Happy Birthday Cent-J!! Wow. Five years. If you'd told me five years ago I'd still be translating Japanese pop songs today I'd have run myself over with a car. Try to figure that one out... Have I really made so little progress into the REAL world? Maybe, but I can't deny how much I love doing this. When I look back on all those nights with Takako sitting on a sagging moldy mattress with a battered dictionary in one hand and a 2 liter bottle of Gogo no Koucha in the other, a tear comes to my eye. I'm like a pharoah building what will one day be his tomb with a little love, a little tenderness and a whole mess of slave labor.

I feel like I've witnessed empires rise and fall. Among the Cent-J'ers here, only Da Crank can claim a longer history with Japanese pop music. I remember the first jpop CD I ever bought was the Sakai Noriko CD Single of Aoi Usagi. It wasn't until I got to college that I started branching out into the current popular acts of the time. One by one they slipped into my record collection, Amuro, Puffy, Mr. Children. And one by one I've watched them fall, Sharan Q, Luna Sea, The Yellow Monkey, Kahala Tomomi, Siam Shade, Cocco, and on and on...

In Five years I've seen jpop grow from an offshoot of anime fandom, into its own little religion, with its own Gods and its own Legends. What would a jpop forum be today without a discussion of Gackt's relative gayness or a heated comparison of Ayu and Hikki? I can hardly believe I was in Japan when Morning Musume first busted out on the scene, that I witnessed the gloriously horrifying fall of Globe into droning mediocrity. I wouldn't have thought 5 years ago that TM Revolution of all people would break out in the US in any form. And yes, I still like him.

But let's get back to Cent-J. The first lyric I ever translated was Le Ciel by Malice Mizer.
Back then, no one was doing Jrock and no one had heard of Malice Mizer, thus I doubt more than a handful of people even saw it. When the idea of putting all this on the web first came up, it was met with tepid excitement.

The current Cent-J basically looks like a sinking treasure boat. That once held such promise but will one day be weighed down and sink to the bottom of the sea, where it's vast booty will be buried in time. There are dead links to Part II's that were never written, there are countless false starts toward something better, and yet this child of ours, is still our child. Even though she never finshes what she says she will, and she wastes her potential, we still love her.

So to all of you, though our child is ten year's shy of the age of consent. Let us count together the day's until Cent-J's a woman and you can all make love to her like proper ladies and gentleman.

Love and Sprockets,