Not only did I represent my class and sing those songs at the farewell party before our graduation ceremony, but I had, in fact, done something even more extraordinary.
Our school trip in the third year of junior high school was a journey taken together with several neighboring junior high schools aboard a chartered Japan National Railways train…
I believe our destination was Tokyo…yes, because I remember Ueno Zoo, there can be no mistake about that.
Each school was expected to perform something aboard the train, and I was chosen to represent Yuriage Junior High School by singing a song.
The song was so extraordinary that I still sometimes remember it and burst out laughing.
I wondered whether this song might also be on YouTube…but, as one might expect, even this song was not there.
It was a song that no one would ordinarily imagine a junior high school student singing.
Even so, this is one of the good things about the Internet: when I entered “Koichi Miura, now with the sorrowful stars,” I immediately discovered that the title of the song was “Kokoro no Tomoshibi.”
The point is that one would normally ask whether a third-year junior high school student would ever sing such a song, and merely thinking about that always makes me laugh.
Nevertheless, my performance of this song appears to have left a powerful impression upon the students from the other schools who were aboard the train that day.
After all, it was an exceedingly subdued song by Koichi Miura, himself a subdued singer, and, as I remember it, I believe it was a B-side.

こころの灯https://www.youtube.com/embed/5OBpGzcnpGw

2024/3/10 in Tokyo