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Loitering Between the Lines of Hello! Project: Part 8

Posted by Henkka on April 22, 2018
Posted in: Other. 2 comments

Part Eight: “Sukiyaki × Conveyor Belt Sushi = Preparedness to Live”
Writers Yuzuki Asako and Asai Ryo
profile the lyrics of Hello! Project songs!

Song #1: Morning Musume – “Sukiyaki”
(Tsunku/Tsunku/Takahashi Yuichi)

Henkka: Seeing as there doesn’t seem to be an English translation of the lyrics to this song online, let me give you a summary.

“Sukiyaki” is a simple, heartwarming lyric about a girl who is bringing her boyfriend over to meet her family for the first time. It depicts the picture-perfect family as they wait for the boyfriend to arrive. Mom’s busy preparing for dinner — sukiyaki — in the kitchen, the little sister’s running out to buy ingredients that Mom forgot to buy, Dad nervously pretends to look busy reading the newspaper, and the boyfriend misses his train due to absentmindedly worrying if everything will go smoothly. Meanwhile, the protagonist is trying to figure out if her boyfriend would be mad if she was to chicken out and introduce him to her family as merely a “good friend” of hers.

When the boyfriend finally arrives, the whole family immediately takes a liking to him. Despite the dad’s earlier feigned disinterest, he takes a lead in excitedly running their little house party. The boyfriend quickly wins over the mom as well, by eating not two, not three, but four bowls of their dinner. The song ends with the protagonist thinking about how she loves her boyfriend and how reliable he is, while contemplating on how sukiyaki actually represents the “heart of Japan.”

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Tsunku♂ Love Theory: “The Stupid Woman”

Posted by Henkka on March 30, 2018
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Foolish women are a big favorite of men!

In this chapter, I will be talking about something of a different nuance than what you might typically take “stupid woman” to mean. In the Osaka dialect, calling someone “stupid” is usually done in good spirit, and what it really means in this case is “man, this girl’s a fun one” or “what an adorable girl this one is.” Thus, “stupid woman” is by no means meant as an insult. If anything, considering how essential the owarai culture is to Osakan people, calling someone a “fool” might actually be a word of praise.

… Now that we’ve gotten the excuses out of the way, let me reveal some of the stupidity of the members of Morning Musume.

In Morning Musume, every member has displayed her share of foolishness. Pretty much every member will every now and then come on stage during a concert while wearing their skirt the wrong way, or with their fly hanging open. It’s become something so commonplace that now the members, the staff, not even the fans are surprised when it happens. But the point where it really gets funny is seeing how their foolishness manifests itself beyond that, depending on their personalities.

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Tsunku♂ Love Theory: “The Tension-Inducing Woman”

Posted by Henkka on March 23, 2018
Posted in: Other. Tags: , . 2 comments

This woman may just be the one who gets the last laugh…

Just like there’s the expression “every household needs one!,” there’s also “every classroom needs a person like this” or “every mixer party needs someone like this.” This expression is used to describe people who fill some necessary role in any gathering of people. To borrow that expression: I believe Morning Musume’s Yasuda Kei is the type of person you’d ought to have in your school club, or in each department of your company. Similarly, she’s an indispensable part of Morning Musume.

What Yasuda does is toughen up the atmosphere in the group — Yasuda is one of the members with true strength, so her simply being there is enough for others around her to go “oh man, we’ll have to do our best, too.” As a result, she ends up improving the quality of the group as a whole.

There are several reasons for Yasuda making everyone else feel like they’re in trouble unless they give it their all, but I suppose the first and foremost reason would be her great singing. At her audition she told us she loved singing so much she couldn’t help but want to become a singer, and she had by then quit school and was working part-time at McDonald’s. To tell you the truth, my initial thought was “come on, be honest: you only quit school because you hate studying.” But she truly meant what she had said, and indeed: her singing was good.

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Tsunku♂ Love Theory: “The Clingy Woman”

Posted by Henkka on March 16, 2018
Posted in: Other. Tags: . 10 comments

When you find a guy you like, check his clinginess level first!

We’ve all seen a scene like this on some TV drama. There’s a couple who are on a date.

“Yujiiiii! Buy me an ice cream!”
“Okay. Wait here.“

The guy goes and buys some ice cream. They then have it together as they walk past shop windows with the girl going “look, how cute are those clothes?!” That scene. The super flirty, head-over-heels couple fawning on one another, not a care in the world for anyone who might see them.

Let’s be honest: people admire that kind of thing.

That includes me: if I was going out with some fresh, short-haired girl, I bet it would be so much fun going on dates like that. Even just imagining it makes my heart race. She would cling onto my arm… and in my mind she would be a bit of a smaller girl, so when I would poke fun at her for something she would laugh all cutesy-like. “He he he.“

But I could never be able to have a date like that. Why? Because I fundamentally have a dark personality. The few times in my life that I have been with girls like that, they were all cutesy and charged-up when I first met them, but as they kept being around me they would gradually turn less and less so. I guess darkness is contagious.

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What does Tsunku♂ think about the no-dating rule?

Posted by Henkka on December 30, 2017
Posted in: Other. Tags: . 67 comments

Earlier today, I received the following question in response to my previous post.

In regards to the dating comment, maybe I’m misunderstanding, but it seemed to me more or less like Tsunku didn’t personally care whether or not the girls dated… […] I wonder if Tsunku agrees with the no dating rule for idols? Has he ever said so?

The short answer is: no, I don’t remember Tsunku♂ ever specifically stating anywhere whether he is or is not a fan of the no-dating rule. (I could very well be wrong on this subject, however. If so, please do let me know in the comments.)

But here’s a longer, more speculative answer.

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Tsunku♂ B.L.T. interview (2017)

Posted by Henkka on December 29, 2017
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In this serialization, Base Ball Bear member Koide Yusuke
talks to his guests about idol music. In this final edition,
as per his strong request, we welcome a Japanese music industry legend!
Please enjoy this almost entirely uncut, one-and-a-half hour discussion of theirs.

Koide: I’ve been doing this serialization for around five years now, and ever since it first started I always hoped that for the final edition I could have you as my guest. Not only are you the person who made me get deeply hooked on idol music, I also greatly respect you as a songwriter, lyricist, and producer. I’d like to take this opportunity today to ask you about all kinds of things.

Tsunku♂: Let’s do this!

Koide: Next year, Morning Musume will be celebrating its 20th anniversary. That also means it has been 20 years since you first started doing producing work.

Tsunku♂: It might actually be closer to 21, if you count the auditions.

Koide: I once read somewhere that when the whole Morning Musume project started, the way you first envisioned it was that on New Year’s Eve of the year they released “Morning Coffee,” they would appear on Kouhaku Uta Gassen and break up right then and there, in spectacular fashion.

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Idols Are The Best

Posted by Henkka on December 25, 2017
Posted in: Other. 25 comments

Henkka: This is a comic I translated a bit over a year ago. I felt like reposting it now to give it more visibility — I just love this kind of morbid humor. I had shivers running through my spine when I first saw the last panel.

I hope you all have a Christmas that is a little more merry than this comic.

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The comment section of Wota in Translation, pt. 2

Posted by Henkka on December 19, 2017
Posted in: Other. 54 comments

Hey guys.

A few days have passed since I posted the poll. The results are now in: Option 3 — the option of deleting some comments — seems like the clear winner.

Some of you would’ve rather had me continue to do nothing about the comments, and it seems that even some of the people who did vote for the deletion of certain comments saw it only as the least awful alternative, worried that it might change the comment section to something unrecognizable.

While I totally understand such misgivings, I do want to assure you that that’s neither what I want to happen or what I intend to do. In a way, a big part of me feels that nothing about the comment policy actually changes with this result. If you’ve ever read the site’s FAQ, you will have noticed that for a very long time it has already included this line in it:

“In short, just don’t be an idiot.”

This change will not affect 99% of you in any way. You will continue to never have your comments deleted. Feel free to post your silly, offbeat, questionable and controversial comments just as you have up until now. I’m not going to spell out what is and what isn’t acceptable, because again, 99% of the commenters here have no problem using common sense and figuring that out for themselves.

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