Ballsack’s J-Pop Midlife Crisis, pt. 16: 森田童子

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.

Dōji Morita is another folk singer starting her career in the 70s. She retired in 1982 and never performed live again. She died in 2018. Her music is somewhat psychedelic, but lush. I honestly don’t know that much about her. I just discovered her because P-Vine released a live album of her last year, which I bought, but then cancelled because it was too expensive. So I obviously hold her in high esteem.

While I was writing this, I looked at the Discogs bio for her, which is hilariously useless. Clearly uncritically translated from Japanese, it’s garbled and spends five full paragraphs talking about her family, only covering her entire musical career in the penultimate paragraph.