Johnny the Surfer - Keisuke Kuwata

Turn on CC (Closed Captioning) for the english translation!!!

*Apologies for how font sometimes goes grey. I've tried a few fixes and nothings working. PM me if you know why

This semester (my last semester in college!) I’m working on a series of blog posts focusing on six different Japanese songs. In these posts I’ll be translating, commenting, and covering these different songs, the first of which is “Johnny the Surfer” by Keisuke Kuwata (波乗りジョニー by 桑田佳祐). I did a little googling and Keisuke Kuwata has apparently been in the Japanese music industry for quite some time since 1987~ish, so this guy is definitely also appealing to an older crowd of Japanese people. If you didn’t turn on the closed captions, this song is about falling into summer love, a cold slap in the face when autumn comes, and one dude’s resolution to win back the heroine's love.

Some more background on my personal motivations, I’m using this series as an opportunity to do extra self study in Japanese, incorporate ukulele time into a class, and post a little more often since school usually = blog drought. You may have seen a pilot blog I did here, I’m also learning more about filming, recording, and editing videos, so fingers crossed that the production value and quality will increase as the semester goes.

You may be curious about the criteria of how I’m selecting songs. On Youtube I’m subscribed to three different Jpop cover bands (Goose House, 山根かずきバンド, and 粉ミルク), and sometimes when I’m working I’ll just let youtube autoplay go on in the background. I’m slowly curating a playlist of Japanese songs that I enjoy (on Youtube because spotify has a pitiful selection of Jpop -- but a surprisingly large collection of Kpop songs).

I don’t know about you but I almost never pay attention to the lyrics in a song, often times I like “dayum, this song catchy” and go to look up the lyrics and I’m like nope. Can’t do this. Anyway, where I’m trying to go with this is, I have no idea what English songs are talking about, much less what Japanese songs are talking about, so I’m picking which songs I’m translating purely on how they sound. So every song is a surprise!

What I’ve learned so far is that translating Japanese lyrics is hard. In the paraphrased words of my sensei who is checking all my translations ‘yeah, it’s kind of difficult'.

Here’s a list of things that make it hard:

Things that sound okay in Japanese sometimes sound so wrong in English

For example I translated this line いつも肩寄せ合って  僕に触って as “That’s why I shuffle closer to you, our shoulders bumping,” which sounds like it could be vaguely cute. If I just do a first pass at translating what comes out is “[We’re] always sitting with our arms around each other, touch me” which instantly sounds 100% more creepy...

In Japanese, often reversed, lines are, for poetry’s sake

For the line 夢を叶えてくれよと,  星に願いを込めた日も the english translation is roughly “If [my] dreams could come true, that day that [I] wished upon a star.” Which sounds really weird if it was even supposed to sound remotely poetic in English, so I changed it to “I sometimes wish upon stars my dream would come true,”

The subject is often implied but not explicitly there in Japanese

So trying to figure out who the subject is can sometimes be very context dependent, and sometimes even purposefully ambiguous so that it can be read in different ways. For example,「出逢い」「別れ」のたびに  二度と恋に落ちないと, “In the journey of ‘encounters’ and ‘breakups’ If [we] don’t fall in love again.” But maybe it’s if you don’t fall in love again, or the less likely if I don’t fall in love again. We can’t be completely sure.