Wednesday Afternoon Diversion: Morning Musume

By Kevin Robinson in Arts & Entertainment on Mar 28, 2012 8:00PM

This is probably one of my favorite internet videos, because it combines a Japanese cultural phenomena with the nuance of language, and then presents it almost completely out of any context.

The sound that animals make differ between languages; "oink," in English, for example, is "hru" in Georigian, and "meow" in Japanese is "nya." Likewise, popular music styles and the groups that perform them differ between languages and cultures as well. In Japan Morning Musume is a girl idol group produced by Tsunku as park of his Hello! Project, with a changing personnel lineup annually. This video, taken from their Alo-Hello! Hawaii video shows the girls of Morning Musume playing a game where they imitate a cat's sound for the camera. Taken out of context, though, and the English-speaking viewer is left to infer the meaning of the video.