Harumi Miyako - Onna no Kaikyo

For pure, over the top emotion, not many types of music can beat Japanese enka. I didn't particularly like it when I was younger, but sadly, the older I get, the more I find myself getting caught up in the tears, the drama, the despair, even relating to it! This is a performance of Harumi Miyako from the early 1990s, on an incredibly elaborate stage, with different settings, backdrop and costumes for each song.
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If Hibari Misora is Japan’s greatest ever enka singer, then perhaps Harumi Miyako could lay claim to the crown as the greatest living enka singer. She was born in 1948 in Kyoto to a Korean father and a Japanese mother. Her mother taught her various singing techniques when she was a young child, including her unari, singing an important phrase of a song with a growling voice, something she would later become famous for. She won the annual talent search of her record company, Columbia in 1963, made her first record in 1964 and for the next twenty years was one of the popular singers in Japan with a string of hits and performing twenty successive years on NHK’s Kohaku Uta-Gassen, broadcast every new year’s eve, watched by over half the population and a barometer of the nation’s favourite artists of the previous year. In 1984 she unexpectedly decided to quit singing, citing exhaustion, a desire to lead a normal life and look after her ailing father. She came out of retirement in 1990 singing songs in a more pop style and personal touch to the lyrics. She has remained relatively active and popular ever since.