Whether you’ve been interested in Japanese music for a while, or you’re a newer fan, it becomes apparent very quickly that…it’s hard to find new music. But trying to dig and remember songs are a lot harder if you don’t know the language.
Unlike Kpop which dubs all their songs titles and group names into English words, often incorporating English words into the lyrics and hook as well, you don’t have that kind of luxury in the J-music world.
I go into depth about the differences between Jpop and Kpop and why Kpop succeeded internationally in this article. But to summarize, the #1 reason why Jpop isn’t bigger is that they don’t care much to promote to a global audience.
Japan has the 2nd biggest music market in the world, and consistently has the largest number of physical sales. Thus, artists can do well at home without learning English or changing their customs. They’ll even go a step further and geoblock other countries from viewing their videos, and taking down videos with J-music or anime content in it.
And because Japanese artists and labels are mostly focused on promoting and advertising to their own, it’s going to be really hard as a foreign fan to dig and sort through songs and artists without knowing the language.
A decade back, I studied Japanese 3 years seriously, two years on my own and one year in university. I have certainly gotten rusty and never had the opportunity to really practice it or immerse myself in it, so I wouldn’t even consider myself intermediate.
However, even with just knowing their pronounciation, hiragana, katakana, maybe 150 kanji, and a lot of basics words, I have been able to browze through Japanese music with ease. As I do so, I can only imagine how much more difficult it would be if I didn’t know Japanese at all.
Thus, if you’re someone who is interested in Japanese music and you find it hard to explore or find songs you like, I would highly encourage you to spend even a few months learning basic Japanese. And I’m going to explain why and how it would help you in this article!
If you’d like to dig deeper into Japanese music, from a theory or language perspective, check out my other articles on my J-Music Resources page.
And if you’re interested in learning more vocabulary and kanji so you can watch anime and dramas, read manga, sing J-pop at karaoke, or play raw Japanese video games, check out my 250+ Kanji for Japanese Media (+Sentences) article and my Japanese Study Guide!
A Short Lesson In Japanese Writing Systems
You can skip this section if you’re familiar with it, but if you’re completely new to Japanese, definitely read this as I will be using certain terminology throughout the article.
“Hiragana” is what you would call the original Japanese character system, and it works like the English alphabet. There are 48 base characters to represent the 48 base sounds in the language. Some sounds can be combined to make a few more sounds (ie ki+yu=kyu). This is what elementary school students will learn to read and write first as all Japanese words can be written using this. They tend to be quite curvy and cute, ex: あ,か,み,す,じ.
“Katakana” feels like a duplicate of hiragana. For every hiragana character, there is a duplicate katakana character. The difference is that, katakana is usually reserved for borrowed and foreign words. For example, “Guitar” is translated into “Gita-” and written like “ギター”. If you ever need to translate your name, you will use katakana as well. This system tends to be more straight and sharp, ex: ア,カ,ミ,ス,ジ.
“Kanji” will be more complex as these are characters borrowed from China. Unlike Hiragana, people can look at a kanji and know or have an idea of what the word means. It is more complex than the alphabet systems above because one kanji character can replace 1-3 sounds, and depending on the context, it can be read different ways. We’ll go into that a bit in the article, but here’s some examples: 高,時,月,東,見.
Issue #1: Titles, Artists & Albums Aren’t Always In English
There are certainly a lot of English song names and titles in the anime world, but you can’t always rely on this. In the anime world, you can always look up a song via the show, and a there are certainly a lot of well known English songs, but you will face limitations.
Due to these limitations, I have noticed that songs with English titles tends to be better known by the community, for example Silhouette from Naruto, Unravel from Tokyo Ghoul, and Imagination from Haikyuu!!
On the other hand, songs like “Hikaru Nara” is known as “Your Lie in April Opening“, “Fukai Mori” is known as “That Ending from Inuyasha“, and “Hitohira no Hanabira” is known as “Iunno? Some ending of Bleach” (Super popular song, but it’s ending #17! No hate or shade to Stereopony either. They were actually my favourite band before One OK Rock).
If you don’t know the title, you probably won’t be looking into the artist, and thus, you’ll miss an opportunity to discover new music or perhaps a new favourite band!
And yeah sure, there are certainly a decent number of Japanese groups with English names, ie. Asian Kung-Fu Generation, Scandal, The Oral Cigarettes, My First Story, and Stereopony, but there are just as many groups, if not more, who stick to their birth names or use a Japanese name, ie Shinsei Kamattechan, Ikimonogakari, Nogizaka46, Ryoukuoushoku Shakai, Watarirouka Hashiritai, Tsubasa Mori, or Atarashii Gakko!
While Kenshi Yonezu may be a hard name to remember at first, his songs at least have English names (ie. Lemon, Flamingo, Loser, Peace Sign, Orion, Paprika), so it’s easier to find him if you forget his name.
But then there are artists with an English name liked Linked Horizon, who uses Japanese titles, (Guren no Yumiya, Jiyuu no Tsubasa, Shinzou wo Sasageyo, Shoukei to Shikabane no Michi) so people will refer to them as “Attack on Titan Op #“. If you loved a song by the artist that isn’t from the anime, you’ll have to dig and click on different songs until you find the one.
Below is the Spotify playlist for Japanese Top Hits so you can get a sense of the names and titles out there:
Not knowing any Japanese will cause you to skip over these names and titles, or you’ll more easily forget how to read and spell it because you have nothing to reference.
How Japanese Helps: Spelling & Memorization
It’s really hard to know how to spell or say something in a language you don’t know at all, and memory is impossible if it’s just a bunch of random sounds to you.
The great thing is, Japanese has a very straightforward pronounciation and spelling system, so as long as you are saying the name or word correctly, you can spell it out correctly. And the more you practice saying the name, the easier it will stick.
Eventually, as you continue to learn the language and learn more words, you’ll start recognizing them in titles and names. As long as you can remember a part of a longer name, it will be easier to recall the rest later or with time. Perhaps, you’ll learn new words on the way!
Let’s look at the title Jiyuu no Tsubasa from Attack on Titan. If they’ve been watching anime, they may have picked up on the word “Jiyuu” which means “Freedom”, as that’s a central theme for the show. But, they may have also picked up “Tsubasa” which means “wings” somewhere, as it’s also quite common. And as a language learner, you’ll learn early on that “no” is a possessive marker, thus the name means “Wings of Freedom”.
Adding on, after they learn pronunciation of their syllables, they’ll know it’s spelled “Ji” and not “gi” or “jee” or “gee”, and Tsubasa is spelled “tsu” like “tsunami” and not “su” or “sue” or “soo”. Once again, as long as they know the basics and how Japanese works, it’s not as hard to recall names and words, and it will be easier to remember and reference later.
Names like YOASOBI can be deceiving to many, and thus they may easily forget how to spell it and end up with something like (ie yaosobi, yosobe, yossoby). But even a Japanese learner who only studied the sounds, will look at it and know it’s pronounced “yo-ah-so-bee”, and that it would be spelled “yo-a-so-bi”. They may also notice the second half of the name, “ASOBI”, means “To Play”.
Issue #2: Song Titles Aren’t Consistent Across The Board
Now, if you are someone who is more into Japanese music, and you’re looking up songs on Youtube, saving them on Spotify, or trying to buy them from Itunes, it’s going to be frustrating finding songs on different platforms. You’ll learn the Japanese name, but then it’s translated to English in one place, and written in Kanji on another.
As a Japanese fan, I feel the need to know and remember both the English and Japanese names of the songs I like, and also familiarize myself with the hiragana, katakana, or kanji spellings as well since I have to do a lot of research and be able to find a song on any platform for my band.
Some songs have official English names, YET, at times, that English name is still translated into Japanese katakana. For example “No Doubt” by Official Hige Dandism is written as “ノーダウト” (noo dauto). “Monochrome City” by Ace Collection is written as “モノクロシティ” (monokuro shiti). “I’m a Believer” by Spyair is written as “アイム・ア・ビリーバー” (aimu a biriibaa), and “Inferno” by Mrs Green Apple is written as “インフェルノ(inferuno)”.
Same song, but both names will appear in different places.
Usually, Katakana is reserved for borrowed English words, as you can see above, but there seems to be a trend of using it for Japanese words as well. For example, “Kizuato” (傷跡) by Centimillimental means “Scar” in Japanese, yet the official title is written as “キヅアト“. Or “Hikari Are” (光あれ) by Burnout Syndromes means “There will be light” in Japanese, yet it’s official title is written as “ヒカリアレ“.
For some songs, they may be better known for their translated English name, but you will still need to know their official name to find them on a streaming service.
In the picture below, you can see that Yorushika’s song was uploaded to her official channel under the English title “Just A Sunny Day For You“, YET, the song is uploaded on Spotify under it’s Japanese name “ただ君に晴れ” (tada kimi ni hare). I can imagine someone trying to look for the song to add it to their favorites and thinking it’s not there….but it must be because it’s so popular!
The same situation is present for the popular song from Domestic Girlfriend. On Minami’s channel, it is named “Crying In The Rain“, yet almost every other cover and video about the song calls it “Kawaki wo Ameku“. Then on Spotify, it is listed under it’s Japanese name in katakana “カワキヲアメク“. Oh, and on top of that, sometimes you’ll see “Minami” and other times you’ll see “美波“.
Sometimes, both the Japanese name and English name is uploaded, however, the one with the English song is the official English version of the song. Such is the case for Monster and 怪物 (Kaibutsu) by YOASOBI from Beastars.
If you’re not familiar with Japanese at all, you’re going to spend a lot of time searching, digging, clicking, and listening, trying to find a song you heard but don’t know the name of. Or you know it’s name but it’s filed under something else. And yeah, some artists my only have 10, or 25 songs, but what happens when it goes into the 50s? or 100s?
If you happen to be a fan of AKB48, you’re going to have a horrible time. Not only are the majority of their song titles in Japanese, but they have over 350 songs! And you can double that thanks to subgroups and remixes. Good luck~
How Japanese Helps = Recognition
In situations where you may be dealing with 4 seperate titles and spellings for the same song, there really is no cheat sheet to help. You would need to know enough of the language to be able to read hiragana/katakana, and to take an estimated guess for songs with kanji on a playlist.
Let’s consider a song I mentioned earlier from Naruto, “Toumei Datta Sekai“. I fell in love with the song and wanted to cover it on guitar, so I do know the name. However, on Youtube where I discovered it, the song is always written in Romanji. How was I going to find it on Spotify?
While I know “Sekai” means “world” (boy, is this word common in shows and songs), I do not know the kanji for it. But “datta” is a verb, the past of “desu” which means “to be”, and this verb thankfully doesn’t use a kanji. So while searching on Spotify, I just need to look out for “だった” in the middle of a title. And bam “透明だった世界” is the only match.
Let’s also look at other songs in this list. With basic Japanese, you’ll recognize some other words in his playlist.
#8 starts with the word “kyou” which means “today” (it combines the kanji for “now” and “day”) followed by “mo kitto”. #9 is all katakana, so it would read “pareedopareedo”. As I said it, I can guess that it means “parade parade” (I checked and I’m right).
#10 is also easier to translate since it contains easy kanji that stand alone. The first is “asa” which means “morning”, second is “kiru” which means “to come” and third is “mae ni” which means “in front” or “before”. Thus, it would be read as “asa ga kiru mae ni” and translated to something like “come before the morning” or “before the morning comes”
Referencing #9 again, borrowed English words is super common in Japanese, but due to their lack of sounds available in their language, they sometimes have to add extra syllables to pronounce it, for example “kisu” (kiss), “terebi” (TV) or “bokkusu” (box). So sometimes, in titles and lyrics, you can come across a new katakana word and be able to translate it yourself to help remember the song.
I really love this song called Makudonarudo (McDonalds). It was created a couple years in advance for the 2020 Olympics and it lists many useful and common borrowed words in Japanese.
Now, Kanji can be complex and hard to remember, even for Japanese people! They are essentially borrowed Chinese characters (Yes, Japan loves to borrow words), but unlike hiragana or katakana that can only be read 1 way, kanji will have different readings, sometimes multiple reading! Context and familiarity is the only way to know for sure.
Let’s take the kanji “人” for example. On it’s own, it is read as “hito“, and it means “person”. However, “一人” (Hitori) means “alone”, “日本人” (Nihonjin) means “Japanese person”, “人気” (ninki) means “popularity”, so on and so forth. You can’t always guess the reading or meaning of a kanji character, so it comes down to familiarity.
Thankfully, when it comes to looking up or remembering song titles, just knowing that “人” means “person”, could greatly aid in your search.
Let’s take the super popular “白日” song by King Gnu for example. I have seen both basic kanji before, so I know the first means “white” and the second means “day”, but I would not know how to pronounce this word once they are put together. If I were to make a guess, I would say “Shiro-Hi/Bi” just because that’s the only readings for those kanji that I’m familiar with.
However, I don’t need to know the proper readings. Even if I only knew what one of those kanji characters mean, I could look that up “King Gnu white” or “King Gnu day” and the song will pop up, as you can see below. And from there, I can learn that the actual reading of the title is “Hakujitsu“.
Let’s also check out this song I recently added to my playlists when I heard it on my daily playlists: “不器用な男” by “カンザキイオリ“. The artists name is in katakana, so I can easily read it and change it to romanji, “Kanzaki Iori“.
Now, how do I figure out this song? I know the first kanji means down/under, but since it’s combined with other kanji, I wouldn’t know the context or reading, like was the case above. However, there is another kanji that stands alone at the end, and I know “男” means boy/man and will likely by read as “otoko“. So I looked it up and found it: “Bukiyou na Otoko“. I also just added a new word to my vocabulary, Bukiyou = clumsy.
In other cases, if the title is exceptionally long, just knowing a word or two of the title can make a huge difference for finding the song again.
I’ve been listening to the song “Niwaka Ame ni mo Makezu” for over a year now, but I still struggle to remember the whole name, for obvious reasons. I learned half the lyrics, so I know it doesn’t show up there either (as we’ll discuss in point #3). So let’s just say I could only remember “ame” because I learned early on that ame means rain, and I know the matching kanji “雨” which also looks like rain.
With just that one word, if I’m looking through their discography, I can still spot the song (#2) even though I can’t read or remember the whole title.
As an additional test, I saw #5 and knew the first word meant “hand”. I could read it since the rest is hiragana, but I wanted to see if just inputting the words “hand” and the artist name will work, and it did! Super useful!
They say that Japanese people usually need to know about 2000 kanji to survive and read a newspaper, but there are 50,000 kanji available to be used, and quite a few of them will have multiple readings.
Thus, if you don’t live in Japan nor are planning to, there’s no reason to learn it all. You can try, but you’ll forget them easily without regular usage. But even for me, only kinda knowing say, 150 kanji or so, it’s been enough to get around when looking through Japanese music.
Issue #3: The Title Isn’t Always In The Song Lyrics
The next issue that you’ll come across as a J-music fan is that fact that, you can’t trust the title of the song to show up in the lyrics.
You know in English music, even if you forget or don’t know the title when you hear a song on the radio, you can just listen and expect it to pop up in the chorus? Yeah…I’ve noticed that happens a minority of the time in japanese music. As I said a little earlier, I could learn all the lyrics for a song, but still forget the name since it doesn’t show up.
We mentioned earlier that there are a decent number of Japanese songs with English titles, but usually the lyrics are mostly or all japanese, so the English name is never actually said.
Again from Fullmetal Alchemist? “Again” is never said. Departure from HunterxHunter? Nope! Butterfly from Digimon? Not at all. Crossing Field from Sword Art Online? Haha, you wish!
Unravel from Tokyo Ghoul? Well, closest it gets is the screamo line right before the chorus. Apparently, (only finding this out now when I looked up the lyrics), he is saying “Unravelling the world” at 1:57 in the Music Video.
So, if you were walking through a mall and you overheard a song you loved and you wanted to add it to your playlist, how on earth will you figure out what the song is? Or if you really loved this song in the background of a video but they never referenced it, what are you supposed to do? Wait all you want, the title isn’t coming…
How Japanese Helps = Transcription
Let’s look at Blue Bird for example. The song is 100% Japanese, so “Blue Bird” is never actually said. When my cousin would watch Naruto (quite loudly might I add), I would overhear the phrase “Aoi Aoi Ano Sora” 5 times, every time. Even if I didn’t know that meant “That blue blue sky”, I could write out the line, and find the actual name for the song that way.
Even the popular Kaikai Kitan from Jujitsu Kaisen doesn’t say the title at all. Eve is a bit hard to understand, even for Japanese people, so I thought he said it in the chorus, but turns out it doesn’t.
I saved the song pretty early on when I first heard it, but in the case I didn’t, I would have used the first line of the chorus which repeats “Yami wo haratte, yami wo haratte” as a search point. I don’t know what “haratte” means, but I know “Yami” means “darkness”. The song will show up.
I feel Renai Circulation also suffers due to this. It’s an old song that is super popular and has been played everywhere, yet, so many lovers don’t know or remember the name.
Funny story, just a few months back, my bandmate was trying to pitch the song, but she didn’t know the name and couldn’t remember the anime it was from.
She tried to ask us about an ‘orange-haired girl’, and expected us know. We all made guesses while she was trying to dig on Youtube for it. Finally, one member figure it out. He knows it more from the meme remix. Turned out I knew the song well myself, including the title, but I discovered the song through Jpop dance covers.
But this is the perfect example of a (partially) Japanese title (Renai Circulation) with a Japanese artist (Kana Hanazawa), from an anime with a Japanese title (Bakemonogatari) being easily lost and forgotten. I even saw a lot of people asking ‘what that cute song is’ because they forgot where they heard it from and had nothing to reference.
But let’s say you didn’t know the name of the song, but you overheard it in a video or it kept replaying in your head. If you at least knew some Japanese, you could just transcribe the song. Or if it’s still somewhat fresh, you can think hard and figure out what a few words are to look up.
I don’t know the lyrics for Renai Circulation, so I played it in a different tab and tried to pick out words that stuck out to me from the intro. I chose “kokoro” and “motto motto”. These words aren’t even side by side (“Kokoro wa shinka suru yo, motto motto”) yet it still showed up! That’s how useful being able to transcribe the lyrics are!
Conclusion
The world of Japanese music is huge and vast, so there’s so much to explore! I still remember how it felt when I heard my first Japanese songs 15+ years and just feeling so curious and attracted to the music this little island made.
However, if you truly want to remember song names and explore further into what’s available, you’ll need to get past the language barrier. Luckily, you don’t need to know everything, as you could see in my examples above. The basics can take you quite far.
And hey, chances are, you also like anime, or video games, or other Japanese-related things, so you can immerse yourself into the language more and enjoy the journey. With just a little more active listening instead of passively reading the subs, you can make a lot of progress.
And hey, Japanese isn’t as daunting as it may seem! The pronunciation is super straight forward. I got through hiragana and katakana in a couple weeks (will obviously take more time to truly internalize it). Their marker system makes sentences super flexible, and verbs generally follow the same rules.
There’s no masculine/feminine changes, nor plurals for nouns! Much easier to pick up than French, which I took for 7 years in school, yet still couldn’t make a perfect sentence to save my life haha.
Thanks to this blog, I have restarted learning Japanese recently. I’ve started taking Duolingo seriously as well. While I know a lot of words, I’m only good at making basic sentences, but I would love to be able to create more complex sentences and express myself. Would even like to write a Japanese song one day.
Speaking of songs, what annoyed me way back was that, after 3 years of studying Japanese seriously, even taking a course in University, I still couldn’t understand the lyrics…and that was the main reason I was learning to begin with!
But thing is, what they say in real life, in day to day speech, is going to be way different than what they say in music or anime, which tends to have more storytelling and fantasy elements to it. Japanese people generally keep their thoughts and feelings to themselves, but they can let loose in their music.
So I went through the lyrics of many many songs, and created the Japanese Lyric Dictionary. I plan to use this as my own study guide, but I figured others who care deeply about Japanese music would love to have this resource too 🙂
Anyways, I hope this article would inspire you or at least give you that last push to start learning Japanese. I wouldn’t even consider myself intermediate at this point in time, yet I can easily look through music, dig through the Japanese side of the internet, and write about what I’ve learned.
I’ve compiled all my Japanese and anime music related articles on my J-Music Resources page.
If you’re interested in learning more vocabulary and kanji so you can watch anime and dramas, read manga, sing J-pop at karaoke, or play raw Japanese video games, check out my 250+ Kanji for Japanese Media (+Sentences) article and my Japanese Study Guide!
And if you want to support me, my blog, and my band, a tip on Ko-fi would truly mean the world to me.
Happy learning <3
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