Here's an enka song to welcome the return of the Spring season. It's also they very first one for the music genre in Taiko to be featured in two consecutive major arcade installments!
Umiyuki
海雪
| Game | Genre |  |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AC12-13 |  | ★3 76 | ★3 96 | ★4 165 | ★6 279 | - |
| Wii 1 | | ★3 76 | ★3 101 | ★4 165 | ★6 279 | - |
105
umiyuk (Umiyuki)What we have here today is one of the few 2nd-arcade-gen licenses whose only home console outing was with the first Wii videogame: the first single release from enka performer Jero (ジェロ), the stage name used by Jerome Charles White Jr. Not the usual name a random person would expect behind a music genre so entrenched with Japanese culture, wouldn't you say?
This 1981-class performer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in fact, has quite the unique lineage on his mother-side grandparent's end: a Japanese grandparent -Taikiko- who found the love of her life during World War 2 in a serviceman, ultimately having her daughter Harumi who would move out to Pittsburgh later on, working as a department store sales clerk. After Harumi and her husband broke up in divorce, their son Jerome was more than motivated to finish his university studies in his hometown, both for the Japanese language and an IT degree, and move out in Japan to his grandmother Taikiko in 2003.
As a 22-aged person in a brand-new country, he mostly worked as an English teacher and computer engineer at NOVA, but the shared love for Enka music with her grandmother and the promise he made her to be able to perform live at the yearly Kohaku Uta Gessen music contest from NHK pushed him to try pursuing an enka career on top of his other jobs. Unfortunately, Jero's grandmother Taikiko died in 2005 but he ultimately made it through to be competing at the event's 2008 edition thanks to his single debut on the same year with Umiyuki, honoring the late relative by donning a shirt with a photo of hers for the competition. Since then and for ten years straight, Jero made the rounds as a national-famed artist well beyond the mere primate of being the very first African-American professional enka performer, ultimately taking an indefinite (and ongoing) music hiatus in 2018 in order to focus on his career in computers.
Composed by Ryudo Uzaki (宇崎竜童) and lyricized by Yasushi Akimoto (秋元康), Umiyuki (lit. 'Sea Snow') made its debut at Oricon charts at the 4th place, topping local enka/kayo song charts for 12 weeks in a row. Jero performed the singing of the song while having in mind the image of the sea in the more-familiar shores of California, having never seen the Sea of Japan's aspect during the Winter season. On top of that, prior to the song's making, both Jero and lyricist Akimoto never visited the Izumozaki Town mentioned in the lyrics, reason for which he decided to hold a 'local concert' in the same town, right after the single's release.
Landing on the 12th and 13th arcades (the Don! to Zoryoban "midquel" included), Umiyuki poses the same threat as it would later offer on early Wii shores: your slow-paced average enka charting challenge whose cluster complexity ramps up all of a sudden for its very end. It's nothing too out of a left field even for beginners, mind you, but it's still more than enough of a slap-in-the-face for players sleepwalking through their performance! Umiyuki's Futsuu mode on the first Wii game was one of the modes with extra notes for slotting the game's giant note gimmick, releasing more notes to hit ahead if it's being accurately hit.
