The plane left Tokyo International Airport (Haneda Airport) at 6:12 PM with 509 passengers and 15 crew members on board, enroute to the city of Osaka. About 12 minutes after takeoff, the rear pressure bulkhead failed. The resulting explosive decompression tore the vertical stabilizer from the aircraft and severed all four of the aircraft’s hydraulic systems.
Thirty-two minutes elapsed from the time of the accident to the time of the crash, long enough for some passengers to write farewells to their families. One of these passengers was Kyu Sakamoto, who had the 1963 US #1 & UK #6 single “Sukiyaki”, which was sung in Japanese and sold over 13 million copies. He was the first Asian singer to have a #1 song on the Billboard Hot 100.
“1963 was when Japan was returning to the world scene after the destruction of WWII,” Condry said. “1964 was the Tokyo Olympics. 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.” Kyu Sakamoto was the face of this new postwar Japan: a clean-cut, 21-year-old pop idol. But Condry said that underlying the song’s sweetness was a story of sadness and loss. “The lyricist Rokusukay Ey was looking back on the failure of the protest movement in Japan,” he said.
Kyu Sakamoto had only one other song reach the US charts, “China Nights (Shina no Yoru)”, which peaked at #58 in 1963. His only American album, Sukiyaki and Other Japanese Hits (Capitol 10349), peaked at #14 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart (now known as the Billboard 200) in 1963 and remained on the Pop Albums chart for 17 weeks.He received his sole foreign Gold Record of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) by Capitol Records on May 15, 1964 in Hotel Okura, Tokyo.In 1993, the asteroid 6980 Kyusakamoto was discovered and named by the two Japanese astronomers Kin Endate and Kazuo Watanabe in honor of the late singer.
READ MORE:
http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=1230http://www.oneplanetoneworld.info/3589http://www.allmusic.com/…/kyu-sakamoto…/biographyhttp://www.angelfire.com/music5/archives/Japan123.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyu_Sakamoto
