We were invited to celebrate Anna’s fourth birthday at Mobu Kids playgym in Falls Church! The girls had a blast and we loved seeing and catching up with Anna, Cara, Pat and Theo. 🙂 Thanks so much for inviting us to be a part of sweet Anna’s birthday celebration — can’t believe she is four already!
At one point, Mirei went under the parachute and got lost under there, which made us panic for a moment:
Dan also captured the funny moment:
Singing “Happy Birthday” to Anna!
Mio has a Japanese music book that we’ve let her listen to since she was a newborn — it has pages with lyrics and illustrations to some Japanese children’s songs, and there are buttons that you can press to hear the music play as you look at the pages. (Her favorite song Usagi no Dansu which she used to dance to is in it, too!)
Lately, she’s able to press the buttons herself to play the music, and she starts to clap as the music starts. It tickles me how she only claps the first few moments, and then goes onto press the button again (or another button) before the song even finishes.
Oh Mio, you are more fun to watch than ever! 🙂 Mommy and Daddy can’t get enough of you! ♥
Tonight, I had the pleasure of seeing the beautiful, funny, and most incredibly talented Idina Menzel perform with the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall!
I have been looking forward to this for a while now, since I have been a fan of Idina since her RENT days. She just has such a powerful stage presence and her voice is one of the most beautiful that I have ever heard. When I heard she was going to perform in San Francisco, I had to go. I dragged Dan along with me, and we were also joined by our lovely friends Sam, Uyen and Charissa! (Thanks for coming with us, ladies!) After a delicious dinner at Indigo, we headed over to Davies Symphony Hall for a truly memorable performance!
Idina sang a couple of her own songs that she has written and recorded, but also sang a number of her Broadway hits. She sang the RENT classic  No Day But Today beautifully, and it was breathtaking to hear her sing some of the Wicked songs she made so famous — I’m Not That Girl, For Good, and of course (my favorite!) Defying Gravity. She even slipped in a couple songs from the episodes she guest-starred in for Glee recently (Funny Girl and Lady Gaga’s Poker Face.) We were all in total awe of the Broadway powerhouse and uber-talented songstress that is Idina Menzel. It was one of the best live shows I have seen in a while, and I really hope that I can see her again sometime soon!
Some photos from the evening….
We weren’t allowed to take any photos or footage during the actual concert, so this was my way of getting a photo with my Broadway idol….
::UPDATE:: I found a video on YouTube of one of the biggest highlights of the concert. She sang “For Good” from the musical Wicked unmiked and a cappella after thanking all of us for coming to see her. It really felt like she was singing to us; it took my breath away.
I can’t believe it’s already April! It feels like just the other day we were ringing in the new year, and a quarter of the year has already passed us by. April has always held a lot of meaning and memories for me.
In school, it was always characteristically the busiest month of the year for me, in terms of putting on International Street Fair and the fact that most of our APIA events for AASU took place during April.
This April marks seven years since Dan and I have been together.
And it was on that fateful day of April 16th three years ago that thousands of lives at our university were forever altered by the actions of a single gunman.
Especially due to this last incident, I can’t really say that I can look back on all of my memories of April with fondness, but it has certainly always been a very emotionally loaded month for me. Since moving to California, April has always been the month I feel the strongest pangs of homesickness. My favorite flower is the cherry blossom, and there’s nothing more gorgeous in April than the 3,800 cherry blossom trees that come into full bloom for a couple weeks every year around the Tidal Basin of the Potomac.
This lovely scene in Washington, DC used to be only a 15-minute drive away from me when I lived in Northern Virginia, but I have not had the pleasure of seeing it in years, due to college and moving out to California, and I have really come to miss it.
The ephemeral nature of the cherry blossoms remind us of the transience of life — characterized by their amazing beauty when in bloom and their swifth death shortly afterwards, the blossoms have often been regarded as a symbol of mortality by the Japanese, and prominently appears in various forms of Japanese art, music and culture. Cherry blossoms, despite their fleeting lifetime every spring, still effloresce and flourish every year, and quickly but gracefully wilt away once they have reached their peak. It’s a reminder of the brevity and delicate aspect of our own human lives, and the importance of living each day to the fullest with no regrets, as if it were our last.
As cheesy as this may sound, I actually have a cherry blossom playlist on my iPod and I have it on repeat every spring when it’s cherry blossom season. There are countless songs about cherry blossoms in Japanese music, but these are my personal top five.
5. 「サクラ色〠by アンジェラ・ア゠(Sakurairo by Angela Aki)
Angela Aki is a half Japanese, half Italian-American singer-songwriter and pianist who grew up in Japan but attended George Washington University — she even has ties to my hometown of Vienna, Virginia, where she recorded her first English album These Words at Jammin Java. She has said that the cherry blossoms she sings of in this song are those in DC, and how they reminded her of her home in Japan. Angela Aki has a really beautiful, powerful voice and this song is one of my favorites by her.
4. 「ã•ãらã€by ケツメイシ (Sakura by Ketsumeishi)
I love this song — it’s a sad song about lost love, but the lyrics are beautiful. I also like the upbeat tempo and the “rap” that comes in here and there. My good friend Richard from school used to sing this song every time we went karaoke, without fail — and was pretty good at it, too!
3. 「桜ã€by コブクム(Sakura by Kobukuro)
Kobukuro’s Sakura is a true classic! I love all of Kobukuro’s ballads. This song also has a tinge of sadness, but the ultimate message is that of hope and having the strength to move forward with your life beyond loss and sorrow. It’s about becoming as strong as the single flower that endures through raging storms and strong winds to see the moment when the rain lets up.
2. 「ã•ãら （独唱）ã€by 森山直太朗 (Sakura (Solo) by Naotaro Moriyama)
This hit song, released in 2003, was Moriyama’s big break and launched him into superstardom. It’s become one of the most popular songs of the last decade, a staple graduation anthem often sung at commencement ceremonies across Japan. The style he sings in seems more traditional than modern, and it really is a classic graduation song in that it sings about the blossoming of youth and the inevitability of parting ways with friends. There are various versions out there, but the one here is his solo, accompanied by piano. I love this other version as well, in which Moriyama is backed by a chorus.
1. 「桜å‚ã€by ç¦å±±é›…æ²» (Sakura zaka by Masaharu Fukuyama)
This is my personal favorite! I fell in love with it when first hearing it in 2000 when it was released, and still love it ten years later. It is one of the most romantic songs I’ve ever heard, although it’s very bittersweet in that it is (again) about a love that has been lost. The soft melody, Fukuyama’s serene vocals and the depth of the lyrics has made it a classic favorite for me. It was a huge hit in Japan as well, selling 750,000 copies in its first week and it remained at the top of the charts for three consecutive weeks; it has sold over 2,300,000 copies overall on the Oricon charts, making it one of Fukuyama’s most successful songs.
I have a friend who can sing the song particularly well and he sang it on guitar for us once, which caused tears to spring to my eyes. I literally melted….
Other memorable “sakura” songs: Sakura no Toki by aiko, Sakura Iro Mau Koro by Nakashima Mika, Sakura by Ikimonogakari, Sakura by Kawaguchi Kyogo… can anyone thing of others?
Last night, my sister and I went to watch UTADA in concert at The Fillmore in San Francisco.
I’ve been a longtime fan of Utada Hikaru since she first debuted at the end of 1998 with her single “Automatic.” I was a junior in high school and was in my final year of chuugakkou (middle school) in Japanese Saturday School, and I remember the whole class was buzzing about her as soon as she came on the scene. She was an instant hit in Japan, and I remember having her first album First Love on repeat for months — it was one of those albums in which pretty much every track was good, and it amazed me that this girl who was one month younger than me was writing and singing these songs. What talent! She continued to churn out hit after hit in the coming years. The Japanese drama-holic that I am, I came to associate a lot of her songs with the dramas they became theme songs for. First Love with Majo no Jouken, Can You Keep a Secret? with HERO, Sakura Drops with First Love, Flavor of Life with Hana Yori Dango 2, Prisoner of Love with Last Friends, and more recently, Eternally with Innocent Love. (All great songs paired with great, addictive dramas… although now that I look back on them, with the exception of HERO and Hana Yori Dango, they’re all pretty dark, depressing “forbidden love” type dramas. But I digress.)
Utada is one of the few Japanese artists out there who have the English language skills to make for viable success in the international market, since she grew up going back and forth between Japan and New York. Even before Utada set her sights overseas, she was starting to attract international audiences and fans. Unfortunately, her first major debut attempt in the US with the album EXODUS sort of bombed (in my personal opinion), and for a few years, she seemed to go back to focusing on her already-hugely-successful musical career in Japan. She came out with a second album early last year titled This is the One, which seems to show more promise.
This month marked the beginning of Utada’s first official American tour. So far, she’d performed in Honolulu, Los Angeles, and Seattle before coming to San Francisco. I went to the concert under the impression that she would probably be singing mostly if not all English songs as her set list, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that she sang almost half and half in terms of English songs vs. Japanese songs throughout the concert. I think she understood that much of the audience was of Asian background and that there were some fans who had come from Japan as well, and so she catered to the hopes that she’d sing some of Japanese classics. Among the songs she sang were Sakura Drops, Automatic, First Love, Stay Gold and Can You Keep a Secret?. We were able to meet up with my fun coworker Estella and her brother at the concert, and we nostalgically rocked out to some of our Utada favorites.
I couldn’t take any pictures or video footage because cameras were strictly forbidden at the concert, but my friend Vince found this clip that had been taken at the concert last night and sent it to me. It’s of First Love. (Thanks Vince!)
There are some more videos online (although not of the San Francisco performance) that showcase more clips from the rest of her set list. I think they’re from her concert at the House of Blues in LA on the 19th.
From here, Utada will go on to perform in Las Vegas, Chicago, Boston, and then to her hometown here in the States, New York City. I hope that the rest of her tour is a success and hope that she can continue to break into the US music industry — I’m excited to see what the future has in store for her. I’m happy that I finally got to see her live, and hearing her sing took me back to the starry-eyed high schooler I was ten years ago. I feel like digging up that dusty First Love album from my closet and once again putting it on repeat.