As you learn another language you start to realise that words which are commonly said in one language simply don’t exist in another. Either that or the usage of one word in a certain language is changed.

Walking about Tokyo, getting on with my life, I’d noticed that people tend to say natsukashi a lot. After looking up this word in my trusty pocket dictionary I discovered the definition for this word is nostalgic. That was good enough for me and I went on my merry way.

That definition suited me just fine for the longest time until one school lunchtime the kids were getting exceedingly happy about having jelly served up for the first time in ages. Almost in one voice they all exclaimed “Natsukashiiiiii“. This almost made my brain explode. I could not comprehend quite how any 8-year-old could justify calling anything nostalgic. “They’re eight”, my thought processes were reasoning, “They haven’t had the time to get nostalgic, everything is still new”.

It was that time I realised that natsukashi and nostalgic didn’t so much have a one to one correlation but natsukashi meants something more like, “This reminds me of something I enjoyed once, sometime ago”. I guess it could be something from your childhood anywhere up to 6 months ago.

This month, meanwhile, has been natsukashi overload for me. Recently I watched the live action remake of Ranma ½, which brought back so many memories. I first saw the original cartoon version way back when I was 14 in Colombia, in Spanish. It was the first cartoon I watched that I realised was from Japan and it set me off on the slippery slope that eventually led me to come here. I remember buying a new VCR that could play American videos just so I could import some from the US and watch it in English. I remember buying the comics and being shocked that I spent so much money on something I could read through in an hour.

Watching the live action show, it reminded me about all the silly gender bending humour, the original kung fu panda, love struck doctors, lost piglets and perverted old men. So much so I just had to procure all of the cartoon series and finally watch it through in Japanese and I’m having so much fun seeing it all again. I’m especially enjoying the early episodes I watched in English, way back when, and comparing how they originally sounded to the memories of the English version in my head. The American pronunciation of “Shikoku” still haunts my soul.

After writing this I realise that I have just described something that could be classed as nostalgic as well as natsukashi, oh well. On Friday I ate a saffron cake for the first time in ages, that was natsukashi, I guess.

Following on from the men’s win in the Asian Cup, Japan’s soccer success continues with the Japanese women’s football team winning the Women’s World Cup in Germany. Well done to them, I didn’t watch any games but I am told they played well and deserved their victory.

Going by this video on Time Out Tokyo, it seems that I wasn’t the only one who didn’t really know much about them.

The main thing that stuck out for me though was their choice of nickname. The women’s team is often referred to as Nadeshiko Japan.

Nadeshiko (or なでしこ) is the Japanese name for a plant whose scientific name is the very unladylike Dianthus Superbus. It grows in northern Asia and also in Europe. It’s English name is the far fairer but still not really that feminine, Large Pink.

However, the Japanese ladies team was not called Nadeshiko because of their desire to be a really convenient mass transit system or a building in Portland. It was called this because of the Japanese ideal of Yamato Nadeshiko (大和撫子).

Yamato Nadeshiko is a term for the ideal traditional Japanese woman. Perhaps this is now an antiquated notion but the model Japanese lady was once considered to be feminine while being chaste and devoted to her husband. She would never disagree publicly with her husband but if she felt she could guide him on the right track without him losing face, she would. Also she would appear to be delicate (like the nadeshiko) to the outside world but actually be strong enough to raise children and do the housework. The term comes from Yamato (大和) which is one of the many words referring to Japan (the two kanji mean ‘big’ and ‘harmony/Japanese style’) and the aforementioned Nadeshiko.

Being the big geek that I am though, the word Nadeshiko stood out for me because it flung my mind back to an old anime series which went by the name of Martian Successor Nadeshiko. This show not only keeps up the anime tradition of having silly names for everything but also has big giant robots too.

Released during the Evangelion boom, when I was basically hoovering up every anime I could get my hands on, it somehow passed me by. Apperently it didn’t take itself too seriously (which is how I like my fiction) but for some reason I didn’t take to it. Maybe it was simply because my local library didn’t have it available to rent, I’m fickle like that.

Elsewhere in the world of anime and manga, there is a Japanese comic and animation going by the name Yamato Nadeshiko Shichi Henge. Again, I’m not sure about the plot but what is interesting here is how the title was translated. Rather than translate it directly, the original title being something to do with perfect Japanese women and kabuki dances, they chose to call it The Wallflower. According to the urban dictionary a wallflower is “A person nobody pays attention to, and fades into the background, but are really genuine and interesting people if you take the time to get to know them”.

Perhaps Wallflower then is the perfect name for the English women’s football team, given how coverage in the UK was hidden away behind the red button. If they follow Japan’s lead with a flowery nickname, maybe one day they will win something.

Most of my research for this post was basically taken from links stemming from Wikipedia’s nadeshiko disambiguation page.

To Japanese women just about everything can be described as cute. That boy, those clothes, that drain, those leaves on the floor, that lunch box, anything. This leads to a bit of a rejection to this word and all it stands for, as far as I am concerned.

Moe (pronounced mo-é) is Japanese term for super cute things, it is mired in geeky subculture. Especially stuff such as maid cafés, cat girls and anime. According to wikipedia anime moe character designs have:

Large eyes (1/5 size of face)
Small nose
Flat face
Tall iris
Body 5.7 heads tall
Thin limbs
Large head
Colourful hair
Fringe over eyes

And I don’t like it one bit.

When I see an anime or manga with intense moe styling I am usually rather put off and refuse to even give it a chance. This all changed though when I first heard about an anime series called Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

My relationship with this show did not get off to the best of starts, at first I was put off by the silly name and then I saw that it was a Magical Girl anime, the genre that brought us Sailor Moon. Finally I saw the character designs and they were as moe as can be. As a result I completely wrote off the show as something sickly sweet for little girls.

The show just wouldn’t go away though and I found various essays about it invading my internet browser. Most of these said that this show was something special and different. Suddenly things about it’s production started to jump out at me. While the frilly, frilly character designs were off-putting, some of the background designs I was noticing looked like the contents of a deranged fever dream and were very intriguing indeed. I also read that a former hentai director was one of the main creative minds behind it and that showed it may just be trying to do something different, so I decided to give it a go.

Things did not start too well, it seemed like it would be a very by the numbers TV show albeit with some funky dream scape sections. Just about as I was going to give up on it something unexpected happened that caused me to let out a gasp and the show revealed it’s true colours.

It is just so DARK….

…and cruel.

From here on in it begins to deconstruct what it is to be a magical girl and that maybe it is not all dainty outfits and lolly pops after all. Once you get into the mindset of the show you can certainly see where all the plot threads are going as they are introduced but it is fun to see just how far they push it.

Once the dust settles you realise that this is a landmark show. Much like Evangelion before it, it takes what has been done before and puts a new spin on things. Like Evangelion there will be hundreds of copycat shows appearing that don’t quite understand why this show was so successful in the first place. Unlike Evangelion however, it does not seem to have broken into mainstream consciousness and may remain something that only anime fans are really aware of.

It not a perfect show however, I do like that this series took my preconceptions of moe designed shows and threw them in the bin (and then stamped on it a bit) but it is perhaps a little too dark for it’s own good. Once you realise that nothing good will ever happen to any of the characters it all becomes a bit too depressing for it’s own good. It’s hard to tell if it even ended on a high note or not.

Madoka Magica has shown me that I should be a bit more open to media which has aspects that would put me off normally. God knows I get frustrated when people ignore the things that I recommend because of some silly reason, I had better stop doing it myself.

I really should give the K-Ons (more moe designs), Babylon 5s (can’t take another Star Trek style scifi), Battlestar Galaticas (same) and Bright Eyeses (I blame Jo Whiley) of this world a try because I just might end up liking them.

I really should have remembered the melon bread.

In 1999 a city-sized alien spacecraft crashed on South Ataria Island. Over the course of the next 10 years, U.N. Spacy, the space related wing of the U.N, reverse-engineered the technology and rebuilt the spacecraft, naming it the SDF-1 Macross. In 2009, during the launch ceremony of the Macross, a space war fleet from an alien race of humanoid giants arrived and identified the Macross as a former battleship used by their enemies. In the resulting battle the Macross was catapulted to the edge of the solar system and forced to come back to Earth by conventional power.

This is the view of the future as presented by the wonderful eighties anime, Macross. Its prediction of the future was wrong, it also incorrectly predicted that aeroplanes will be able to turn into robots and that a song can save the world.

One of it’s many sequels did get something right though…..

Macross Plus, the only Macross sequel to live up to the original, was made in 1994 and in true Macross style it contains futuristic dogfights, a pop idol and not only one, but two, love triangles. The first involves two test pilots and a music producer while the other contains one of the test pilots, the music producer and the pop idol. While the first is not so interesting, just two guys trying to out macho each other, the second is much more compelling.

The pop idol in question is a computer AI, named Sharon Apple, which creates light shows and displays holograms of itself during concerts. Myung, the music producer, generates Sharon’s music by hooking her brain up to the computer and uploading her musical knowledge. The AI then performs the finishing touches. Myung is the talent behind the talent so to speak. The problem is that the AI is reading all her thoughts and emotions and becomes obsessed with the test pilot she truly loves. The computer pursues him relentlessly and without any morals, perception of pain or limitations, it does some pretty nasty things. Sharon Apple is basically what HAL 9000 would be if he took up a pop career and then fell in love with someone.

So, Sharon Apple was a music generating virtual idol, she was the first Vocaloid.

Vocaloid software is a computer program which can synthesize singing by typing in lyrics and melody. The melody and the lyrics can be entered for each note and the software can change the stress of the pronunciations, change tone and add effects to the voice. The voice is specially recorded from voice actors or singers, each piece of Vocaloid software features a different type of voice.

This software has become very popular in Japan and I think it is not because of the programs themselves but because of the cute little mascots on the packaging. Each piece of software is designed to be “a singer in a box” acting as a replacement for an actual singer. They have invented a character for each voice, which have become known as Vocaloids.

Of all the various characters they have made one Vocaloid has become very, very popular here in Japan. Her name is Hatsune Miku and she is everywhere. Apparently it all started when a user of the software uploaded a song with a little animation of Miku carrying a leek on Nico Nico Douga, a kind of Japanese Youtube. From here many others began making videos and songs and sharing it on that site.

The character is so popular now that I have seen her on the side of race cars, on drinks bottles and outside karaoke bars. She has two PSP games and one Arcade music game by Sega which seem to be very successful. It has got to the stage where there have been live concerts of ‘her’ most popular covers and original songs.

This is where the comparison to Macross Plus comes in. At Miku’s concerts a hologram projection is used on stage and seeing images of people cheering a hologram gives me mad flashbacks to that old anime.

The comparison is quite freaky.

A Cartoon:

Real Life?:

I’m sure the stuff that geeky looking kid was trying to do in the cartoon is the content of those Hatsune Miku fans’ wet dreams.

One of the overreaching themes of Macross Plus is that a computer can never match a real person’s voice when singing. At the bottom of this post is a Youtube playlist of an original song plus the Vocaloid cover. As great a technical feat as Vocaloid software is, imagine a Dalek singing one of your favourite ever songs. It’s just not right.

httpvp://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=D34E88775BC25565

You have got to admire a character design like Lum’s. The fact she is usually only wearing a tiger striped bikini is bound to draw attention for a start. Couple that with the green hair, horns and knee high boots and you have rather an iconic character.

She is one of the main characters in a manga and anime which started in the 1970s called Urusei Yatsura. The plot mainly revolves around Lum (an alien) and Ataru (a letch) who she fell in love with after he foiled her father’s attempt to take over the world. He did this by beating her in a game of tag. Lum is basically sweet and innocent but also has a very hot temper and being an alien can shoot electricity out of her hand. This comes in handy to keep poor old Ataru in check because being a pervert at heart he is generally trying to get with every lady that moves.

As you can probably tell by now the plot is pretty barmy but it is a fun series which interestingly has often been described as a Japanese version of The Simpsons. Not, I think, because they are particularly similar in tone or set up but because of the enduring popularity they have even years and years down the line and also because they are both chock full of cultural references.

American culture is pretty well known abroad so The Simpsons is not a problem for British audiences, Urusei Yatsura on the other hand can become almost impenetrable to foreigners. So much so that the company that localised Urusei Yatsura for the USA had to provide extensive liner notes for the series explaining references and why they chose to translate the many puns in the show the way they did.

For its run as a TV show Urusei Yatsura generally stayed at the level of ‘fun and charming hijinks’ for the majority of the time. However there were also a series of movies made back in the eighties and the second of which was directed by a certain Mamoru Oshii. If the name doesn’t ring a bell he is the man who directed the Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor films and also live action stuff like Stray Dog. If you haven’t seen these films I can tell you that they definitely cannot be described as ‘fun and charming hijinks’.

So for a brief moment Urusei Yatsura became a philosophy driven art house film about the nature of dreams and reality, the difference between a sweet dream and a nightmare and whether our dreams will make us truly happy. It is a great film, the kind that has to be watched a few times to work out and just about as far from the original show as you can get. I implore you to check it out, it’s called Beautiful Dreamer. If only The Simpsons Movie had dared to do a similar thing. Apparently the original author of the manga did not like Oshii’s interpretation of her creation and he never got the chance to create another film with these characters, which is a shame.

Earlier I noted that this anime is a hard one to translate, this is true to the extent that Animeigo, the US distributor, did not even attempt to make an English dubbed version. Over in the UK though, the BBC did give it a go. You probably never heard of it because it was given the title Lum the Invader Girl and shown as part of a ‘Japan week’ on the now defunct channel BBC Choice. The voices were provided by Anna Friel and Matt Lucas, two fairly famous actors in the UK and I think Lucas did a good job, really capturing the spirit of the original Ataru.

The BBC dub wasn’t a great success though, they only dubbed the first 3 episodes and their definition of ‘translation’ was very very loose. In the great British tradition of dubbing foreign shows such as The Magic Roundabout and Monkey, the script was largely thrown out the window and they seemed to more or less make it up as they went along. They added in references to stuff like Pokemon, Millwall Football Club and The Archers, what they produced was actually quite amusing despite hardly being true to the source.

Judge for yourself:

This wasn’t the show’s only flirtation with British popular culture though. A lo-fi band, once described as the most indie band in the world by NME chose to call themselves Urusei Yatsura. They happen to be one of my favourites and I feel were criminally ignored with only one UK top 40 single to show for their efforts.

Click on this picture for the song they did a Peel session for and which is perhaps their greatest (also note the UY references in there):

Out of the ashes of that band 3 of the members have recently formed a new band, Projekt A-ko. Please give them a listen too.

Who would have thought a girl in a tiger striped bikini could have such a big effect on people?