We can't have a Summer-y season around here without some traditional Japanese festival music to it, can we?
| Game | Genre |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AC Nijiiro (Y4) NS2 (MP) |
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★1 46 |
★1 67 |
★4 151 |
★5 280 |
- |
86-102
tkyond (Tokyo Ondo)Contrary to popular belief, nowadays it's still possible for ongoing console games to receive series-debut tunes with the "traditional" paid DLC pack delivery methods, away from the luxuries of either app updates or subscrition service monthly drop-ins! This ending month, in fact, brought to all Donderful/Rhythm Festival versions the Nursery Rhymes and Popular Songs pack, ultimately delivering a couple of new Classic tunes since the also-on-Switch Sonata, Gekkou from 2019.
Hailing from the last century, the Tokyo Ondo draws its origins from the 7th Showa era year (1932), born as a means to lead to prosperity after a disaster-issued recession. As a result of 1923's Great Kanto Earthquake, the city of Tokyo was merged with other surrounding towns 9 years later, resulting in the formation of the 2nd-biggest city in the world (at the time) with more than 5 million inhabitants. In the same year, merchants from the Yurakucho shopping district banded together to fund a Bon Odori festival in Tokyo's Hibiya Park as an economy-boosting event and to that end, they asked the music company Victor Entertainment Inc. to come up with a commissioned ondo song. The resulting tune took the name of Marunouchi Ondo (丸の内音頭), with music from Nakayama Shinpei (中山晋平) and lyrics from Saijo Yaso (西條八十). Prominent folk singers of the time -Mishima Issei (三島一声) and Kouta Katsutaro (小唄勝太郎)- were summoned as its main vocalists, with the original radio-broadcast recording owed to the geisha/singer Fujimoto Fumiyoshi (藤本二三吉), but at that one fateful 5-days festival of August 15th-19th, everyone was invited to join the dance and singing at any time, as long as each performers was donning a matching yukata that was available at the festival's stalls.
The Marunouchi Ondo was publicly broadcast via radio during the Hibiya Park matsuri's third day, reaching such an overwhelming popularity state-wide to push the Victor record company to alter the lyrics as it could refer to Tokyo as a whole and sell it statewide as the Tokyo Ondo, same lead original performers and all. The newly-lyricized song would then lead on to bolster newfound popularity across the deacdes leading to this day, warranting a 2004 Heian-era-spawn edition on toe (the so-dubbed 'Oedo Tokyo Ondo') for the newer generations, from the ongoing copyright holders among many. Nowadays, however, the Tokyo Ondo is more widely reguarded as a sports cheering tune, officially adopted by the Tokyo Yakult Swallows profeccional baseball team and the FC Tokyo professional soccer team. No offcial selling numbers for this widely-spread folk song were released, but it was accounted how up until 1971 it managed to sell approximately 20 million copies overall, ten times as much as the original Marunouchi Ondo.
We've spent pretty lengthy paragraphs on this one song, but the chart talk is kept short as there's not that much of a difference on the style across other ondo songs in Taiko. Watch out for the slow fade-out ending though, crawling to a halt with a few decreasing BPM changes for the last few notes!
