The Folk Crusaders

The Folk Crusaders (also known as Fōkuru, フォークル) was a Japanese pop music group, popular in Japan in the later half of the 1960s.

The band was formed in 1965 by the five university students Kazuhiko Katō, Osamu Kitayama, Yoshio Hiranuma (平沼義男), Mikio Inomura (Imura?) (井村幹生) and Maki Ashida (芦田雅喜), but Ashida and Inomura left the band at an early stage. The three-man band were active in the Kansai underground scene for some time, but in 1967 the band decided to split up, and to commemorate the split up they released the self-produced album Harenchi, in only 300 copies. The same year, the album was picked up by radio stations in Kyoto and Kobe, where the songs "Imujingawa" and "Kaette kita yopparai" were played frequently. "Kaette kita yopparai" ("Drunkard Returns") sold over one and a quarter million copies, and was awarded a gold disc.^[1] The band starred in a movie with the same title as the song, Three Resurrected Drunkards, directed by Nagisa Oshima. The band members continued their musical careers in different bands but had reunions with The Folk Crusaders and released some more albums.

The band's song "Imujingawa", a song about the Imjin River and the splitting of Korea, played a role in the 2004 movie, Pacchigi!.

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