Japanese with anime voice: episode17
Hello, I’m Sachi.
In your country, how do you get to know the 広報(kouhou) of the town you live in? 広報(Kouhou) means informing the public at large.
Each municipality in Japan has a public information system, which is mainly used to broadcast evacuation drills held by each municipality on Disaster Prevention Day, when there is a fire, or to notify people who are missing. Also, chimes and music are sounded at 12:00 noon and 5:00 pm. This also differs from municipality to municipality. In my hometown, there is also a call for garbage disposal. Also, a chime goes off at noon and in the evening.
I think every city, town, and village probably lends out PR equipment free of charge to newcomers to the area.
Where I live now, I can borrow one for free. Normally, it is a public relations device that can be plugged into an outlet and left around the house, but in the event of a disaster, such as a power outage, you can insert batteries and use it as a disaster radio.
In my hometown, they changed to a new PR terminal machine last year, I think it was free. I don’t know the details of that.
So, what I want to talk about this time is that the PR in my city is generally the same as the PR in other areas. We receive information about evacuation drills, fires, missing persons, and so on from the public relations office. For lunchtime and evening, the public relations office plays music, whereas in my hometown it is chimes.
What’s different is that 市歌(Shika) comes on at 7:00 a.m. Do you know what 市歌(Shika) is? “市(Shi)” means city, and “歌(Ka)” means song. In other words, it is The City Song. In my life, I knew that each school had its own song, but I never thought that there was a city song!
What’s more, that city song even has a second number. Every month, the first and second lyrics are played alternately. And every time before the city song is played, there is a mysterious noise. I don’t know why. What was that all about? Can’t the song be played without the noise preamble? It’s really a mystery.
So I looked up the lyrics of the city song to see if I could find anything new about it.
In 2005, the city solicited lyrics for this city song from throughout Japan. It is unclear why they decided to make the scope of the call nationwide. And I thought it was only up to the second verse, but there was a third verse, too. I haven’t heard it in the publicity. Where on earth would they play this city song up to No. 3 if they never hear it even in the PR?
Okay, well, let me introduce the lyrics.
白壁（しらかべ）光る 遥かな天守
shirakabe hikaru haruka na tenshu
息づく街角 広がる茶園
ikiduku machikado hirogaru chaen
夢つなぎ 未来輝く 我が故郷
yume tsunagi mirai kagayaku waga kokyou
彩り染まる 花平野
irodori somaru hana heiya
ああ 掛川
aa kakegawa
城下（しろ）のまち 夢みるまち 素敵な掛川
shiro no machi yume miru machi suteki na kakegawa
By the way, I am very tone deaf, so I can’t sing.
- Shirakabe means white walls. In other words, the word includes the beauty of the landscape.
- Tenshu is the name of a building symbolizing the authority of the lord of the castle.
- chaen is a tea plantation.
To summarize the meaning of the lyrics, Kakegawa is a beautiful place. Oh, Kakegawa is the name of the city.
I’d like to introduce the lyrics of the 2nd and 3rd verses, but it would take too much time, so I’ll just introduce the 1st verse. I’m a little tired just introducing the meaning of the first verse…lol. Well, although the lyrics are different, the meaning seems to be the same. In other words, I think it is a song that wants to say, “Let’s make the future of Kakegawa together. “
But when I first came to this city, I was amazed by the song. When I woke up in the morning and was doing the housework, suddenly a song started playing on the public relations system. It was a song I did not recognize at all. And at the end of the song, it says “kakegawa,” and that’s when I realized that it was a song about the city. I told my partner about the song, and he said, “Yes, 市歌(Shika) is played every morning at 7:00 a.m.” At first, I didn’t even recognize the word 市歌(Shika). I thought, “What the heck is that?”.
By the way, it was the beginning of the month when I moved to this city. So I spent every day at 7 o’clock listening to the city song. Then, when the month changed, I heard the city song as usual, but I noticed something different. I thought, “Oh, that’s not the usual lyrics. ” I talked to my partner about it again. And he said, “Yes, the city song here has a second verse. ” I wonder if a city song needs that many lyrics.
Does your city have a city song? I think it is rare to have a city song even in Japan. Well, I think that a village that has existed for a long time has a village song. Come to think of it, my hometown also has a song for the town. But nowadays it is used as a call to action when people carry the mikoshi (portable shrine) during matsuri (festival), so I don’t feel it is a town song. But even if there was a city song, I wonder if it would be played in public relations?
But, in this day and age, we have smartphones, and it seems that even communication from the school is via LINE, right? And in the old days, neighborhoods used to send out circulars to each other on paper, but now you can see them on LINE, too. And yet, only public relations is still done with a small terminal device like a radio. Well, it is true that when a disaster occurs, we can no longer use our smartphones. But even so, while digitalization is progressing, some analog counterparts still remain. Japan is really a strange country!
