Kyoko Koizumi/Finger Five -- Gakuen Tengoku (学園天国）

I'm starting the Kyon-Kyon file pretty far into her career, but this is the song that reminds me most of her. It was her 28th single, and the 25th to break into the Top 10, when "Gakuen Tengoku"(Academy Heaven) was released in November 1989. It went as high as No. 3 on the Oricon weeklies and was the 44th-ranked song for 1990, spending 21 weeks on the charts. With the intro guitar blast and the "Are you ready? Hey, hey, hey" call-and-back, this is a karaoke wake-up call guaranteed to get everyone up and singing. By the way, Yoshio Nomura（野村義男）, the guitarist here, was once part of the Ta-No-Kin Trio, the darlings of Johnny's and Associates（ジャニーズ事務所） in the early 80s. The song had originally been part of her 1988 album "Natsumero"(ナツメロ...Old Melodies), which had Kyon-Kyon doing cover versions of kayo kyoku, but with "Gakuen Tengoku"'s success, it was given its own release.

"Gakuen Tengoku" was also the theme song of a popular school-based comedy titled "Aishi Atterukai"(愛しあってるかい....Are You Getting Any?) which starred Kyoko Koizumi（小泉今日子） herself as an English teacher (gonna have to check THAT out someday).

Kyoko Koizumi owns "Gakuen Tengoku" to such an extent that some people may not be aware that it is a cover of the 1974 song written by the then-most commercially successful lyricist of Japan, Yu Aku（阿久悠）and composed by Tadao Inoue（井上忠夫...aka Daisuke Inoue）, for the singing group, Finger Five. Very much a product of its time, these were the Tamamoto Brothers from Okinawa in their long-haired and bell-bottomed glory...kinda like the Japanese version of the Osmond Brothers of Utah.

The original, the group's 5th single under the Philips label, did even a bit better than Koizumi's cover. It peaked at No. 2 on Oricon and sold around a million records while Koizumi's version sold around half a million discs.