ICHIYA’s POP Eye – Sound

　From Kyary Pamyu Pamyu Moshi Moshi Nippon’s “ICHIYA’s POP EYE”.
  Today’s topic is Sound!
  Japan is noisy. When you walk around a town and enter a store, you can hear many melodies from TV commercials.
“♪Bic bic bic bic camera” 
“♪Seven eleven good feelings”
  Melodies of television’s CM are played in town.
 “Rasshai, Rasshai, Rasshai!” --  it means “Welcome” 
“Tohle Tole Peech Peech!” --- it means “It’s fresh”
  Many different of catch phrases become jingles and attract you to go inside a store.
  Sounds have become characters and icons in Japan and are used as a tool to deliver messages. In order to produce a CM sound logo, professional musicians have to come up with about 100 ideas, and then choose only one among them. That is fairly costly.
  It is one of Japanese characteristics that sounds are treated as equivalent as letters, pictures and movies.
  Machines also make various sounds. Vending machines talk, and elevators talk and say something like “2nd floor. The Door is closing”. On a train an announcement is made at each stop, saying something like “We will soon make a brief stop at Kyoto.”
  In Tokyo, each station has its own theme song. For example, Shinbashi’s song is song of railways, and Takadanobaba’s song is Artro Boy.Every time a train arrives at a platform of a station, a theme song for the station is played. Sounds have become an ID of the place. At the same time, sounds of birdsongs are played at station’s platforms through a speaker to create natural ambience.
  Sounds of nature. Do you like singing of insects?Japan has many kinds of cicadas. Robust cicada goes “min min”, evening cicada goes “kana kana”. Cricket goes “rin rin”. 
  They are all famous sounds of insects that are recognized as the seasonal features of summer and autumn, which all Japanese know. 
  However, these kinds of sounds are considered as merely noises in other countries. When Japanese films are exported, the sounds of cicada get erased. In Japan, summer scenes often include the sounds of cicada. For Japanese, these sounds of insects are more like “voices” and are important factors to express seasons. 
  Please pay some attentions to various sounds when you visit Japan.