Sparkling Momoe, 1979

Momoe and husband, Tomokazu Miura in San Francisco

At the same time, at the urging of Sony Records, she pleased the fans who had liked her softer side with such sentimental ballads as "Ii Hi Tabidachi" (Leaving on a Good Day) and "Aki Zakura" (Fall Cherry Blossoms). These and other tunes reached the top of the charts, but earned her relatively little critical or industry recognition; Momoe never won an industry award in her entire eight-year career. Even so, she never threw a public snit fit over this snub or conducted a Paul McCartney-like campaign for honors. In this and other ways, she was, from beginning to end, a class act.

Momoe's movie career began only a year after her recording debut, in 1974 with the release of Izu No Odoriko (The Izu Dancer). Her costar was a baby-faced unknown named Tomokazu Miura. The movie was the sixth based on the classic Yasunari Kawabata story about an ill-starred romance between a young dancer and a high-school student. Izu No Odoriko was an unimaginable attempt to capitalize on Momoe's popularity as a singing idol, but the two young stars clicked- and soon the public was demanding more of what came to be known as the "golden combination." Momoe and Tomokazu made eleven more pictures together, all of them moneymakers.

Not surprisingly, given all the time they spent playing on-screen lovers, their romance began to blossom off the set as well as on it. Though Tomokazu was already 22 when he first paired with the 15-year-old Momoe, no eyebrows were raised. As far as their handlers and public were considered, theirs was a match made in box-office heaven.

But though their pairing may have had its start as commerce, Momoe fell hard. For this teenager, whose parents had never married and whose father had performed an early disappearing act, the older Tomokazu represented a firm anchor in a turbulent world. She paid him her greatest compliment when she told record producer Sakai that "he's not like someone from the entertainment business."

As she grew to maturity, the idea of becoming Mrs. Miura and getting out of the pop-music rat race altogether became more attractive. She had always been in the entertainment world, but not of it- a distance that had been part of her appeal. In her autobiography, she wrote that "I didn't like this job..... My singing was turned into work, without any regard for my own wishes. Forced to sing the same song over and over everyday, I came to hate singing."

Then in 1978, a popular trio called The Candies suddenly announced that they were quitting "to become ordinary girls again." Although Momoe was skeptical about their chances of returning to blissful anonymity, their example planted the idea of retirement more firmly in her mind.

In 1980, she finally announced her decision to marry Tomokazu and quit show business. The news hit many of her fans hard. Though they may have applauded her marriage, they regretted her retirement. It meant no more music from Momoe. Why, not a few of them wondered, did it have to be both? Why couldn't she keep singing, as so many other married pop stars had? Momoe, however, had made up her mind to get out, and nothing could change it.

Though to the less understanding her decision may have seemed regrettably old-fashioned- feminists complained that she was setting the women's movement in Japan back by ten years- to millions of her more traditionally minded fans there was something splendidly self-sacrificial about her exit, like Ingrid Bergman getting on the plane with the good-but-dull Paul Henried instead of hanging around Casablanca with the cynical-but-exciting Humphrey Bogart.

The more perceptive of those fans knew that without Momoe, Tomokazu was just a journeyman pretty-boy actor, whose career would never rise about the middling (they were right- it hasn't). But for the majority, she was doing the pure thing, the right thing, the romantic thing by giving it all up for her man. Her last recording "Watashi Wa Onna" (I Am a Woman), seemed to express this attitude. Momoe sang about wanting to give her love "with both hands." The song shot to number one on the charts.

Momoe went out in a blaze of glory, with her popularity, and her reputation still intact. In a society that celebrated (and still celebrates) the average and conventional, in which women were (and still are) often expected to quit their jobs when they marry or give birth, the decision of this wealthy, famous, and powerful star to join the ranks of the buggy-pushing, grocery-shopping masses underlined, more than any song lyric ever could, her Ms. Averageness. Despite all the perks and temptations of stardom, her fans could say, she was always one of us, will always be one of us. They could conceive of no greater compliment. Her life was also theirs- forever.

This article appears courtesy of Mark Schilling, and it was reprinted from his book "An Encyclopedia Of Japanese Pop Culture." Buy from Amazon