Masami Okui is one of Japan's leading anison (anime song) singers, whose most famous song is "Rondo-Revolution." She is also a member of JAM Project, a group of anison singers who work to promote the genre and often perform together. The group can even pack a big venue such as Nippon Budokan hall in Tokyo.
Okui herself came to the Naked Loft club in Tokyo to appear in the Utamatsuri song show I organized recently. Yes, she joined me in an event at a small, intimate club that reaches capacity with fewer than 100 people.
"The audience is so close, it makes me more nervous than at Budokan," she moaned in the Kansai dialect, yet she also happily spoke about her life and sang songs.
I always call her Nee-san (Big sister). She's actually younger than me but has a big heart that makes me want to call her my big sister. In any case, we are close in age, so all the episodes in her life story were so very familiar to me that I almost cried, "Yes, I know!"
The first time Okui sang in front of other people was at an amateur singing event when she and a friend sang a song by pop music duo Pink Lady. Elementary school children at that time would all dance to Pink Lady songs. After the show, she started taking singing lessons, the first step for her to become a singer.
What impressed me most as I listened to her talk was that she has always been true to her own policy throughout her life. That is, she hates to bow down unreasonably. It's not that she doesn't like to bow. She just can't -- no, she refuses to -- fit into a top-down communication system. That's why she didn't stay long in a school sports club, which was run under the authoritarian system, and she didn't join a dance group at her singing school because the members were very fussy about courtesy between older and younger members. Okui also quit the popular music circle at university immediately after an older member forced her to use keigo (polite language) to another even older member whom she had been on good terms with.
She is such an honest person whose behavior is always consistent with her words. That's why the songs she sings directly resonate with our hearts, I thought, as I heard her stories.
Her straightforward personality was in full force again when she was invited to join a singer's backing chorus. Learning that the rehearsals would start in two weeks, she quit the university and came to Tokyo. Her unwavering decision-making ability is truly amazing.
After performing in backing choruses for several pop idols, she became a member of the backing chorus for Yumi Matsutoya, one of the top pop singers in Japan. After that came her encounter with anison.
During the recent event, Okui also sang many songs she does not usually sing in public, such as kayokyoku pop songs from the 1970s and '80s as well as atmospheric pop songs by Teresa Teng, whom Okui likes very much. The three hours we had with her was a precious time although it was a bit of miscalculation when I had to wear a miniskirt and joined her in singing Pink Lady's hit song, "Pepper Keibu" (Inspector Pepper), in an attempt to visualize how Pink Lady had affected Okui's career.
For sure it's fun to spend time immersing yourself in powerful songs at a large venue. But it's such a luxury to have an opportunity to directly feel the life of a singer behind her songs. Listening to "Rondo-Revolution," her final song at the event, I thought maybe I was the one most soothed that evening.
Suzuki is a Yomiuri Shimbun senior specialist and an expert on tokusatsu superhero films and dramas.
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