I haven’t written one of these for a while, and this one’s a little late. I have some good excuses which you don’t care about, but if you knew them, you’d agree that they’re good, so we’ll just leave it at that.
This is an interesting song. Its first few bars of introduction are really catchy and high energy – they actually remind me of an 80s or 90s song. In fact, that’s how I found this song, because they kept playing that intro on AKBingo and I liked it enough that I wondered what song it belonged to.
This is a song about endings and beginnings. As I have mentioned, the sakura (or cherry tree) seems to have a significance to Japanese culture, and at least in the way it’s usually used in J-Pop songs, as a marker of time. For the sakura blossoms only for a few days a year, and then they all fall off, waiting for the next year to come around.
This is a sweet and sad song, about graduation from school and heading into adulthood. That’s an experience that, for many reasons, I never really had, but it seems that in this song they are trying to capture the bittersweet feelings that must come with that kind of an event. As the petals drop from the cherry tree, so does one stage of life end and another begin.
The petals of these tears go pitter-patter
On these cheeks they come out, flow, and fall
As we look up to the blue sky
And breathe in deeply
The petals of these tears go pitter-patter
Memories of that part make me happy
The stairs to adulthood before our eyes
Together we climb and wave our hands
This is something I’ve really grown to appreciate about J-Pop. It can be very sweet and saccharine, it can be fun and mindless, it can be sweet and sad, it can even be tragic, but there is a depth and poetry that is very much missing from western pop, and has been for many, many years. It’s like, they want to sell albums, but they are also proud of what they produce.
What would it look like if we could take A-Pop (what I call American pop) and infuse a Japanese sense into it? The sense of beauty that the Japanese have cultivated over thousands of years, and even now, manifests in a bunch of young girls and women dancing around in frilly, colorful (and sometimes downright loud) costumes and singing about things they may or may not understand?
What would it look like, indeed. I’d like to know. It would be nice if there was actually some “A-Pop” that one didn’t have to feel embarrassed to do anything but make fun of.
