(Around Tokyo)"Rest in Hope"
This morning it snowed for hours around Tokyo.
At noon, the NHK TV channel presented a band in an entertainment program after the news time.
The band was called "Jackie Yoshikawa and the Blue Comets."
It was late 1960's that the band had go on to stardom in the Japanese entertainment business. The band had two main singers: Inoue with a saxophone and Mihara with a guitar. After having sold 1.5 million copies of a song titled "Blue Chateau," they gradually faded away along with a change in time to the post-Vietnam War era.
When Inoue committed a suicide in 2000, I remembered the band long forgotten, since Inoue was the most talented musician in Japan 30 years before.
In 1967, the band played with Hibari Misora (1937 - 1989), the most successful singer in Japan after WWII. The song called "Makka-na Taiyo (The Red, Red Sun)" sold 1.4 million, the fourth most sold song title of Hibari. As she had been already a legend for young people in late 1960's, her collaboration with the Beetles’-style band was a kind of sensation then.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibari_Misora
Hibari was a genius girl in singing. If she had not died of a disease 20 years ago, she might have been named as a national treasure, almost seriously. She was always perfectly on pitch, never losing a key. But, she had a strong tie with a notorious Japanese gang group.
(Once Mr. Shintaro Ishihara, the incumbent Governor of Tokyo and also a very successful author, described Hibari as a flatly common singer [without a sense of high society at all, though outwardly, in my interpretation]; yet the Governor had a younger brother who died in 1987 as one of the most beloved actor in Japan and who somehow looked not so different from Hibarai's divorced husband who is an actor, too.)
So, this noon, 40 years after their golden days, the Blue Comets made a TV appearance on a public TV channel in Japan: with Mihara singing an old song and playing the guitar.
Of course, what I wanted to see was Misora Hibari and "Jackie Yoshikawa and the Blue Comets," singing "Makka-na Taiyo (The Red, Red Sun)."
It might be because the song might have something in common with "Yuhi-ga Naite-iru (Sunset Crying)" played by the Spiders in Japan also 40 years ago, since I presented the melody in EEE Reporter to commemorate the great earthquake in China last year.
Anyway, they are part of the modern Japanese Civilization, good or bad.
It is so if you like them or not.
Indeed, only the God can judge the people and their entertainers.
Truly, I am the one who is waiting for the judgment, with those who listen to me.
(30 ans plus tard, vous serez une grande star, ma fille. Ne pas mourir d'une maladie, ne pas commettre un suicide, depuis la guerre sera terminée et une récession aura disparu.
[I meant "a war will be over and a recession will end," before submission to Google Translation, my girl...]
The Red, Red Sun (like love):
http://www.fukuchan.ac/music/j-folk0/makkanataiyou.html
Sunset Crying (like love):
http://www.fukuchan.ac/music/gs/yuhiganaiteiru.html )
Act 2:26 Therefore did my heart rejoice, and my tongue was glad; moreover also my flesh shall rest in hope:
Act 2:27 Because thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.
Act 2:28 Thou hast made known to me the ways of life; thou shalt make me full of joy with thy countenance.