Ballsack’s J-Pop Midlife Crisis, pt. 8: 青江三奈

Starting sometime last year, I started really getting into Japanese music. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, because I had always thought I hated singing in Japanese. Turns out I don’t! In the night threads for the following week, I’ll write a little about each of my favorite artists that I’ve discovered, and share a streaming album for you to dutifully ignore.

Mina Aoe (青江三奈) is an Enka singer. She has a fairly low register, which I like, but I mainly got interested in her because of the cover of her 1968 album, 『青江三奈ブルースを唄う』(Aoe Mina burūsu o utau).

Sentarō Iwata (岩田専太郎) did the cover art for this, and if you’d like some great illustrations of Japanese women in kimonos, boy howdy, that’s your man. It seems he did a number of record sleeves for Victor. Here’s a few others for your viewing pleasure

Oh… I thought there would be more… well anyway, here’s the Mina Aoe record