10 WESTERN Songs I Wish Were Anime Themes - part 6

Okay, our unintended journey through my high school/college days as a pretentious Indie snob continues with… honestly an incredibly unpretentious and not all that “Indie” song. But the important thing is, just about nobody in the English-speaking world ever heard of Juniper Moon outside of self-congratulatory critics and record store owners, and that’s all a turn of the millennium band needed to have Indie cred. And yes, you’ll have noticed that “El Resto De Mi Vida” is not, in fact, English. This song alone is why I had to specifically name this series of blogs “WESTERN Songs I Wish Were Anime Themes” and not “English songs.” Juniper Moon were a Power Pop band that started up in Spain in 1999, releasing their first full album in 2002, of which “El Resto De Mi Vida” is the title track. I’m not sure how much the language gap contributed to their lack of a breakthrough in the Anglosphere, as it’s tempting to suggest that the album would have sold pretty well to the Weezer crowd. However, while Juniper Moon’s sound is broadly in step with the Pop/Punk styling of the time, there’s an extra hyperactive twee-ness that I think would have kept the group out of The Big Time either way. Power Pop’s most notable success stories around this time still at least paid lip service to Alternative seriousness and Irony, and while I can’t speak Spanish well enough to say if there’s any lyrical edge to juniper moon that’s not coming across, the music itself is a bit too unabashedly bouncy to not risk seeming a bit uncool. For the left-of-the-dial Indie crowd, though, I could totally see a band like Juniper moon at least getting some opening dates for The Apples in Stereo or the like. At the most, this is the kind of music somebody at Cartoon Network would have licensed for a Powerpuff Girls commercial. Ya know, like The Apples in Stereo. Unfortunately, the world never really got a chance to find out, as original lead singer Raquel split not long after “El Resto De Mi Vida” was released as a single, and while the band tried to reorganize around new members, they’d officially broken up by 2005. And so it goes.

Obviously, I think that’s a real shame, because they put out a LOT of earworms in their short lifespan, and “El Resto De Mi Vida” is my personal top of the heap. It’s one of those songs that sounds vaguely “retro” without actually seeming to be pinned down to any specific time or style. The keyboards give it a bit of a 60s vibe, but not to the point of being Garage Band revival like, say, The Caesars. The actual melody has kind of a Cheap Trick by way of Redd Kross vibe, but the production is too polished and early-00s to comfortably fit in that vibe either. It’s mildly quirky, but not quite as weird as the likes of The New Pornographers. And again, the song is too high energy be lumped in with the post-Alternative Weezer-type acts. Basically, there’s a whole lot of different people who could have liked “El Resto De Mi Vida” if Juniper Moon had been able to stick together long enough to seriously promote it, but there’s also no single label that comfortably fits the song. That’s the usually the sign of something really good, even if it is a promoter’s worst nightmare. Incidentally, I’ve even seen indications that, in their time, Juniper Moon seemed to be getting especially good exposure in Japan. I dunno if they ever managed to make it around the world to perform there, but I can absolutely see a band like this getting really over with the Shonen Knife crowd. All the better for imagining that some anime might pick “El Resto De Mi Vida” as its opening theme! But what kind of show?

It’s always tempting to make something out of the fact that these songs are “in a foreign language” as far as the standard Japanese audience would be concerned, but I think that caries even more weight here. I don’t have any statistics in front of me, but I’m just gonna go out on a limb and suggest that the number of average Japanese folks who know any Spanish is even lower than the percent who know a functional amount of English. Thus, I’m even more tempted to pitch an idea for a show that’s all about foreigners living in Japan. This time, I don’t even think there needs to be any metaphorical aspect to it, just a plain old straightforward slice of life comedy about a group of young expatriates from all around the globe who’ve decided to come to Japan. Maybe there’s only one apartment building on that side of town that’ll rent to foreigners, so they all end up being neighbors. From there, I don’t really think there even needs to be any kind of “story,” just silly little vignettes of those wacky foreign folk not understanding normal Japanese things, and not being understood in turn. In fact, we could up the ante by having most of the characters not even being able to understand each other, all of them could have come from totally different countries. And just to make things less obvious, how about NONE of the main cast are from America. Everybody just naturally assumes at least ONE of them must be from The States, but nope, that’s just one more point of miscommunication. And to be clear, when I say “America” I also mean Canada and Australia and Great Britain, because your average Japanese rando thinks they’re all the same. No, but seriously, I’m mainly thinking of the language barrier here, with the actual cultural background of the characters coming later. Again, if the point of this series is to emphasize the Fish Out Of Water aspect of living in a foreign land, then cutting out the one foreign language that the locals MIGHT know would only emphasize the point further. Spain is a pretty obvious choice, given the theme song, but we could grab folks from all over Europe and Africa and South America, the more diverse the better. The odds of finding a random person on the street who understands, say, Hungarian is gonna be even lower in Japan than it is in most places not called Hungary. The point is, the only thing the whole cast would have in common would be Japan… the place they none of them fully understand. All of their grasps of the Japanese language could be tenuous, but it’s the only way they can all communicate with each other, which is HIGHLY fertile ground for wacky misunderstandings to spring up without anybody knowing any better. It’s one thing to just have the weird foreigner struggling to adapt to normal Japan stuff, but this way we can add on the extra dimension of wacky foreigners struggling to adapt to each other! So many sitcom shenanigans! All the better for a show with such a bright, bouncy Pop Punk theme song, right?

Also, just as an added “avoid the obvious thing” requirement, while every character would have a different reason to have come to Japan, I think it’d be good if NONE of them are there because of Anime. Like, maybe some side characters we don’t see too often might be otaku, but none of the people who appear in every episode. Anime is too self-referential as it is, I think it’d be healthy to find other reason for these people to be here. Like, maybe one of them is a baseball fan who, ironically, realizes that The American Pastime has more fans in Japan than America. Or maybe one of them is an aspiring rail engineer and is in Japan to study all the trains. Maybe there’s a musician who wants to get in on INSERT LITERALLY ANY SUB-GENRE OF JAPANESE MUSIC HERE. Or how about an aspiring chef who wants to learn about sushi right at the source? Heck, maybe one of them is a travel blogger. That’s how I know about half the stuff I hear about Japan these days. The point is, there’s plenty of ways to have foreigners bumbling around Japan without automatically having them be cosplaying otaku. Let’s try to be more creative here.

In fact, remember what I said earlier about not having an American in the cast? Let’s renege on that a bit and say there’s ONE Yank in the cast, and it’s the otaku… but it’s also the character we barely ever see. And this could be such a basement dwelling, anti-social weirdo that, on the odd chance that somebody goes to this person for clarification on something English/America-related, it’d be no use. Oh, let’s double down on that. Our otaku could also be the one most fluent in conversational Japanese (only in a weird dialect, like a 30-something man with the slang of a teenage girl ‘cos he learned from highschool anime) but only knows about video games and giant robots and other nerd stuff, and thus is no help in understanding NORMAL Japanese daily life. There’s a lot of ways to approach this setup, is what I’m saying.

But, of course, the more we think about that, the more we brush up against the biggest problem of a “Look at the funny foreigners” series: isn’t that kinda offensive? To that I say, it wouldn’t HAVE to be… but is probably WOULD end up that way if done poorly. Obviously, the biggest challenge would be for the writers to actually know a lot about MULTIPLE foreign cultures. To believably, and accurately, depict misunderstandings on the part of the characters, the writers would actually have to understand what they THINK is going on, based on their own cultural norms. And to compound the joke by having multiple characters misunderstand that initial misunderstanding, the writers would also have to know how THOSE cultures contrast with each other. The same with the language barrier jokes, it’s already hard enough to write puns and wordplay gags that span across two languages, just imagine trying to write across four or five! And yes, even setting aside the sheer logistical difficulty, there’s also the ever-present threat of reducing these characters to racial stereotypes. Let’s face it, Japan’s not got the best track record on this sort of thing, and a series like this would REALLY be tempting fate by cramming multiple foreigners into the same show. This could possibly be mitigated by specifically having the characters come from comparatively obscure countries that your average Japanese person hasn’t really heard of, and thus hasn’t had time to think of cruel caricatures… but that’s kind of a moot point when Japan already has such an abundant supply of “literally anyone who isn’t specifically Japanese” stereotypes. Honestly, I think the best solution to both would be for the writers to specifically recruit some experts from the nations in question to serve on the writing staff. They could help with writing the language puns, provide background info on their cultural background, be the ones to say “Seriously, do NOT draw us like that,” and possibly even provide personal anecdotes about THEIR time in Japan to keep this from just being a bunch of Japanese nationals guessing what being a foreigner is like. Just… don’t try to make up entirely fictional countries for them to be from. That… can only end with embarrassment for all concerned.

Finally, I should also add that, when I originally came up with this idea, my first inclination was that there would be at least one Japanese local to serve as a sort of viewpoint character. Maybe the owner of the one apartment building that rents to locals, or the owner’s kid, somebody who’d have regular contact with all the tenants and thus have a front row seat to all the goings on. I reflexively assumed such a character would exist in order to provide a center for the narrative, something to tie all the disparate subplots together. Upon further reflection, though, I think a character like that would be a major mistake, as it’d invite the audience to identify with the “normal” one and distance them from the expatriates. This is supposed to be THEIR story, so the audience ought to be thrown in to the deep end just like they are. Also, showing everything through the point of view of a Japanese character would probably tempt for the writers to start skimping on details for the foreign stuff. After all, if our stand-in character doesn’t understand what they’re saying, why NOT replace it with generic “blah blah blah” sound effects or whatever? Come on, this is anime, you know they’d do it. Better to not give them the chance. In fact, it might be a good idea to take things in the opposite direction. Maybe have all the Japanese characters speak in unintelligible sound effects, like the grown ups in Charlie Brown, so that even Japanese viewers will be a bit confused by what’s going on? Or even draw the Japanese characters in less detail than the main cast, so that it’s harder to pick up on any body language or facial cues. If nothing else, this would mean less animators and voice actors to hire, which means a lower budget, and that’s DEFINITELY a language any anime production can speak.