Happy belated New Year! Many thanks for the nice comments we’ve gotten about Let’s Go J-Sound! in recent months. We’ve been neglecting the blog, but we hope to keep it updated a lot more frequently in 2007 and expand it’s focus a little to include news and other tid bits about Japanese music made between 1955-1985. We’d like to start updating Let’s Go J-Sound at least once a week or at the very least every other week, so please visit us more often!
We’ve gotten lots of requests from people asking us to repost some of the old songs we talked about here last year, so we decided to kick-start the new year by compiling all the tracks into a mini compilation for your listening pleasure. We plan on making it available for a month and after that we will remove the file and the songs will not be posted ever again so grab them while you can.
Apologies for the long absence. We’ve been really busy this summer, but hope to start posting regularly again next month.
A lot of people are probably familiar with the cute Japanese singing duo known as The Peanuts. The Peanuts were made up of twin sisters Emi & Yûmi Ito and they’re mostly remembered for playing the Shobijin (Fairy Twins) in the original 1961 Mothra movie. They originally called themselves the Ito Sisters, but changed their name to The Peanuts in 1958 when they began an extensive recording career in Tokyo, which lasted from the late 1950s to the late 1960s. The Peanuts’ popularity began to fizzle in the 1970s and they stopped recording and performing together in 1975.
Japanese music fans should enjoy listening to a couple of The Peanuts’ more obscure songs which really show off their great harmonies. The first song is called Small White Boat and its haunting melody showcases some of the best Peanuts’ vocals we’ve heard . The second song is simply called Bossa Nova and it’s a great tune that Bossa fans should enjoy.
If you’d like to find out more about the Peanuts we recommend visiting Lawrence Tuczynski’s extensive Godzilla Monster Music site which is a lot of fun to explore and the best English language site for information about The Peanuts we’ve come across.
You can also enjoy a live performance of their popular tune Koi no Vacance (aka A Vacancy of Love) in this great clip featuring The Peanuts in the early as well as later part of their singing career.
Composer Hattori Katsuhisa has been a respected figure in the Japanese music industry for many years. He is most well known in the US for composing anime soundtracks for popular television shows and movies such as Crest of the Stars (1999) and Fist of the North Star (1986), but he’s also had a long career composing music for Japanese films.
In 1969 he composed a terrific soundtrack for Yoichi Maeda’s little known film Nanatsu no kao no onna (aka The Woman with Seven Faces) which starred Shima Iwashita, Ken Ogata and Ichiro Arishima. We’ve never seen the movie ourselves and haven’t been able to find out very much about it, but we do know it has a great soundtrack!
Hattori Katsuhisa’s score for Nanatsu no kao no onna ranges from Bossa Nova, to Easy, to Beat and contains some commanding horn arrangements, nice vocalisms, sweeping strings, interesting violin work, subtle flute and driving beats. We’ve uploaded two complimentary tracks from the Nanatsu no kao no onna score that soundtrack enthusiasts should enjoy.
Apologies for the long absence. We’ve been really busy this summer, but hope to start posting regularly again next month. 
Composer