Yamano Music in summer 1971

　Saijo wrote several songs about Ginza including “Tosei Ginza-bushi” and “Ginza no yanagi” (about the restoration of the willow trees). This got me interested in Ginza’s record stores. Spreading out the “Dainippon shokugyo-betsu meisai-zu: Kyobashi-ku (Detailed commercial map of Japan: Kyobashi-ku),”a map of stores in Ginza published in 1931 (Showa 6), just around the time “Tokyo Koshinkyoku” was popular, I started with Ginza 1-chome and spotted Tsubame Records, the Columbia Phonograph Company, and other stores that were likely to have sold records back then. Yamano Music was also already on the map, in Ginza 4-chome. A frequent shopper since my early teens, I checked Yamano Music’s corporate history on their website to find that the company was originally established as Matsumoto Music, a manufacturer of organs and pianos. It was in 1915 (Taisho 4) that it started business under the name Yamano Music. What interested me was the event introduced for the year 1928 (Showa 3), when that it became “retailer (jobber) for Victor Company of Japan, Ltd. “Tosei Ginza-bushi” was released in the same year, followed by “Tokyo Koshinkyoku” the next year and “Ginza no yanagi” in 1932. These songs were all sold by Victor, so I would imagine Yamano Music ran major campaigns to promote them. Perhaps, Chiyako Sato and Yaso Saijo, or maybe even Shinpei Nakayama, the composer showed up at the store events.
　I wanted to interview Yamano Music to learn more and that is how the idea for the current volume originated, but I was told that all materials from before 1945 (Showa 20) were lost in the fires caused by air raids and that so much time had passed that no one would remember the events of the early Showa period.
　Disappointed, I decided to change my approach. As I mentioned earlier, I first started to stop by Yamano Music when I was in junior high school, so I came up with a new idea to interview people who would be familiar with my place of teenage memories (mainly from the early 1970s).
　Next to Wako Department Store, on the corner of Ginza 4-chome, stands Ginza Kimuraya, Yamano Music, and Mikimoto, unchanged from the map from the early Showa period. I found my way to the back of the first floor, walking through shelves of recent J-pop music and “new music” that reminds me of my youth, displayed as if to compete against each other. I took the elevator in the back to the meeting room on the eighth floor. My interviewees were Vice President Susumu Ikeda and Mr. Yoshiharu Ishii, a former employee who had been in charge of floor sales for a long time. Vice President Ikeda joined the company in 1966, and Mr. Ishii, now 82 years old, had joined in 1956, the year I was born.
　The store is famous for musical instruments, but to me, Yamano Music stands for the American and European music on LP. In my early teens, I would come to look for imported LPs of pop music that I had been inspired by, listening to midnight programs on the radio, as well as those of folk rock bands that I had learned of from my extreme friends.