Alones - Aqua Timez

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

So the third song in my series is Alones by Aqua Timez, it was the opening song (ep121-143) to the anime Bleach and came out in 2007. Back then I was still living in New York in about 6th or 7th grade. I was only just starting to get into anime (outside of what aired on channel 7--  4KidsTV), and specifically only really mainstream stuff. Naruto, Bleach, and One Piece were the three things that I religiously followed on Youtube. They all had over a hundred episodes at the time, middle school me binge watched hundreds of hours of anime.

From left to right: Bleach, Naruto, and One Piece.

I used to have the all the opening and closing songs from Naruto and Bleach on my mp3 player. At this point in my life I didn’t know any Japanese but I would look up lyrics and memorize the romanized words just so I could sing along. I don’t have any recordings from back then, I’d imagine anyone who actually understood Japanese would probably cringe. But even now I still feel a connection with people who spend hours bathing in the light of their computer screen drilling gibberish into their brains just so they could sing along.

Here’s a little taster of what it was like:

Oreta awai tsubasa

Kimi wa sukoshi

Aosugiru sora ni tsukareta dake sa

Mou dareka no tame ja nakute

Jibun no tame ni waratte ii yo

Aqua Timez has also been one of my favorite bands since forever. I discovered their music through Bleach, and over the years amassed a collection of illegally downloaded songs. When I was in Japan I frequented used bookstores, in addition to books they also sold clothes, CDs, and electronics. I would take forever browsing the aisles, not because it was a treasure trove of stuff (but it was), but because I had the hardest times looking for specific books or CDs since the labels were in Japanese. I didn’t end up finding their CDs there but I did hop on Amazon.jp and ordered a used CD, “The BEST of Aqua Timez”.

I have no idea why this kid is on the cover.

Anyway, less about the band and more about the song. There’s kind of two ways you could interpret Alones,

The song by itself is about two lonely people who are kind of depressed, the speaker and the other guy. It’s a song about how it’s okay to have weakness and it’s okay to  put yourself before others.

The other interpretation is in the context of what’s going on in the Anime (here’s the AMV for those who have watched/read Bleach),

So Orihime (one of the main characters) just joined the Aizen (the bad guy) because he threatened to kill her friends if she didn’t. The song is from the POV of her friends (Ichigo and the deathgod gang) who are trying to save her. Their message to her is that she doesn’t need to endure isolation by herself, she doesn’t need to sacrifice herself for them, and that it’s okay if she can’t save everyone because they can help shoulder the burden.

Either way I really liked the message. Society puts a lot emphasis on being strong, and sometime you feel a need to put up a facade of being okay. This song speaks to me beyond my angsty middle school self.