Stargazing (Tentai Kansoku) - Bump of Chicken

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

Hello, welcome or welcome back to the 2nd song in my 6 part blog series where I translate Japanese songs, this week’s song is “Stargazing” or “Tentai Kansoku” by Bump of Chicken (天体観測 by Bump of Chicken). It came out in 2001, 16 years ago! That’s how old my brother will be after his birthday this year. Apparently it was used as the opening song for the similarly named drama “Tentai Kansoku,” and it seems like it was this song that propelled Bump of Chicken to stardom.

If you’re looking for more of an introduction to what this blog series is about and how I select songs you should visit my previous blog here.

I’m pretty sure the first time that I’ve heard of this particular band was in Japan during my Junior fall studyaway. The university program I went to paired me up with a Japanese student with the goal of helping me be more acclimated to Japan. In one conversation she said her favorite band was Bump of Chicken, and that night googling them was the first time I heard the song “Tentai Kansoku.” I remember my first impressions were kinda “meh,” I thought the melody sounded kinda strange, but since then the weirdness has grown on me.

Bump of Chicken is a pretty funky sounding band name. I honestly thought that the name was based off of a Chicken’s Coxcomb, I mean where else would you find a bump on a chicken?

I get it now. It’s a coxcomb. A cock’s comb. A chicken’s comb. It looks like a comb.

Plausible but not confirmed, so I figured I would do more investigating for this blog post. According to the official statement put out by the band and their company, “Bump of Chicken” means「臆病者の一撃」, which kinda translates to “The Coward Strikes Back.” A yahoo answers (which is still going strong in Japan) goes on to clarify that most English speakers agree that “Bump of Chicken” is definitely not what they’re saying it means.

Alternative theories for how it kind of relates is that “Bump of Chicken” could mean “Goosebumps,” as for how that relates to “The Coward Strikes Back,” we could speculate that wimpy people have more goosebumps, or that “The Coward Strikes Back” sounds like the title of a Goosebumps book.

Honestly, the members of the band were probably like:

“we need a cool band name…”

“how about something in English”

“yeahhhh…”

“What was that word on our last vocab quiz?”

“Chicken”

“That’s too short”

“Uhhh...Bump of, how about Bump of Chicken”

Anyway, I really enjoyed translating this song. It was way less confusing than the previous song, and it painted beautiful scenes in my head. Whenever I’m translating I always have this epic MV going on in the back of my mind kinda like in the style of Makoto Shinkai. This is where I wish I could project my thoughts onto a video. Someone has already made a pretty cool MV, and the fact that it was released 2 years ago speaks to the enduring nature of the song.  

In the song there’s one line that repeats pretty frequently,

「イマ」という ほうき星 君と二人追いかけていた

Which I translated as,

"We’ve been chasing this comet called 'Ima' together."

I bring this up mainly because there’s some ambiguity going on here. 「イマ」or “ima” is written in katakana which is the Japanese alphabet system primarily used for words borrowed from other languages. Sometimes katakana is also used for emphasis, KINDA LIKE WRITING EVERYTHING IN CAPS.

In addition “Ima” also means now, so the line could read “We’ve been chasing this comet called “now” together.” Where it could take on a metaphorical meaning where the act of stargazing (in the present and now) brings the main character closer to his long gone childhood friend.

I thought it would be really sick if “Ima” was a real comet so that this line could have a more dual meaning. Unfortunately from a quick google search it seems like there is no comet named “Ima.” How ever there is a comet called 70P/Kojima which was discovered by Nobuhisa Kojima.