I have already told you about Japanese stereotypes of British people but how do you think Japanese people think we (and by we I mean non-Japanese) see them?

That may seem like an odd somewhat convoluted question but it is exactly the topic covered by the 1989 song Funk Fujiyama by Kome Kome Club.  Just how accurate are they? Lets find out.

ワタシハ NIHON ハジメテデス
watashi wa nihon hajimete desu
It’s my first time in Japan.

GINZAトッテモさんデスGOOD!
Ginza tottemo-san desu GOOD!
Ginza is very GOOD!

ジャペーンのLADY 女性ミンナUTAMAROデス!
jyapeen no LADY jyosei minna UTAMARO desu!
Japan lady women are all Utamaro.

YOSHIWARAトッテモさんデスGOOD!
YOSHIWARA tottemosan desu GOOD!
Yoshiwara is really GOOD!

A’ha A’ha 空を越えて
A’ha A’ha sora wo koete
A’ha A’ha Cross the sky,

A’ha A’ha 海を越えて
A’ha A’ha umi wo koete
A’ha A’ha cross the sea,

A’ha A’ha 丘を越えて行けばガイジン
A’ha A’ha oka wo koete ikeba gaijin
A’ha A’ha cross the hills and if you go you will be a foreigner.

GET’S YOU! GET’S YOU! MAN

—Chorus———————————————–
えーびばでい SAMURAI SUSHI GEISHA
eebibidei SAMURAI SUSHI GEISHA
Everybody samurai, sushi, geisha.

びゅうていほーる FUJIYAMA HA! HA! HA!
byuuteifuuru FUJIYAMA HA! HA! HA!
Beautiful Mount Fuji, HA! HA! HA!

コンニチワ サヨナラ コレイクラ
konnichiwa sayonara kore ikura
Hello, goodbye, how much is this?

カミカゼ HARAKIRI HA! HA! HA!
kamikaze HARAKIRI HA! HA! HA!
Kamikaze, harakiri, HA! HA! HA!
———————————————————

カケジク好きDETH ミソスープ
kakejiku suki DETH miso suupu
I like hanging scrolls (DEATH!) , miso soup.

きゃめらハダイジョブ さんデスGOOD!
kyamera wa daijyobu san desu GOOD!
The camera is fine, GOOD!

OCHA SAKE HIROSHIMA NARA KYOTO
Green tea, sake, Hiroshima, Nara, Kyoto.

ですこじゃ ぎゃるに
desukojya gyaruni
Disco girl,

もぉてんDETHグーッと!
mooten DETH guuddo!
modern, death, goooood!

A’ha A’ha 虹を越えて
A’ha A’ha niji wo koete
A’ha A’ha Cross the raindow,

A’ha A’ha 夜を越えて
A’ha A’ha yoru wo koete
A’ha A’ha Cross the night,

A’ha A’ha 時差を越えて ボケテ ネボケテ
A’ha A’ha jisa wo koete hokete nebokete
A’ha A’ha Cross the time zones, you will be befuddled and only half awake.

GET’S YOU! MAN

(Chorus)

『ワタシニデンワシテクダサイ
watashi ni denwa shitekudasai
Please phone me

デカケルトキハワスレズニ…』
dekakeru toki wa wasurezu ni
when I go out I won’t forget!

A’ha A’ha 空を越えて
A’ha A’ha sora wo koete
A’ha A’ha Cross the sky,

A’ha A’ha 海を越えて
A’ha A’ha umi wo koete
A’ha A’ha cross the sea,

A’ha A’ha 丘を越えて行けばガイジン
A’ha A’ha oka wo koete ikeba gaijin
A’ha A’ha cross the hills and if you go you will be a foreigner.

GET’S YOU! GET’S YOU! MAN

(Chorus) x2

With regards to the translation, the first thing that stuck out for me when I copied the lyrics from a well known Japanese lyric website was that the English bits were written in Hiragana (mostly) and the Japanese bits were written in Katakana, which is the opposite of how things are usually written. I thought that was (kind of) clever. The next thing is that I guess this is supposed to be sang as though it is a foreigner singing so there is a lot of random English words in there and not only that, they are doing some funky things with Japanese as well.

Sometimes there are adding a random さん(san) to adverbs. In Japanese using san as a suffix basically means “Mr”, for example “Tanaka-san” means “Mr Tanaka”. I’ve no idea why they were adding it to the end of adverbs. Also, on occasion, they say “death” seemingly randomly. I think they did this because “death” sounds very similar to です(desu) which means “It is” and often used at the end of sentences. Their little joke is pretty impossible to translate.

I had trouble making out what they were saying in the line “mooten DETH guuddo!”. Going by the fact it is in Hiragana, I think they are trying to say an English word but I have no idea what it is. As a result that entire line makes no sense. What do you think they are saying there? Please let me know.

A new piece of grammar for me was the 〜ず(~zu) ending for verbs. After a bit of internet digging I found that using “-zu ni” makes it a ‘without’ kind of negative, someone did something without doing something else prior. For example:

牛乳を飲まずに給食を食べる。
gyunyu wo nomazu ni kyushoku wo taberu.
I eat school lunch without drinking milk.

So in the song he goes out without forgetting to call.

Ginza and Yoshiwara are places in Tokyo, while Utamaro refers to Kitagawa Utamaro an old Japanese painter.

——————————————————–

This may be a very silly song but I feel that they are spot on. They are trying to say the things that non-Japanese discuss when they think of Japan. In the song they mention stuff like samurai, geisha, harakiri and kamakazi. In my experience these are exactly the kind of things that people talk about when I tell them I live in Japan. I spent much of this summer back in England and Colombia and when Japan was brought up they would often make some kind of weak joke about this stuff.

In fact, in Colombia such talk was often accompanied by this pose, which was disappointing.

Anyway, I discovered this song from an internet show which goes by the name of You Can Play This. The fellow on there shows us some video games which were only released in Japan but lets us know that, with a little bit of effort, we can all play them. This song really is a perfect fit for the show’s theme tune and I encourage you to check them out if you like video games at all.

In other news, I can’t wait to sing this song at karaoke. It’s another to add to my Karaoke Hit List.

AKB 48 are the kind of pop group that give Japan the reputation for terrible manufactured pop that it enjoys overseas and they are just about the most extreme version possible. They consist of a collection of 48 (although the number goes up and down) young models who are split into three ‘teams’. I think these teams are headed by one of the 3 most popular girls at any given time. This is voted for by their fans, it’s supposed to reflect their personalities and not their looks, or something. When the girls reach 20 years of age their are generally considered too old and thrown onto the scrap heap or graduate to become actors and solo pop stars (or porn stars).

At the moment AKB are the queens of the Japanese entertainment industry and ridiculously popular with both kids and adults. This has led to their song, Heavy Rotation, becoming a bit of a karaoke classic. Every time I’ve been to karaoke recently this song has come up in some way or an other.

Really, I’m not complaining, it’s a cheesy song (reminds me a bit of S Club 7) but isn’t that what karaoke is all about? I’ve had fun singing along to it drunk and at 4 o’clock in the morning it is nice to see a video of scantily clad young ladies having a pillow fight.

The thing I really took from these karaoke experiences though was one line in the lyrics of Heavy Rotation, “MAX　ハイテンション” (MAX high tension). I realised that ‘tension’ was another example of 和製英語 (waseieigo, words borrowed from English).

It turned out to be not so simple.

When talking to a Japanese woman who is soon to go to Australia on a working holiday, I asked why she wanted to leave Japan. She told me that it was because the hairdresser’s where she worked was a very low tension place.

To me this seemed like a good thing but it turns out that ‘tension’ means a very different thing in Japanese.

Dictionary.com states the definition of tension as:

ten·sion   [ten-shuhn]
–noun

1.the act of stretching or straining.
2.the state of being stretched or strained.
3.mental or emotional strain; intense, suppressed suspense, anxiety, or excitement.

In Japanese it means none of those things, someone who is described as ハイテンション (high tension) is someone in high spirits. So, someone who is the life and soul of the party is high tension. A class where everyone has fun and enjoys the lesson is a high tension classroom.

It turns out then the aforementioned woman’s hair salon was a boring place and not free and easy as you would expect a ‘low tension’ place to be. The meaning of tension therefore has completely changed in Japanese it has a good feeling, rather than a bad one.

It must also be pointed out that if someone is described as ハイ (high) it means the same as ハイテンション. Again the English has a very different connotation.

So after paying for a recent karaoke session, I had a look at the receipt and noticed that the tracks we sung were listed on it, which is a nice touch. I then realised something slightly strange.

All the titles of the English songs were written in katakana, which is fair enough, it’s easier for Japanese folk to read. However all the titles of the Japanese songs we sang were written in English, which made much easier for English folk such as myself to read.

Is that ironic? I don’t really know but trying to work out what all the English songs were called could make for a terribly exciting party game.

If you are anything like me you will absolutely love the song Debaser by the Pixies. Here is a word of warning however, don’t ever try to sing it at karaoke.

It will sound terrible, everything that makes that song truly ace has been removed by the power of midi. Even it you think, like I did, that you can’t sing so therefore Frank Black’s screaming will be possible to pull off, just don’t do it. There is a lot more to that song than a screaming man.

Obviously all the above is irrelevant if Kim Deal in the room to sing it with you.

Then it would rock all socks.

There are many stereotypes of Japanese people, one is that they love their karaoke. Going by the number of karaoke bars around here, this is true. They are everywhere in cities and large towns, sometimes there are as many as two or three on a single street. It’s almost as bad as the abundance of GAME stores in the UK.

Karaoke bars don’t have the same set up as in Britain, drunken humiliation in front of strangers is not as popular with the Japanese as it seems to be with Brits. So groups of people go into private booths and sing their heart out with their friends, rather than on a stage to a crowd of randoms.

The more often I go to these places, the more I find my level with quite what song I can get away with. I say “get away with” rather than sing because I really can’t. I broke my karaoke cherry singing Poison by Alice Cooper and that is about the only kind of song I can do. If I try to do any song that requires anything other than a low gravely growl it just sounds horrid. Really horrid. Dirty Diana is out of window and woe betide anyone who hears me sing anything by Queen.

Good Old Fashioned Loverboy was such a disaster and you will by surprised quite how bad a choice Debaser was.

Luckily there are a great amount of songs which are now on Shaun’s Karaoke Hit List. Songs such as Fuel, Hungry Like The Wolf and my magnum opus, I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing. Usually my tactics are to go for a few of these bankers and then go for a few untried experiments. At the moment I am interested in trying out I’ve Just Seen A Face and maybe Mr. Brightside.

I also really want to have a go at King Of Bongo by Mano Negra but annoyingly and disgracefully Manu Chao and his back catalogue are just not admired enough here. I wonder how popular karaoke is in Latin America? Only there can I live my dream of singing about little monkeys playing bongos.