Now that I have officially decided to leave Japan this year, it is finally time for me to sort out my Japan Bucket List. This is basically a list of things I want to do before I return to the UK. Given my procrastinating nature, even the very act of making the list has been difficult. Before I knew it, it has become too late to do some of the stuff that I would have loved to. Things like watching or even taking part in Yukigassen and visiting the Sapporo Snow Festival are now impossible. There are even some things on there that I know in my heart of hearts were impossible in the first place. It has long been a dream of mine to steal a train driver’s hat as he sticks his head out of the window when a train leaves the station. That is nothing but a pipe-dream from the very beginning though.

The first item on my bucket list to be chalked off was much easier to achieve. Kalk Zamen Kuri no Hana is, in my opinion, Shiina Ringo’s greatest album and therefore the best album ever recorded. Not an easy listen but certainly one that rewards you one hundred fold if you take the time to get into it. KZK just oozes a kind of class unusual for a J-Pop star. Heck, unusual for any pop star  Hell, unusual for a musician. Of course, it didn’t achieve the mainstream success that her other albums before and since did, so unlike her other albums from this period there has never been a vinyl reissue of it.

As a result, it has become pretty rare. Despite half heartedly searching for in for the last 3 years, I never saw it in the used record shops I would waste time searching. So, after finally putting down the money for a Yahoo Auctions account (Japan’s far worse version of ebay, which you have to pay extra to bid over 5000 yen). I finally found what I was looking for.

For the cost of a cool 8000 yen I picked this up. And just look at it, it’s a thing of beauty.

The musical treat contained within is not betrayed by the packaging. As the album is very Japanese in its construction the cover’s spine is on the right rather than the left. Pure class!

Inside is a selection of the sheet music in gold plus bonus English Lyrics of Stem, odd since the English language version of this song doesn’t appear in the album.

The records themselves aren’t so exciting but the lyrics sheets are super nice.

Lovely Ringo on one side, turn them over for lyrics on the other.

 As a special Bonus, here are the lyrics to Poltergeist, which is probably my favourite Shiina Ringo song (at least it is today).

And how does it sound? Well, like most LPs compared to it’s digital brethren it has a more woolly sound. Maybe it is because of the reduced sound quality but this version just feels like it envelops you in a way my iPod doesn’t. I can’t really judge the audio quality though. I’m far from an audiophile and my setup is blatantly not the greatest.

This version of the album also has a bonus song at the end and taken on it’s own merit Ichijiku no Hana is truly beautiful and lovely. But appearing at the end of this album it is a bit odd. It kind of spoils the already epic conclusion to the album and it’s original last song. It’s like that bit in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band when A Day in the Life finishes and there is some strange warbling just after (except not as bad) . Apparently Ringo wrote this song for this album but cut it out. Maybe someone wanted to add it here as bonus but it spoils the flow a bit.

One thing I did forget about listening to LPs is that you have to  switch sides part way though. On a double album like this one, with only 3 songs a side, I am only just comfortable on my bed before I have to get up and turn it over. Which is super annoying. These days we really are pampered with 1000s of songs in our pockets.

And what of the other items in my list? Well, you will hear about them soon enough….

If you have been a regular reader of this website you may have noticed by now that I am a huge fan of Shiina Ringo and I like to read manga. Imagine my joy then, when browsing the selves of my local RECOfan used music shop, I found a manga about the life of the lady herself.

Ringo Through the Looking Glass (Kagami no Kuni no Ringo) was a manga released in 2001 and written by a bloke named Soushi Sakurai. It appears to be part of a set of manga that was written about famous Japanese bands of the time. Ads for comics about the likes of L’Arc En Ciel, Glay and the wonderfully named KinKi Kids litter the book.

The comic itself is a biopic (biocom?) about her life before becoming famous, largely focusing her school years but runs all the way up to the release of her first album.

To its credit the book seems like it is quite well researched and covers all the key aspects of Ringo’s life. Things like being unable to do ballet because of the operations she had as a child, the talent shows she entered, the conflict she had with producers over lyrics and her study in England are all mentioned. I guess the comic deserves full marks for that.

Where the thing falls down though is with Sakurai’s art. It ranges from competent to ruddy awful and back again. He has drawn Ringo with a crazy moon face and the expressions she pulls are really ugly. The other characters in the book don’t look too bad so I guess his style doesn’t lend itself well to real people.

Worse still is that sometimes the body proportions are all over the place, with Ringo suddenly possessing huge man hands every so often. You can tell this comic was drawn for money and not for love by the huge inconstancies in the art. This is really exemplified by the end of the book where the artist has drawn his own renditions of CD covers and famous photos of Ringo. Some are actually pretty well drawn others are grotesque.

Just look at these examples:

Ok

 Ok

OMG THE HORROR!!!!!!

Would I recommend this book? Nah.

The art is mostly horrible and it is not available in English. I had to struggle through it in Japanese, which meant I had to look at some of those shoddily drawn panels much longer than the artist probably intended. If you really want to find out about Shiina Ringo’s life I recommend you just read her wiki page. It’s all in there, spookily so, it’s almost as though they used this book to research the entry.

And so on the 11th of January 2012, Tokyo Jihen announced that they will spit up.

It’s hard to say how I feel about this. It is the band fronted by Shiina Ringo after all and she is, in my opinion, one of the greatest singer/songwriters around today. The whole band is extremely talented at what they do but it feels like the group has become less than the sum of its parts.

From their release of Variety, the band’s third album, Ringo loosened her grip on the song writing duties and allowed the other members to have a crack at it. The result was three largely unfocused albums with a few excellent songs (on necessarily the ones written by Ringo) and some songs elevated to greatness when performed live. Perhaps she chose to do this because two of the original members left after their first album, not content to be in Ringo’s shadow.

Ultimately it was Ringo’s decision to end it and I hope that this means that she has something fantastic planned for us. The track she wrote for an upcoming film is wonderful and though it is an instrumental, it has shades of the old, badass Shiina Ringo about it. Looking at it the other way though, she may take this as an opportunity to retire, only to dabble in producing and writing for others. She has been doing this for some time now and so far it has been with people with an nth of her talent.

For the other members though, it frees them up to concentrate on their own bands. Of these other members however, it has only ever been HZM, one of the aforementioned early splitters, that I have ever had any in real interest in. His band, Pe’z, are simply a wonderful Jazz band. Kameda is simply a music producer at heart, although he will probably continue to play the bass for Ringo, as he has always done. Ukigumo is perhaps the only other member I’ll keep an eye on. Songs like Meisai, OSCA and sa_i_ta show that he is a great writer but the lad just can’t sing, which puts me off a bit.

Anyhow, for good or for bad this is the end of Tokyo Jihen all we have left to look forward to from them is a farewell tour and a couple of live releases. RIP Tokyo Jihen but long live Shiina Ringo (and the others I guess).

As I have pointed out before there are three different alphabets used in Japanese. One of which is called katakana and is generally used to emphasise words and to write words of foreign origin. There are many, many words that Japanese people say which come from English but unfortunately these can be difficult to understand. This is because the Japanese pronunciation is often very different from the original word and this has a tendency to fry English speakers brains. It is probably better to treat such things as new completely separate Japanese words.

This katakana problem inspired one of my house-mates to think up a Katakana: Does it work? game. He thought that due to the fact there are less vowel sounds in Japanese, words written in Katakana can be impossible to read and work out what they refer to. For example, you can take a word like バン, it might represent ban or a van or maybe even a bun.

This leads to this little word:

This word is the title of the first Tokyo Jihen song in the video above and without context it is impossible to romanise. It could mean either lamp or ramp. Is Little Miss Ringo singing about light fittings or skating? When I first heard the song many years ago, I didn’t have enough Japanese knowledge to realise which it was.

The reason for this problem is that not only is there no ‘l’ sound in Japanese but no ‘r’ sound either. The closest sound the Japanese make is somewhere between the two. A ‘lr’ sound, if you will. This sound is VERY HARD for English speakers to say, if you want to attempt it here is Koichi of Tofugu fame to teach you. For the same reason when Japanese speakers talk in English this half ‘lr’ sound rears its ugly head in all sorts of ways (probably where that old ‘egg flied lice’ joke comes from). So the problem isn’t that Japanese speakers aren’t just mixing up their ‘l’s and ‘r’s but also saying neither and English speakers simply can’t comprehend the sound they are saying and our brain processes it into one or the other.

So back to that song and as I said without context it is impossible to translate its title. Due to the very handy cheat sheet below I have managed to work out that Ringo is using a lot of car vocabulary: windscreens, wipers, motorways, indicators and the like. Therefore ランプ must refer to the off ramp of a motorway.

Unless, of course, she is talking about the car’s headlamps.

Gah…

It turns out that in translation, context is everything and even then it can still be confusing.

Here is an 11+ style verbal reasoning problem:

If Variety is to Spa & Treatment
as Sports is to Ultra C
then Discovery is to ?????????

Before I let you know the answer please let me get something off my chest that I have been meaning to say for a long time.

Shiina Ringo isn’t the greatest pop musician on the planet.

A conclusion that I have been putting off reaching for a while and maybe I can avoid coughing up too much blood by qualifying the statement with the words ‘any more’.

Tokyo Jihen’s last three albums have simply been disappointments. These albums, named Variety, Sports and Discovery respectively, have all had their stand out tracks on them. On each there have perhaps been 2 or 3 songs I really liked but for an album by a woman who consistently knocked my socks off with almost everything she did as a solo artist, it just isn’t good enough.

Maybe there are many reasons for this, Tokyo Jihen are not the same ‘dream ensemble band’ she created in 2004 as two of this members have moved on since it’s inception. Also she is not the sole creative force in the band any more, since those two original members left after only one album, she writes much less of the songs present on their CDs than she used to. It may also be that she simply isn’t the hungry, rebellious yet ultimately shy girl that she was 10 years ago.

Whatever the reason, it is the live performances this band pulls out of the hat that allow me to keep the faith. The amount of energy present in these shows is nothing short of revelatory. This is strange because the 2 newer musicians in the band don’t have half the stage presence as the people they replaced. Despite this though, the versions of the songs present in their concerts are more immediate to me. It’s strange but once I hear their songs performed live, I acquire a greater appreciation for the studio versions and start enjoying them immensely.

Spa & Treatment, the tour that accompanied Variety, gave me so much love for their most maligned (a least by their international fan base) album. I actually attended Ultra C, the tour which supported with the release of Sports, and despite having crappy seats (which no one used by the way, we all stood up) I enjoyed so much. That feeling was only magnified upon watching the DVD. It was truly a great performance that night, perhaps their best since those other 2 members (beginning to sound like a broken record now) left.

This brings me to the answer to my little quiz at the top of this post and Jihen’s latest album, Discovery. As I said before I was disappointed with this release, I felt it was largely spoilt by the order the songs on the disc if anything. The tone of the album is all over the place and I actually realised (discovered if you will) that it is better to play this album in shuffle mode. And what of the associated tour? Well, I shall be in attendance on 2nd December, then I will find out if they can knock this songs out of the park again or if Discovery is the first Shiina Ringo CD I consign to the dustbin.

And the name of this new tour? It is known as LIVE TOUR 2011 DISCOVERY.

Bit of a disappointment really…..