Buckie Shirakata & His Aloha Hawaiians

condition (record/cover): VG (sidelong mark on side 1) / VG+ (light foxing inside gatefold)

Gatefold sleeve. No obi.

Buckie Shirakata was born in Honolulu to Japanese parents, arrived in Tokyo in the 1930s with a steel guitar and effectively invented Japanese Hawaiian music, a genre that outlived the war (barely; Hawaiian music was suspect as American) and boomed in the fifties, when every Japanese resort hotel had a steel guitarist in a floral shirt. His Aloha Hawaiians were the flagship band for decades, and Teichiku kept them recording into the age of enka.

Hit Kayō Best 14 is the collision: fourteen Japanese pop and enka hits played as Hawaiian instrumentals, steel guitar taking the vocal line, ukulele strumming under a melody written for a Tokyo cabaret. It should not work and it does, because Shirakata's steel had exactly the sliding vibrato that enka singers use. Japanese Teichiku pressing.