Juno Reactor - Samurai

Well it's back to school time and I wanted to teach you all about my favourite song, Juno Reactor - Samurai.  When I first heard this song, I knew it was in Japanese (but I didn't understand the lyrics at the time).  Now most songs that I do listen to are not in Japanese so this caught me off guard a little bit.  And since I knew Juno Reactor was a band from England, this didn't make much sense to me, as in how did a band from England write a song in Japanese?  Well as I found out later, Ben Watkins (who is the leader of Juno Reactor) loves Japan and Japanese culture.  I was real fascinated in this since my parents are from Japan and I can kind of speak a little bit myself.  Not only did I like that it was in Japanese but also it has that rhythmic beat that makes you want to dance.  But as I learned to understand the lyrics and the meaning behind this song, this made me more in love with it.

The Lyrics of Samurai
There are many lines of Japanese that are spoken in this song but I'm going to focus mostly on the first line.  The first line in this song is "Anata wa taiyo" which translates to "You are (the) sun".  What this is a metaphor for yourself.  It is not saying that you yourself is the sun but that you are strong like the sun.  So when the lines are spoken, this is telling you that you are strong.  The focus of the sun is often used in other Juno Reactor songs and I will illustrate this in the next section.  The line "You are (the) sun" (also the other lines as well) was also used in a previous Ben Watkins' song (in Sunsonic's Kind of Loving but in English of course).  The other lines of Samurai are similar to the first line.  Each other line starts out as "Anata wa" which means "You are".  So for example the second line "Anata wa hikari" translates to "You are the light".  So in essence, this whole song is used as motivation for someone, telling the listener that he or she is strong.  I often use this song to motivate myself to be strong. 

Focus on the Sun
Juno Reactor has many songs about the sun and Samurai is definitely one of those.  Another song that has "sun" theme to it is Juno Reactor's Solaris.  But Samurai's sun is way different to Solaris' sun.  If you listen to the two songs, Solaris has much slower beat or rhythm (I think Ben described it as if you are sunbathing).  Samurai's beat is more up-tempo, so the sun here is less demanding, more like the sun here in Canada during springtime as opposed to the more heat-intensive sun during the summer.  Not only is the sun a focus in Juno Reactor's songs but also the opposite, the moon.  I saw an interview  Ben did where he talked about how the sun and the moon coming together to form Juno Reactor.  This is interesting because another Juno Reactor song that had Japanese lyrics (Juno Reactor's Kaguya Hime) has a "moon" theme to it.  Kaguya Hime has a very "dark" feel to it's song, much like the darkness of the moon, while again Samurai, which focuses on the sun, is more up-lifting.

The above picture is taken from Samurai's CD (done by Ben's brother I believe).  My dream one day is to go to a Juno Reactor live show and be able to hear Samurai playing.  I was hoping Ben would play this at the Vancouver show but he didn't play it.  If anyone wants to know anything about me, they should listen to this song.