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.

Dubai: The "-est" City

A compilation video of my time in Dubai.

This past week I’ve had a blast in Dubai which is all thanks to Abi and the generosity of her parents. This was my first time visiting the Middle East (and my first time in Europe if you count my layover at Amsterdam where I’m currently typing this blog en route back to my last semester at Olin College).

Dubai loves being in the Guinness world records, everywhere we went there was the largest X or the tallest Y, and I get it, everyone wants to be number one. It’s also a relatively young city so it’s constantly under construction, building the next tallest building in the world, or the largest theme park in the world. I’ve also eaten more kebab here than I have in my entire life.

Here are some of the biggest, tallest, coolest places I’ve visited:

1. Dubai Mall (the world’s biggest mall) – True to its name, this place is huge. It has a ridiculous amount of stores from extremely high end stuff like Gucci or Prada to your Forever21. Some people would consider this shopping heaven, but it was so big that trying to window shop could mean walking several miles. It was cool, but exhausting.

2. Burj Kalifa (the world’s tallest building) – Attached to the Dubai Mall is the Burj Khalifa, there’s an entrance from the mall that go through to take an elevator all the way up to the 148th floor which is approximately half a kilometer off the ground. Dubai has a lot of skyscrapers but they all look pretty puny from the world’s tallest.

3. Dubai Frame (soon to be the world’s largest picture frame) – This one is a personal favorite; we saw it pretty frequently driving from Abi’s home to downtown Dubai. It’s basically two buildings with a walkway connecting them but they’re going to hang a picture of the current Sheikh up in the middle (or so I hear).

4. The Palm – So the Palm is this huge island shaped like a palm leaf (which I’d imagine looks really boss from an aerial view but you never really get high enough to see it unless you’re skydiving), which was created by dumping a bunch of sand into the ocean and then hauling rocks to the shoreline to protect it from eroding away. It has a few fancy hotels, the rest of which are residential areas.

5. Desert Safari – We got picked up by a white SUV which took us on a sandy off road path over mountain dunes. Once we got to the camp location we rode camels (for like a 2 minute loop), tried sandboarding (which due to the friction was a sore disappointment), and watched various performances by a belly dancer, fire spinner, and a dude with a spinney dress.

My Water Bottle Whistles

Happy New Year guys, right now I’m in Kawasaki, Japan, on a trip with my SCOPE team visiting Mitsubishi Electric Headquarters. SCOPE stands for Senior Capstone Program in Engineering and Mitsubishi Electric is the sponsoring company that we’ve been working with for the past semester. However this isn’t another post about Japan, it is a post about my water bottle.

My water bottle and I have been inseparable ever since I switched to this particular one the summer of 2016. It has a few key features, it’s thermally insulated, it has a “press to drink” spout, and it has a handle. When I go out I check to see if I have my phone, my wallet, and my water bottle. In fact I keep it around me so often that it cameos in a lot of my pictures.

My water bottle in the top right corner at an event I ran at Olin over the summer.

My water bottle in the bottom left as I attempt the TT dance.

One of the worst feelings in the world is when you feel like you’ve forgotten something. Fifteen minutes before my flight (SFO -> Japan) I’m sitting in my plane when my stomach drops. Shiiiiiiiiiiiit. I forgot my water bottle outside. I unclip my seat belt and rush outside, as soon as I dash out the plane a flight attendant screams “WAAAAIT!.” Apparently once you board a flight you can’t reboard for security reasons. She waves an airport agent over and tells me that he’ll go look for my water bottle. The dude goes out and I’m anxiously waiting. I’m like pretty much 100% sure that my water bottle is gone forever but I still can’t help but hope. He walks back in, shrugs and says “I looked everywhere, even in the trash can, it’s no where.” And in my head I can picture it sitting by itself lonely on the third chair in the left side of the waiting area. Goodbye, I loved you.

So to commemorate its memory here’s a few stories featuring my water bottle.

My water bottle whistles. It does this quiet but audible high pitched whining.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...

It’s kinda funny watching people sitting around me trying to pinpoint where it’s coming from. They’ll assume it’s the light, but then move their head around trying to figure out why it gets quieter. Sometimes they’ll say “is it me or do you hear that sound?”

When they find out it’s my water bottle they’re usually pretty impressed, until I tell them it’s because I fill it with hot water. The hot water creates enough steam that the inside of it is pressurized. As it’s gotten older the rubber gasket no longer holds a tight enough seal and so it squeals to relieve some of that pressure. When I push the button to relieve the pressure it goes pffffft and sprays a bit of steam out like a whale does with its blowhole. I’ve had a few times where I’ve pressed the button and it goes pffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffft, spurting a bunch of burning hot steam onto my face. It was annoying at times but it was like taking care of a pet, the whistling definitely added a lot of character to it.

My water bottle was a twin. My parents got a pair for $19.99 at Costco. One was teal with with silver accents and the other was silver with teal accents. This isn’t the first time I’ve lost a water bottle. I took it’s sibling to Japan with me. I brought it everywhere with me. It traveled to Osaka, Kyoto, Sendai. Once I went on a hot springs trip with my friends in Sakunami. I had a blast, soaked in hot water all day, read some books, played go, went to different hot springs indoors and outdoors where it was cold enough that the snow still covered the ground. I realized that it was gone on the train ride back.

I wonder, what happens to forgotten water bottles, abandoned by their owners. Do they sit there until someone takes it and throws it in the trash? Do they sit at the bottom of a lost and found box dusty from waiting? Do they sit at a landfill or do they get new life? Goodbye, I loved you too.

My water bottle with me and Melody at the Tucson desert museum.