indessed roscivs

As many of you may already know, I’m planning a trip to Tokyo next month. I’ve been there once before, but for business—this will be the first time that I actually get to do what I want to do while I’m there. Mostly what I want to do is speak Japanese and play Go, but I’ll probably do a little bit of sight-seeing as well.

Yesterday, I made reservations at the ryokan we’ll be staying at. I was terribly nervous—they didn’t have an email address, so I had to make the reservation over the phone, and my Japanese conversation skills are shaky at best. (Speaking of which, I just received the results from the Japanese Language Proficiency test I took in December. I passed! 90% in writing, 80% in reading, and 60% in listening. That’s about what I expected, and enough over the 70% minimum requirement to pass handily. This year’s goal—JLPT 3!)

So, in preparation, I wrote down the entire dialog as I imagined it would go, along with other vocabulary words that I might need, just in case. I added the phrase for, “Do you mind if I speak English?” in case I got stuck—I figured in a foreigner-friendly ryokan they’d at least have one person who spoke English. Even so, I nervously kept putting it off until finally I managed to bite the bullet, pick up the phone, and dial the international number. I took a deep breath and mentally prepared myself for what was to come, as I heard the click on the other line as the phone was answered.

“Hello, Kimi Ryokan. How may I help you?”

I noticed some surprising things as I was learning the lyrics to Konayuki. Usually, when I’m learning a song, the chords are the most difficult part—lyrics are memorized easily. But when the lyrics are in another language, that dynamic changes considerably. The only difficult part in the chords is a change from D to B minor—other than that, I can play along with the mp3 at full tempo. But the lyrics, this time, are a little more of a challenge.

I experimented with a few different forms. The chords I found online had the lyrics in romaji—for example, “konayuki mau kisetsu wa itsumo sure chigai”. I also tried putting them in hiragana—”こなゆきまうきせつはいつもすれちがい” for the same phrase. But it turned out that the easiest way for me to read the lyrics fluently was using kanji—粉雪舞う季節はいつもすれ違い—albeit with furigana (very small hiragana above each character). In this form I found the text very easy to read and understand—and keep in the correct rhythm.

When singing in any language, there are natural places to extend certain syllables or compress others in order to accomodate the melodic flow of the notes. When singing in your native language, you don’t even notice when you do this—it’s simply a natural extension of speaking, even if you would never actually speak that way. But when singing in another language, you often find that they compress or extend in places that seem strange to you.

The one that always gets me in Japanese is the dipthong “ai” (like in the English word “ice”). If, for example, I have four notes, but the Japanese text says “naikedo”, I imagine I have to extend one of the syllables, since there are only three syllables, right? Wrong—Japanese breaks up the dipthong into two syllables: “na” and “i” (rhyming with the English “pa” and “he”, respectively). This sequence occurs several times throughout the song (with, confusingly enough, the same sound being compressed into a single syllable elsewhere, when necessary), and I almost always got it wrong. But strangely enough, when I abandoned the romaji, it became much easier and natural to find the correct moments to pause and continue.

The final anecdote from my song-learning experience concerns a word in katakana. When katakana is used, it almost always represents a borrowed word—most frequently, from English. The particular word in the song was “a-su-fa-ru-to”, and in the song, accented on the second syllable. Normally, after understanding some basics of how English words get transformed into Japanese, it’s pretty easy to figure out a word based on the katakana. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what this was supposed to mean. Finally, after singing through the song several times, I gave up and checked the dictionary. Turns out it was the emphasis throwing me off—the English word is “asphalt”, and if I’d simply emphasized the first and third syllables instead of the second, I would have got it instantly!

The season when powdered snow dances always passes by …
Powdered snow, if you paled me, white to the heart,
Could you share our loneliness?

The song 粉雪—konayuki—was featured in a Japanese television drama entitled, “One Liter of Tears”, based on a book of the same name. It’s not so much a book as a diary—it was written by a young girl who was diagnosed with a fatal disease when she was fifteen years old. She writes about the daily events of her life, which include the normal activities of a teenager, along with the difficulties unique to struggling with such a disease. The diary was published when she was twenty-three—two years before she died.

Powdered snow, if you paled me, white to the heart,
You would wrap around our loneliness and send it back into the sky

I’m not sure I could handle reading the book or watching the series—it seems just too sad for me to manage—but I love the song. It has simple chords, so it’s easy enough for me to play, but the lyrics are moving and the melody stirring. I’ve been practicing it all weekend long.

Powdered snow, this heart that has transcended time is faltering

It’s a beautiful song.

A couple of years ago, I was searching for some Japanese music to listen to. However, as I had just barely started learning Japanese, I wasn’t sure how I could go about discovering new artists without knowing much Japanese (or even being able to type Japanese characters). On a lark, I decided to try searching for the word クリスマス—Christmas—because I figured, (a) there would be a lot of songs with the word “Christmas” in the title, and (b) it was easy for me to type because it was a completely phonetic word.

My brilliant plan didn’t work out very well, unfortunately. It turned out that most songs I downloaded were actually by American artists, simply labeled in Japanese. (Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas” was apparently very popular in Japan.) I found a few interesting songs, but didn’t discover any smashing new artists whose sound I really enjoyed. Or so I thought.

Last September, I was cleaning out my downloads folder when I came across a video file I had never seen before. It had a huge filename and was obviously mislabeled with dozens of keywords one is likely to search for—one of which, I realize now, must have been クリスマス. I watched the first few seconds of it, but being short on time, simply relabeled it “Japanese Music Video”, since that’s what it was, and filed it away for another day.

Last Saturday was that day. I was cleaning out my downloads folder again, and came across the file and decided to take the time to watch it. I found it strangely moving, and (now armed with a little better grasp of the Japanese language) quickly discovered that it was called 粉雪—konayuki—and was written by a band called レミオロメン—Remioromen.

According to the Japanese Wikipedia page, the band’s name is a made-up word, consisting of a fragment meaningful to each of the three main band members. The “re” comes from the member named Fujimaki, who was fond of the band “Radiohead” (re-di-o-he-ddo in Japanese). “Mio” is from the member Jinguuji, from the name of the girlfriend he had at the time. And finally, “romen” is from the member Maeda, who took it from the Japanese word for streetcar, “romendensha” (literally road-surface electric-car).

The name of the song was “konayuki”—powdered snow. It was fitting, then, that this morning I awoke to freshly fallen snow upon the ground—as if I’d been calling it to me all weekend long.