Is There Still Anything That Love Can Do? by RADWIMPS

Have you ever had a class or work assignment you weren't really qualified for? Maybe you talked yourself into it and wound up over your head. Maybe it worked out and you learned something. Or maybe your teacher or boss found out you're nothing but smoke and mirrors. Hopefully not. This song comes from a similar story where it all worked out in the end. Sort of.

Thirteen years ago, a Japanese film was released called 言の葉の庭. If you can't read kanji, it was released outside of Japan as The Garden of Words. This movie was only about 45 minutes long, and was about a guy with a foot fetish. Not really, but also technically the truth. He was actually a shoe maker, and meeting a woman in the rain under a bus shelter, he decides that her shoes aren't working for her, and vows to make her good shoes. She falls in love with him. The movie was okay, but where it excelled was its beauty. The film went viral, with the Internet calling it "Anime Wallpaper: The Movie", because virtually every frame of it was worthy of being your desktop wallpaper, and there are some outstanding Garden of Words wallpapers out there.

Makoto Shinkai, the writer and director of 言の葉の庭 was so humbled and awed by the West's reaction to his film, that he decided that his next film would not only be fully translated to English (as the others had), but if you watched in English, the music would be in English as well. This is not something that was commonly done, but he was gonna make it happen. He found Yojiro Noda, a Japanese singer who claimed to be bilingual. Shinkai hired him and his band, RADWIMPS, to do the entire soundtrack for his next film, 君の名は。 . (Isn't it weird how the full-stop has a different glyph in Japanese? The English one is just a dot. The Japanese one is a tiny circle.) Oh, this film was called your name. outside of Japan, though the more literal translation of the title is "what's your name?". Don't ask me why it has a full stop instead of a question mark.

So the trailer released, and if you watched the English trailer, you got the characters' voices in English... and the song was in English. That song, Zenzenzense (lit: "the way, way back") would play in Japanese if you watched the Japanese trailer. And when the movie came out in theaters, if you watched the English dub, the songs all played in English.

That's not why it's the best animated film I've seen, nor is it the reason it's the best film overall that I've seen, but it's pretty damn cool.

Anime purists generally don't like Japanese media being translated to English at all, because that invites more casual fans. The bigger a thing is, the less the purity of its fans, those who love it and believe in it, you get a lot of casuals who could take it or leave it. On top of that, the companies start marketing to these fans, and not the "pure" fans. So there will always be pushback against translation of anime, mostly from basement-dwelling, moon-faced assassins of joy. And so 君の名は。 got extra pushback for the music.

Also, the translation was not very good. Those of us who know English and watched the film in English know the lyrics were not very good. It pushed us to watching the Japanese dub with English subtitles. (I personally prefer to watch the Japanese dub with no subtitles. I've seen it enough that I know what's being said, and I just enjoy the sheer beauty of the film, and I'd rather hear the Japanese voices, because it is a quintessentially Japanese story. At least, until fan subtitles (fansubs) hit the Net. Those were REALLY good. For example, there's a scene where a girl slowly opens her hand to reveal something written on it that she didn't have time to look at before (context would be massive spoilers). In the official subtitles, the entire thing is written out before she opens her hand, killing the pacing the director intended. In the fansubs, the message is slowly revealed as she sees it, so we share her surprise.

So, Europe kind of got shafted in that they were the last ones to get a release. However, because of the pushback against the English songs, they got an option the Americans didn't, they got an English dialogue track with Japanese songs. That made American fans a bit jealous.

I don't think Noda or RADWIMPS were particularly bothered that people didn't like their English songs for 君の名は。 . They got paid, and the movie accomplished what it set out to, it was an amazing film you should absolutely watch, and it reached way more audiences than its predecessor.

Three years later, Shinkai released a new film, 天気の子, or, Weathering With You outside of Japan (but the name literally means "The Weather Maiden"). RADWIMPS returned to do the soundtrack, only this time, watching the movie in English did not get you the songs in English, except for today's song of the day, which still played in Japanese during the film. However, over the credits, it played in English if you watched the English dub. You could also switch to the English dub after watching the film in Japanese if you wanted to hear it both ways.

And, unlike any song in 君の名は。, Is There Still Anything That Love Can Do? had amazing English lyrics.

Here's the English version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Oz8gCJy2-Q As in, 100% of the lyrics are in English. It's a Japanese song in that it's written and performed by people from Japan, but it's an English song in that it's in English.

Noda has gone on to say that it takes about twice as long to say anything in Japanese, so the English translation would have a lot of dead air, so he has to say more to fill that space. It's an oversimplification to compare any two languages that do not have a common base (like say, Italian and Spanish both come from Latin), but his point was that when singing in English, he has to say more, so he's either going to repeat himself, or he'll elaborate (word salad) on a point, and covering that up and making it still sound good is a challenge.

RADWIMPS have other songs that are in English, some of which do not even have a Japanese version (that I know of), such as Light the Light.

And, for the record, Japanese is considered the most "alien" language to English, and vice-versa. Anyone translating between these two languages is doing a heck of a job. There's a reason computers can't do it in real time yet. Like Apple and Google advertise that their earbuds and phones will translate some languages in real time. No one's translating Japanese to English in real time yet. Maybe ChatGPT could do it, but that would be expensive. The free tools absolutely cannot do it right now. So, if you hear Japanese people singing in English, please respect the amount of work they put in to make it so you could understand their words without having to read along with subtitles.