What Is The Most Listened Japanese Song

[Kassim Bisaillon]

IanCondry, who teaches Japanese culture at MIT, says "Sukiyaki" transcended language because it hit an emotional nerve. The song spent three weeks at the top of the Billboard charts in June 1963 and was already a huge hit in Japan before its American debut. But what most listeners in the U.S. probably didn't realize was how it symbolized Japan's return to the world stage.

"1963 was when Japan was returning to the world scene after the destruction of WWII," Condry says. "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."

"'Walking along, looking up, so that the teardrops won't flow out of my eyes / I look back on a spring day on this lonely night,'" Condry says, translating the lyrics. "Later he goes on to say, 'A good fortune is beyond the clouds / A good fortune is beyond the sky / So I'm looking up and I'm looking forward, imagining that good fortune in the future.'

"It really is a song about the sadness of looking back, but also being on the cusp of something being better in the future," Condry says. "In some ways, that also helps explain the timelessness of that kind of sentiment."

I've been listening to Japanese music a bit lately and, while I do not understand any of it and even have trouble even making out what syllables are being used, I sometimes get the impression, that it doesn't really rhyme all that much.

Lyrics in most Japanese songs do not rhyme at the end of each line. Only some J-pop songs influenced by the western culture actively use rhymes. Japanese hip hop songs tend to use rhymes often. For example, lyrics written by Rhymester usually contain a lot of rhymes, as the name suggests :) Listen to this song, and I believe you can easily feel the rhymes even if you don't understand Japanese.

Some Japanese songs use other methods to make the lyrics sound nice. One example is 七五調 ("7-5 rhythm"), which is the rhythm heard in haiku poems. See: Is the layout of this text supposed to resemble a style of poem?

EDIT: Classical Chinese poems typically used line-end rhymes, and Japanese people have understood them. But according to Wikipedia, Western-style rhymes have never been popular among Japanese poets/lyricists.

No. There are only five, six, seven or so vowels in Japanese and most syllables are open. There's little point in rhyming. Imagine a person every sentence with あ. That sounds a bit funny, actually. Therefore, most popular music in Japanese (be it enka, kayokyoku or J-Pop) don't rhyme.

I should mention that many languages do have very few vowels, but Japanese has much more open syllables, i.e. syllables end in vowels. Also, Japanese syllables are rather scarce. A combination of these factors - not just having few vowels - contribute to the lack of rhyming.

You can't learn a language just by studying vocabulary and grammar. There has to be something you give a damn about understanding in the long run. If you're studying Japanese, maybe that's watching anime or reading manga or novels or even actually talking to other human beings. Whatever it is, one reason many of us never become fluent in the languages we study in school is that we lack this motivation. Maybe you chose the language for some lame reason like it was the only class that fit in your schedule. Don't worry, we've all done it.

But even when we start with a stronger motivator, I think another reason we give up is often that we put off the good stuff for too long, waiting for some magic moment when we'll have gone through enough textbook chapters to deal with the language in its natural state. Problem is, even if there were such a magic moment, the material in most textbooks is so dull that chances are you'll never persist that long.

So when I realized that somewhere along the way I'd developed an interest in Japanese pop music and was frustrated that I couldn't understand the lyrics, I decided that this was an opportunity. Even more so because I love to sing and wanted to be able to sing along.

My level of Japanese right now, after years of stop-and-start in both classes and self-study, is beginner to intermediate with a lot of weird gaps. While it's way too soon for me to be able to translate songs myself, there are plenty of resources on the internet to help out, and I am definitely learning and inspiring myself to keep going. If you want to try it, I've figured out some tricks to help, and also some warnings about what you don't want to learn from songs that I think will be useful whatever your current level.

For me there are three main points to consider when picking a song to study. The first is of course that I have to love it enough to hear it over and over. This is studying, after all, and some of it is repetitive and painstaking. I don't want to be tired of the song by the time I can sing and understand it.

The second is that there have to be translations and romaji transliterations available online. Fan translations may not all be of fantastic quality, but there's often more than one to chose from, which can teach interesting lessons in itself, as I'll discuss later.

In the best case scenario, you're a fan of one of a few current artists with hopes of international success that provide English subs on their videos. As my example I'm going to be using one of these, the song RPG by Sekai no Owari. Click on the little CC in the lower right corner of the video above and that will bring up the subs. I need to type them out these as I listen because if there's a cleverer way to get at them I don't know what it is. If you're using lyrics sites instead, you'll generally be able to cut and paste.

Third, once I've determined that I can find the materials I need, I will make a first pass of singing along using just the romaji transliteration. This can head off doing a lot of work and then finding out that the song is recorded at a pitch that's not comfortable for me to sing. You also probably don't want to pick a song that's really fast or has crazy rhythms, so by doing this first you'll find out if you're being overambitious on that score. (This one for example turned out to be a bad idea).

If you follow my instructions, you're going to end up copying everything you find online and pasting into a file, but just a note to start that you should save anything you find interesting for use later. I find that unofficial translations are prone to disappearing, and since they're not strictly legal they're vulnerable to being taken down.

For this song, there are three translations available online, which I'll discuss and compare later. For now we'll go with the translation "Under the clear blue sky, we are walking to the sea." Looking up the unfamiliar words gets me:

Seems like a kind of fancy way to say that thing in the second clause. I note that to myself and move on. As our esteemed Koichi-sensei has wisely said elsewhere, "Most people spend way too much time obsessing over the things they can't figure out." I've got the general idea what's going on in this line, so I'm good to go.

Once I've done this for the whole song, I will annotate some lines as needed so I can sing along. One thing I've already done that in the line above. As I'll talk about later, in singing, the w is sometimes pronounced in the particle を. This singer doesn't do that and I don't want to either, so I took the w out.

There are other singing pronunciations that are unusual, and some of them affect how the words line up with the notes, so I have ways of marking them. For example, syllable-final ん is sometimes sung as a separate syllable to fit a rhythm. For instance, in this song there's a line:

The first word is sung on three different notes, so I mark the n as bold. You will also sometimes hear long vowels and vowel sequences, such as ou as in もう or ai as in ない sung as distinct separate vowels. I use a period to mark a syllable break: seka.i, for instance, if that word is sung on three separate notes.

In cases that are really hard, if you know musical notation, you can add in notes for the rhythm. Just be aware that if you have to do that right away, you're probably starting on a song that's too difficult.

I recently read a very interesting book about people who can speak many languages. Toward the end the author asks these people for study hints, and one of them says, "Spend time tinkering with the language every day." I would call that a good description of what I'm doing here, and if a woman who learned seventeen languages recommends it, I am willing to take her word.

And despite the fact that I am not explicitly using this method to study how to read, knowing words has had some benefits in learning reading elsewhere. As I mentioned above, native speakers already know how to speak their language before learning to read it. When I've learned a word from a song and then I encounter the kanji in my studies there's no question I remember it more easily than an unfamiliar word. When hoshi 星ほし for "star" came up on WaniKani, instead of feeling "oh god, another kanji," instead my heart leapt with recognition, because I already knew that ほし hoshi is the word for star. It was like seeing an old pal in a new place in new clothes instead of trying to make friends with a stranger from scratch.

As far as reading, while I can actually already sing some lines of this song from memory, the plan for the next step is to try to strip away the romaji. I experimented with the karaoke version, which has furigana for the kanji, and I could keep up reasonably well, but the horribleness of the musical arrangement killed it for me, so I won't try that again. I want to sing along with the bands I like, not some horrible computer-generated elevator-music version.

The other benefit I think this is having is pronunciation fluency. Studying on my own, I don't have a lot of real opportunities to speak. In singing, I have no choice but to keep up with the music so I have to learn how not to stumble over my syllables.

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