
(Promotional shoot, 2010)
His name is Yasuyuki Okamura, known as Okamura-chan with his female fans. It's seriously not easy for me to get attached to musicians (I had a mild Robert Palmer phase not long ago), and no one's really caught with me as much as Okamura has. He's just...a cartoon character. He's wild on stage, but in interviews it's evident that he's a really, really nice guy. (And when he was younger and had pin-ups, he had the weirdest pin-ups.)
So one day in October 2010, I wound up looking up his 1989 song Super Girl, which at the time I only knew as one of the ending themes for City Hunter. I've always had a thing for eighties music, but he was such a charming little goofball in the video that I started looking more of him up. I eventually got his album "Katei Kyoushi" a month later, and the weird thing is, certain tracks remind me of working at the A&W if I concentrate.
Evidence A: Music video for "Doonacchattendayo / Whaddya Doing": I almost crashed a funeral with this song. More on that later.
Evidence B: "Biscuit Love": Easily my favourite of the faster songs on "Katei Kyoushi".
Evidence C: "Harenchi / Shameless": This song is highly recommended! It's almost six minutes long and it's embarrassing when translated, but it's well done and quite catchy.
Evidence D: "Peach Time": I listened to this ten times in a row once. The noises at the end I must admit are really weird, but they're a trademark of Okamura's 1989-1992 period. There's samples from his earlier songs "Young Oh! Oh!", "Ijiwaru/Unkind", and "Bible".

(Date, Okamura's 1988 album. He was a very young man when this was released.)
Okamura is in his mid-forties today, and he's rather mellowed-out in comparison to his career in the eighties and nineties (which is good, since that would be weird) but now he's a big producer and his voice is pretty much the same! It's just...so...smooth. He helped produce the singers Meg and Misato Watanabe, so if you're a fan of either lady...thank him.


(From the back cover of "Mon Shiro" single release, 2005)
Although...last year he got out of prison and rehab following charges of amphetamine possession. There's court transcripts floating around online but they've made me cry. Basically, there's some things about Okamura-chan that I should learn from.
I'm nowhere near being an expert on Okamura, and I never want to be obsessed with a person like some people can be, but I can say that I'm confirmed to be his biggest English fan.

