Well, I dove right in to the Eriko Tamura goodness, and over the past year have been exhausting those albums for all their worth! Week after week I played those songs over and over, and then it occured to me that I hadn’t yet explored all the singles-only and B-side tracks from her yet!
There is this wonderful 80’s J-pop related site (which may or may not appreciate me mentioning here so I won’t name it) where you can download and listen to all of Eriko’s singles and B-sides, and I was stunned to find a whopping SIXTEEN non-album songs, enough tracks to put together a whole new album! That new non-album mix became my new go-to to listen to on my walks, and it soon became apparent that I needed to get the physical copies of THESE CDs as well!!!
Going online, I was EXCITED to find a dealer in Japan who was selling 15 of her 16 singles in one amazing LOT!! This was PERFECT for me since I didn’t own ANY of her singles and would give me an almost complete set in one crack!
I must say I had some reservations when I saw the store was asking for 400 BUCKS for it- 400 bucks is like 25 bucks per single!!! Plus 24 bucks shipping. But when I looked CLOSER at the info, I saw the DREADED shipping note we all here in Hawaii hate to see: DOES NOT SHIP TO ALASKA OR HAWAII!
Well, that made my initial reluctance to drop 400 bucks on the lot a moot point! Sadly, there are way too many dealers in Japan who simply refuse to ship outside of Japan to places like Hawaii.
Then it occured to me-what about trying SURUGUYA, the place where I got my Erika Tamura CD albums from?? Visiting the site, I was THRILLED to find that they had ELEVEN of Eriko’s singles, and FURTHERMORE, at a VERY reasonable price! Each single averaged about 3-10 dollars, so affordable that I decided to grab a few of Eriko’s LASERDISCS as well! I also grabbed two of her anthology CDs, BALLADS and DISCOVERY, and sent in that order with fingers crossed!
WELL, JUST this week, my package came in, and I am beside myself with how GORGEOUS these collectibles are!
First off: the singles! It's been awhile since I was so thrilled getting a shipment of j-pop CD singles, a format which though long gone really holds a sentimental place in my heart as it was the format of choice in the golden era of J-pop for me!
Locomotion Dream, Honki, Process, Domino, Reversible,Nijiiro No Namida,Little Darling, Suteki na Ame, Ningyo no T-Shirt, Kanashimi de wa Owaranai, these singles were SO beautiful, my only regret is that I can't get ahold of those old PIKO CD single plastic cases to encase these in for protection and an added gloss to them!
I keep forgetting that in the early days of the 3cm Single, they were REALLY trying to give the fan a bang for his/her buck- as I’ve shown in various singles of artists like Hikaru Nishida and ribbon, they tried to cram as much ‘goodies’ into the single as possible, and the Eriko singles for Locomotion Dream, Honki, Process and Domino are a good example: pull-out cards and even glossy photos!
Speaking of singles, there was a hidden gem in this shipment. When I put in the order for Eriko’s CD single of “Sukiyo’, I noted that for some reason, the cover artwork didn’t look like the pictures I had seen online. I chalked it up to being a later re-issue or something, but when I got it, I was thrilled to find that it was in fact a CD CASSETTE single!WOWW!
This was really exciting for me as I’ve NEVER owned ANY j-pop on cassettes, though several of my friends (who were into J-pop from the early, early days) did! Of course, this means that I will still have to eventually get my hands on a copy of the CD single itself, but as Sukiyo was the ‘ground zero’ song of Eriko’s that got me into her in the first place, I don’t mind owning it in several formats, and even hope to someday get in on 45 as well!
As I mentioned before, I’d already gotten all 8 of Eriko’s original CD releases, as well as her Greatest Hits collection, but there WERE a couple of CDs I didn’t have, a Ballad Collection as well as a later Greatest Hits package called DISCOVERY, the latter of which I resisted getting not only because I already had the songs but because I dislike the cover so much!! Why do idols all go through the phase of permed hair! Egads! Conversely, I also got the CDV of “Reversible” which, though I can’t even play it, has a cover which looks so beautiful I just HAD to have it!
As far as the Laserdiscs go, I got a Live Concert and two Video Collections! Must say, they are beautiful and I can’t WAIT to watch them as soon as I have the time to haul out my old creaky laserdisc player (which I HOPE still functions!) so I can watch ‘em!!! MOST looking forward to “Sweet Farewell” which was promoting her album “Shoujo de Iraretara", one of my ALL TIME FAVE albums of hers, and I can't WAIT to see her do the songs LIVE!!
Such an AWESOME Eriko Tamura haul for someone like me in the midst of Eriko fandom, and do you know, with the price of those CD singles and the additional items like the CDs and the Laserdiscs, the bill only came out to 97 dollars! True, there was a shipping charge, but even with that and Suruguya’s modest commission fee, my grand total was STILL under 150 DOLLARS, a FAR cry from that $400 auction I would have gladly shelled out if I could have! So LUCKY I didn’t!
