Sorafune by Tokio

I love these guys, they are just great.  To be honest, “Tokio”, probably isn`t one of the greatest bands around, but they have a great chemistry between them and they seem like genuinely nice people which is exactly what I want in a group.  And probably never a day goes by in Japan when you don`t see them on the television.  They have been around since the mid-1990s and are still very popular.

The guys appear in a lot of TV shows and commercials.  One of their shows is, “Tetsuwan Dash”, which is on Sunday nights at 7pm (Nihon Television).  It`s a kind of variety program with Tokio doing farming, driving a solar-powered car around Japan, sometimes cooking, all kinds of stuff.  But the best part of the show is when they do some kind of challenge.  To be honest, some of the stuff they do is really silly, which is why it might be so interesting.  For example, they have a relay race over one kilometer against a train.  Put a remote-controlled boat in a small river up in the mountains and see if they can make it to the sea.  Or they are given a suitcase each and dumped in some country like Egypt and told that they are only allowed 500 paces to get back to Japan.  Or they have to eat a bowel of boiling hot ramen (a type of noodle) while a timer is rapidly ticking away that is connected to a bomb – obviously if they don`t finish the ramen, the bomb will go off giving them one heck of a scare.  Jackie Chan also occasionally appears on the show as well.  Against Jackie they once raced bicycles down Victoria peak and if their feet touched the ground, they were out.

Anyway, their song, “Sorafune”, is our new Song of the Week.  It was written by Miyuki Nakajima who is a very famous singer/songwriter in Japan.  Released on August 23, 2006, it reached the number one spot on the Oricon charts.  It is definitely my favourite Tokio song and a great video to boot.  I hope you like it, and you can also see their (Japanese) website here.