Christeph in Japan

To get more of a flavor for the JPop School of Japanese Studies, below is a cross-section of my, um, homework.

Cutie Honey - Koda Kumi
Ah, my very first JPop song. Cutie Honey is a character who appears in lots of manga and anime, and this is her theme song! Her prominent characteristic is that she gets “busty” whenever she’s in crime-fighting mode, and the lyrics to “Cutie Honey” describe the salient features of her body. This version is by Koda Kumi, who is, as far as I can tell, the Britney Spears of Japan: void of socially redeeming features and total eye candy. The video for this song actually grooves pretty effortlessly, and has an English translation of the lyrics as well as romaji.

Word to the wise: let it download completely before you start watching.

Cutie Honey’s contribution to my knowledge of Japanese includes:

• Verbs for sappy love songs
  傷つける (to wound, hurt someone’s feelings)
  見つめる (to stare intently)
  追いかける (to chase after/pursue someone)
  近寄よる(to approach/draw near)

• Japanese onomatopoeia:
  チュクチュク(beating heart)
  ヒクヒク (twitching nose)
  シクシク (sound of sobbing)

アゲ♂アゲ♂EVERY☆騎士 - DJ OZMA
Ok, I have no idea what is up with the title to this song, thus I always have to get my Japanese friends to reluctantly punch this one into the karaoke machine. For the sake of clarity, I’m just going to refer to this gem as “Every Night”, because that’s the phrase that’s going to be burned indelibly into your consciousness by the end of the song.

I’m a little ashamed to put DJ Ozma up here… he seems a little trashy, and I always get a few eye rolls when I queue this one up. But you can’t deny it… the song is catchy and mesmerizing. There’s a fair bit of English in this song (it even kind of makes sense!) which is balanced out by some ridiculously fast Japanese phrases.

The video is worth it just to see Ozma’s hair at the end, which is kind of like a blonde afro. Did I also mention that he’s wearing a white leisure suit? The mood in this video strikes a weird balance between raw sexuality and the kum-ba-ya-ishness of summer camp. Some of the dance moves are also ludicrously outdated, as are the women crawling earnestly all over Ozma

In addition to being endlessly amusing, DJ Ozma taught me some basic PG-13 vocabulary that has for some reason escaped me up to this point, such as:

唇 (lips)
狂う (to go crazy, ie. dancing like crazy)
出鱈目 (bullshit, nonsense)
裸 (naked)

Kiss and Cry -宇多田ヒカル
Utada Hikaru’s a pretty big name and has been for about 10 years now. I’m told by my Japanese friends that her lyrics are beautifully crafted and “read like poetry”. No music video for this one yet as far as I can tell, so you’re going to have to settle for this odd pairing with anime.

More good sappy love song vocab here, including:
近づく (to approach, get closer)
誘う (to lure, seduce)
共犯 (complicity)
and my personal favorite, 弱虫, which translates directly as “weak insect” and means “coward”.

The song also features fun Japanese-English phrases like “high tension” (said of a person), “critical hit” (to the heart), “resutora” (corporate restructuring), and “donto-uori-beibe” (Don’t worry baby), which is mysteriously inflected with katakana, even though the singer is fluent in English.

Extra points to Utada Hikaru for effortlessly working “Nisshin Cup O’Noodle” into her song.

Choo Choo Train - Exile
My students are all bugging me to learn a song by Exile. They’re kind of boy-band-ish for my tastes, and thus I’ve been resisting. But two weeks ago I started teaching American pop music to my English club at school, so in the name of reciprocity, I’m kind of at their mercy.

This particular song seems to have more English in it than 日本語. The lyrics don’t seem to make much sense in either language, which makes the song kind of useless for studying Japanese. But it’s fun, if formulaic. Choo Choo train is easy enough to learn, and if it gets me some cred with my students, it’s the least I can do. Literally.

Let’s just call this one a pop-culture lesson and leave it at that. I wish I could show you the breezy fun video of boy candy running along railroad tracks, but alas, the copyright watchdogs in Japan are FIERCE!

Anytime - Crystal Kay
Crystal Kay has this intoxicating cultural background that is rare in Japan. The upshot of this is that she is fluent in Japanese and English and is an excellent R&B singer to boot.

am 11:00 - HY
Should I ever master this song, I want a lifetime achievement award. This song lies right on the boundary of the possible for me and the Japanese skills I currently own. It’s full of crazy articulate vocabulary, but more intimidating than that is that the second half of the song is rap. However, am 11:00 has endeared itself to me, and I find myself oddly drawn to the whole Japanese rap thing. The music video is sweet and earnest and fun and isn’t trying too hard to be cool or foreign or sexy, which is saying a lot in the world of J-Pop. Plus I love that I get to sing the non-sequitur “Let’s go to hunny’s house” right smack dab in the middle of the song.

If anyone out there knows of more singable JPop, please pass it my way!
After all, I have a big test to study for.

Let’s face it, posts have been few and far between these last few months. The cause of this silence? I blame the Japanese… not the people, mind you, who have been exceedingly fun and kind and friendly, but the language, which has not yet exhibited any of these qualities to me.

Ever since passing level 3 of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) last December, I’ve been preparing for the next level up. A passing grade on level 2 declares you competent enough in Japanese to pursue employment at a Japanese company. The intimidating truth of the matter is that it’s a huge leap up from where I was last December. Passing this test is going to take some serious study mojo.

I started with the fun bit and learned the additional 700 kanji necessary for level 2. When I finished at the beginning of April, I had to face the ugly truth that kanji alone wouldn’t do the job. I was going to have to start seriously digging in to vocabulary and grammar as well.

I’ll try and spare you the nitty-gritty details of my day-to-day studies, how I’m mining the WWWJDIC for sentences to put into my SRS, and slogging through gobi and particles and keigo. An extra 3+ hours of this kind of work every day leaves my brain in a mush-like state which is inconducive to writing. However, it’s not all grunt-work. I took some advice from folks who’ve achieved fluency, and they testify that the best study technique is the one that’s fun, the one that incorporates Japanese into your life sneakily, on a daily basis. To this end, I’ve been reading children’s stories and manga and… here’s the kicker… listening almost exclusively to Japanese music.

When I came to Japan, lots of people told me that they first gained their enthusiasm for English by listening to Beatles songs. I was kind of skeptical about the Beatles School of ESL… I mean how far is “Let it be” going to get you in every-day conversation? But ever since I started studying J-Pop a few months ago, I no longer doubt. I have been, in-fact, completely converted.

Learning Japanese through music is such an obvious method for me I can’t believe I didn’t try this sooner. I spent a good chunk of the 4 years preceding my life in Akita poring over sheet music and memorizing songs in Italian, French, German, Hebrew, and Russian. Granted, those classical songs I studied were mostly in romance languages, and I only had to learn the gist of what I was singing, but the groundwork is still there. Sitting down to learn a Japanese song now seems like second-nature.

The beautiful thing about karaoke is that it’s waaaaaay less stressful than any voice recital. Ample performance opportunities and a forgiving audience both make for excellent incentive. And I can’t argue with the results: things seem to be gelling, albeit slowly.

If only they’d let me take the test this December with a microphone in my hand instead of a pencil.