I was thinking that, there's a whole lot of old Japanese music that I discovered rom my time in Japan that I've never properly shared on this blog. (Partly because I didn't get my Sharing Music I Like project started until 2020.)
Well, since I've got some extra free time this week, why not try to post a few entries.
This entry is Sensou o Shiranai Kodomotachi, or "The Children Who Don't Know War".
Someone actually mentioned it before in the comments of this blog once.
In my review of Fire Across the Sea: The Vietnam War and Japan by Thomas Havens, I wrote:
As a big fan of Japanese oldies, this book tries to answer a question I had been wondering about for years: with massive protests and anti-war sentiment in Japan, why were there no anti-war songs on the pop charts?
Just wanted to correct one fact. There was a popular anti-war song in Japan! It was a big hit in 1970's in midst of Vetnam War, The title is "Senso o shiranai Kkodomotachi"(Children who don't know wars) by Jiros. I was 8 years old and still living in Japan. I remember we often sang this song in a bus during several field trips. I've found some links to YouTube though they are old now.I was looking for information about JRA and got here. I think this is a great blog!
(The Youtube link that he posted no longer works. This is, as I've noted before on this blog, one of the dangers of trying to link to Japanese music on Youtube. The Japanese music industry seems to be really aggressive about taking stuff down.)
But anyway, I responded to the comment:
Ah, yes, thank you. This was an oversight on my part. I was actually familiar with this song, but forgot to mention it here. (By the time I was in Japan, 2001-2009, this song was a bit dated, but it was still a popular stand-by for choral performances and school festivals.)I agree it's a beautiful song, although I've never found it to be strongly anti-war. It always seemed to me to be more about the generation gap, and the difference in growing up between the children born after the war, and the generation beforehand.It also seemed to me to be rather focused on the situation in Japan, and celebrating the fact that Japan itself had been without war for a full generation, but ignoring what was going on in Vietnam.....All this I need to say with a caveat that my Japanese level never really got beyond upper-intermediate, so I can understand most of the lyrics in this song, but could well be missing something.
I actually first learned this song, like I learned most of the Japanese oldies, by working my way through the yearly pop charts. As I wrote about in this post here.
But then, once I had learned this song, I began to realize that it was sung in school festivals a lot. (I think this is a result of the noticing effect. I probably had been hearing the song at school festivals before, but because I didn't know what it was, it just went in one ear and out the other, and it wasn't until I actually learned what this song was, that I began to notice it everywhere.)
Now, as I said in my comments above, take my interpretation with a grain of salt, because I never got much beyond an upper-intermediate level of Japanese.
But, I think I can understand most of the lyrics of this song, and as far as I can tell, it's a celebration of the fact that by 1971 there was a whole generation of young people in Japan who didn't know war. (Although perhaps I was wrong when I said "I've never found it to be strongly anti-war." It is anti-war in the sense that it's celebrating a generation of peace.)
It's also just a really catchy song. Which is probably also part of the reason why it's stayed so popular over the years. Give it a listen.
Here's the same song live, when the singers were much older:
(Those links will probably go dead in a couple years. But just search 戦争を知らない子供たち in Youtube to find it again.)
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