easy to understand everything. So this also appealed to the Japanese language learner in me.
The song is someone singing about a break-up, and the chorus goes, "Darling, why, why did you leave me?" (As I said in 2005, enka is mostly sappy love songs).
When I heard this song performed in Karaoke in Japan, it was mostly done tongue-in-cheek--i.e. the attitude was "won't it be funny to sing along to this ridiculously maudlin song about a tearful break up".
And I've always thought the song was supposed to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek from the beginning--that is, I imagine the singer was in on the joke. But I don't really know. (There's a Wikipedia article about this song in Japanese, but my Japanese isn't good enough to read it. So I'm just imagining.)
Anyway, once I noticed how catchy this song was, I brought it into my regular rotation. I put in on my mixed tapes that I used to listen to while driving around. And I also used to try this song out a lot when doing karaoke.
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