Blue Light Yokohama (ブルー・ライト・ヨコハマ) (1968) - Ayumi Ishida (いしだあゆみ)
Blue Light Yokohama (ブルー・ライト・ヨコハマ) (1968) - Ayumi Ishida (いしだあゆみ). This song is Ayumi Ishida's 26th single, released on 25 December, 1968 under the label Nippon Columbia and composed by Kyohei Tsutsumi (筒美京平).
This song is Ayumi-san's biggest hit. In this video, Ayumi-san is singing "Blue Light Yokohama" in 20th NHK Kōhaku Uta Gassen on 31 December, 1969. Here is also Ayumi Ishida's first appearance. It has been sung at NHK Kōhaku Uta Gassen three times, in 1969 (this video), 1973 and in 1993.
This song is not about Yokohama actually but it's about how a girl feels to her boyfriend. This is the first song that mentions Yokohama that I heard. One of the best Shōwa era songs from the 1960s. Her nasal voice is perfect for this song.
"Blue Light Yokohama" was the no.3 song on the Oricon Charts in 1969 and the no.1 song on the weekly chart for 9 weeks (10 February-7 April). This song received Composition Award at 11th Japan Record Awards on 31 December, 1969 and also received Effort Award at 2nd Japan Cable Awards in 1969.
和製英語(わせいえいご)are Japanese words that have some origin in English, but have been appropriated by the Japanese speaking community. Often, if converted from katakana to English, they won’t be real English words (which can sometimes lead to funny mistranslations on signs).
シャーペン → shar-pen?? ❌ → mechanical pencil ✅
トランプ → trump?? ❌ → playing cards ✅
ベビーカー → baby car?? ❌ → stroller/pram ✅
However, there is a subcategory of 和製英語 which is particularly insidious, as a japanese learner. I’m gonna call them 罠英語 - trap words. They appear to be a normal English word simply converted into kanakana, but although they look like a regular old loan word, they are actually a Japanese misinterpretation or reinterpretation of an English word.
マンション → mansion ❌ → condominium/apartment ✅
The most well known example is probably マンション. Each of these words has a history which explains how they became trap words. In マンション’s case, it was business. In the 1960s, Japanese developers were building luxury housing complexes, but wanted to differentiate them from other housing complexes that had a low-class image, like public housing.¹ As far as I can tell, it wasn’t just one company, and マンション wasn’t a brand name. They created a whole new word, borrowing from English. Since then, the word マンション evolved to have a wider and wider scope, now including not just luxury housing complexes but any housing complex.
ジュース → juice ❌ → juice/soft drink/sports drink/mixer ✅
This one drives me up the wall because of how different it is from English. ジュース is a huge umbrella term which includes Coke, Aquarius, ramune, flavoured milk(!!), and actual orange juice. It does NOT include coffee, tea, anything with alcohol, or lemon juice(!!). Why not lemon juice? Because ジュース kinda means “beverage”. You don't usually drink lemon juice straight, so it’s not ジュース. Instead, you call lemon juice レモン汁. There are plenty of recipes on the japanese recipe sharing website Cookpad for レモンジュース, and most of them involve diluting actual lemon juice in carbonated water and mixing it with sugar or honey.²
Apparently, up until the 1960s (〜昭和40年), the word ジュース was not regulated, which meant Japanese brands were free to label fruit flavoured drinks as ジュース, even if they had no actual fruit juice in them. This changed in late 1967, when, thanks to pressure from consumer groups, the Japanese Agricultural Standard Law (JAS法) was revised to include a regulatory definition of the word ジュース: 「果汁100%のもの以外は、『ジュース』という名称で販売できない」(100% fruit juice).³ Even the wikipedia article for ジュース defines it using the JAS definition.⁴ However, the word ジュース had already entered common usage before the law came into effect, and it’s still used today to mean any non-coffee, non-tea, non-alcoholic, sweet beverage, especially ones sold from a vending machine. I believe the prevalence of vending machines may have led to the spread of this word. Another reason ジュース has not been adopted in common use may be that Japanese already has a word for fruit juice - 果汁. Languages dislike redundancy, so it’s natural that one of the two would have changed to have a different meaning. Many native Japanese speakers are unaware of the regulatory definition⁵, (and even then, regulations shouldn’t and don’t dictate how language is used in everyday conversation) so it’s important to be careful!
ノート → note ❌ → notebook ✅
In Japanese, it’s rare that a common word will be longer than 4 kana sounds long (aka morae). Similarly in English, we don’t end to use words that are over 4 syllables long very often. In English, the word “notebook” is 2 syllables, nice and short. But when you convert it into Japanese, it becomes ノートブック, a whole 6 morae! No one has time to say all that! Since English can fit multiple consonants into a single syllable but Japanese can’t, when converting to Japanese, lots of additional vowels get added in, which extends the word. That’s why loan words in Japanese tend to get abbreviated: ビル for building, リモコン for remote control, ティアキン for “Tears of the Kingdom”.⁶ It’s only natural that ノートブック would get abbreviated to ノート. It’s just an unlucky coincidence that “note” happens to be an English word as well. The word for "note" in Japanese is メモ!
This is why the Death Note is called a note, even though it’s not a note, and also gives us this slightly おかしい translation.
I’m keen to post more about these trap words since dictionaries are often quite prescriptivist about the meanings, and it’s hard to get a good idea of what the word means without talking to Japanese people. I also find the histories quite interesting. Let me know if you’re interested! I have a feeling these words (besides ジュース) may be kinda common knowledge, but I hope the explanations were interesting! I think next time I'll talk about some ones that are less commonly known.