To say Japanese poets are fans of nature is a bit of an understatement. 苔の生す迄 = koke no musu made = Lush with moss It’s said that they grow out of these pebbles over the course of centuries. Sazare-ishi look like rocks made of thousands of little pebbles and are often regarded as sacred. Sazare uses the same kanji meaning “slender” or “fine,” but here refers to a pebble. You may well have seen sazare-ishi at Shinto shrines. 巌となりで = Iwao to nari de = Grow into boulders If we wanted to be a bit poetic, we could appreciate the contrast between the life of one person and 8,000 generations. When roles are hereditary and held for life, a generation is generally equal to a reign - thus wishing for a long line of succession as well as one person’s life. Note the repetition of 代, but here in a slightly different context. 千代に八千代に = Chiyo ni yachiyo ni = Continue for a thousand, eight thousand generations The “lord” meaning is the most prevalent, so we’ll be focusing on that for this article. Historically, Kimigayo seems also to have been sung as a wish for the long life of one’s guests and other non-lordly people of honor. In this poem, the first yo is almost always translated as “reign,” but the kanji and word itself can also refer to generations and other such spans of time. 代 (yo) has several meanings, as you’ll also see in the next line. It was eventually decided that “Kimi” does refer to the emperor, but the emperor as “the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people, and whose position is derived from the consensus-based will of Japanese citizens, with whom sovereign power resides,” according to then-Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, as cited by the Japan Policy Research Institute. This etymological quandary caused much debate during the passing of the 1999 Act on National Flag and Anthem, which made Kimigayo the official national anthem. During the Edo period (1603-1868), “Kimi” would have referred to the shogun rather than the emperor, but this would switch formally with the founding of the Empire of Japan in 1868. Given that the Heian period was about infusing modern poetry with ancient influences, it’s far from settled whether or not this poem directly addresses the emperor.
In the Heian period (794-1185) when the poem was written, “Kimi” would generally refer to one’s lord, but the emperor himself was often called “Okimi “ (meaning “Great Lord”) in earlier times. It’s also been translated as “My lord’s reign.” There remains debate about who, exactly, “Kimi” is.
Originally, the first line read “ Waga kimi ha” - “My lord” - but this was changed a few years later to its current form. We’ll go line-by-line, starting with the first, most famous, and controversial: That night, they wrote I Had a Dream's baroque musical closing number, "1959.Let’s start with the fundamentals. "I just walked a couple blocks to his house," Leithauser says, smiling. Some five years later, the pair would reunite after a mutual friend suggested the two songwriters try to work together. The whole thing took about five months to come together, and, in the meantime, they put out a record and did Saturday Night Live before flying out to open for us in an Atlanta club," Leithauser says, laughing. A couple years later he got this band together and asked if he could open for us. " Ezra Koenig had actually been the intern at our recording studio we had set up in Harlem. Musically and lyrically, "A 1000 Times"'s theme echoes the story of its creators, who first met in 2008 when Batmanglij's band Vampire Weekend asked to open for the Walkmen. It sort of set up the way the whole record is gonna go. I don't know why those were the lyrics but it just came pretty quick and it just had a nice feel. "It was like a wandering around, kind of New York dream song. "I took it home and then six months later, was at my house in Brooklyn and we were standing around the piano and we wrote the entire song in about 20 minutes," he recalls. So when Batmanglij asked him to find a topline for a beat he'd been working on, Leithauser saw an opportunity. The former Walkmen singer first fell in love with the traditional folk song (often credited to Hedy West) when he heard the Joan Baez version some years back, and had tried fruitlessly to reinterpret it ever since.