Hot Pink Sake for Valentines!

Feeling a romantic inclination for next month's Valentine's Day? Ditch the hand-made chockies or Cadbury Roses, and real flowers? ...pfft.

Wine and dine your loved one with a pink-coloured nigorizake.

While regular sake is clear or vaguely amber in hue, nigorizake (濁り酒, or ‘cloudy sake’) is usually a thick milk-white in color and brings with it a swath of sediment - chiefly because it’s only roughly filtered, then decanted with some of the original fermentation mash (moromi). It’s sweeter and less refined but far more playful, and like a James Bond martini it needs to be shaken, not stirred.


Now, even better, it's pink - thanks to those fine beverage makers at Nakano Shuzo Sake Brewery in Oita Prefecture, who also obviously have a playful sense of humour and are charging just ¥880 per bottle (about $9.00) - cheaper than a bunch of humdrum roses.

Happy New Year!

So, new year's the big thing here in Japan.

We stayed home and watched Kōhaku Uta Gassen (紅白歌合戦) on NHK: Sayuri Ishikawa, SMAP, Sachiko Kobayashi, huge kitsch dresses and a wee bit of sake with flakes of gold foil floating in it.

Nice.



I pinched this outline of the show from Wikipedia and just tweaked it a bit (hey, it's new year's day; I wanna go relax with the family!):

The program divides the most popular music artists of the year into competing teams of red and white. The "red" team (akagumi) is composed of all female artists, while the "white" team (shirogumi) is all male. Last night the men's team, led by SMAP's Masahiro Nakai, somehow trounced the women's team fronted by actress Yukie Nakama.

The honor of performing on Kōhaku is strictly by invitation, so only the most successful J-Pop artists and enka singers can perform.

In addition to the actual music performances, the costumes, hair-styles, makeup, dancing, and lighting are also important. Even today, a performance on Kōhaku is said to be a big highlight in a singer's career because of the show's large reach.


Anyway, the show finishes around 11:40 pm... then we had to watch these people banging a massive bell 108 times at a Buddhist temple (something called during Joya no Kane) to see out the old year - apparently according to Buddhist beliefs 108 is the number of passions and desires entrapping us in the cycle of suffering and reincarnation. So, the 108 bell chimes symbolize the purification from the 108 delusions and sufferings accumulated in the past year.

Happy new year, mates.

The Best Japanese Songs of All Time?

Japan's Metropolis magazine asked 16 local writers and musicians to describe a formative encounter with a Japanese song. The resulting mix — from folk to noise to metal and enka — represents a half-century of sounds from one of the most diverse music scenes on the planet. This is my bit of the feature; the rest of the story can be found online from today HERE:

When local kids here in Japan deride enka, I try to nudge them in the direction of singer Sayuri Ishikawa’s classic 1977 outing, 'Tsugaru Kaikyo Fuyugeshiki'.

Literally translated as “Winter View of Tsugaru Straits,” this song represents the ’70s and Japan at their best. Mournful and kitsch, grandiose yet poignant, the music here sublimely infuses a funky orchestral backdrop with graceful power vocals that drift toward Gloria Gaynor.

The song was conjured up by lyricist Yu Aku with composer Takashi Miki (a.k.a. Tadashi Watanabe), who passed away earlier this year and who was also responsible for the insanely catchy 'Anpanman no March' theme song.

This is the first and only enka number I’ve actually fallen in love with — there’s fuyu (winter, left), my favorite season (I have a silly tattoo of the kanji to prove it), and as a hack DJ I’ve dropped this song between techno and hip-hop tunes in clubs as far afield as Beijing and Melbourne... and it’s (somehow) worked.

It’s also the one song I coerce my Japanese mates to sing at karaoke — they’re never quite Ishikawa, of course, and they grimace a bit, but they always give it their best.

Read the rest of this story here.