Find us on social media: | For current & accurate updates: or /mandymatney Support Our Mission: /support-the-show Support the Reporting: fitsnews. While I am not a great fan of this music this should help you to understand what is going on: After the talking bit those are the first few chords: Bb. Listen on any streaming service or visit to learn more. Follow along with Matney's reporting in real time from South Carolina as her exclusive sources guide listeners on a journey to expose the truth wherever it leads. Matney's podcast, ranked #1 globally in 2021, provides unmatched insight into the horrific deaths, botched investigations and newly-uncovered crimes that are all interconnected. The now-infamous Murdaugh family is surrounded by seven criminal investigations into fraud, obstruction of justice, the 2021 double homicides of Paul Murdaugh and his mother Maggie, the 2015 murder of young Stephen Smith, the suicide-for-hire plot of family patriarch Alex Murdaugh, and a vast insurance scheme that preyed on the region's most vulnerable citizens. Award-winning journalist Mandy Matney of has been investigating the Murdaugh family since that fateful night in 2019. So while "Sukiyaki" may have come out of a failed protest movement in Japan, that same song - with its hummable melody and sweet disposition - became an unlikely hit in an American summer of change: the summer of 1963.For nearly 100 years, one family traded influence and held power in the South Carolina lowcountry until a fatal boat crash involving an allegedly intoxicated heir-apparent shed sunlight on a true crime saga like no-other. "In some ways, that also helps explain the timelessness of that kind of sentiment." "It really is a song about the sadness of looking back, but also being on the cusp of something being better in the future," Condry says. "Later he goes on to say, 'A good fortune is beyond the clouds / A good fortune is beyond the sky / So I'm looking up and I'm looking forward, imagining that good fortune in the future.' "'Walking along, looking up, so that the teardrops won't flow out of my eyes / I look back on a spring day on this lonely night,'" Condry says, translating the lyrics. And so, in Sakamoro's song, he says he hears the longing for a fresh start. "Nevertheless, the government went ahead and signed the security treaty."Ĭondry says that experience left many young people disillusioned about protests. "There was a virtual occupation of the Diet, which is the Japanese parliament, and student protests were happening all over - tens of thousands of people marching and chanting," Condry says. "The lyricist Rokusukay Ey was looking back on the failure of the protest movement in Japan," he says. But Condry says that underlying the song's sweetness was a story of sadness and loss. Kyu Sakamoto was the face of this new postwar Japan: a clean-cut, 21-year-old pop idol. And Japan's economy was expanding globally and so, in some ways, the song is kind of an interesting metaphor for that global expansion of Japan on the world scene." "1963 was when Japan was returning to the world scene after the destruction of WWII," Condry says. probably didn't realize was how it symbolized Japan's return to the world stage.
The song spent three weeks at the top of the Billboard charts in June 1963 and was already a huge hit in Japan before its American debut. Ian Condry, who teaches Japanese culture at MIT, says "Sukiyaki" transcended language because it hit an emotional nerve. 1 song in America was an import from Japan: a song about young love called "Sukiyaki," sung by Kyu Sakomoto. Underlying the sweetness of Kyu Sakamoto's unexpected hit song "Sukiyaki" was a story of sadness and loss.įifty years ago today, the No.