Artist Focus: Aki Hata

Now I will write about music. Well, in a manner of speaking. It’s a transitional thing. In the anime Lucky Star, the otaku heroine Konata taxes the American exchange student, Patti–who claims to “love Japanese music”–with only liking artists who have done anime work. “And what’s more,” she adds, to Patti’s tearful acknowledgment, “you only listen to their anime songs!”

In such a spirit, I’d like to direct the spotlight to a truly remarkable female on the Japanese music scene: Aki Hata.

While Hata is a singer, musician, and all-around Renaissance woman, she’s probably best known as a lyricist, penning songs for beloved anime including Azumanga Daioh, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and Lucky Star. Ms. Hata is the brains behind what is, surely, the most iconic scene in recent anime, the Haruhi “LiveAlive” concert:

But Hata is also responsible for a large number of “character songs,” those tunes sung by the voice actors and actresses that are harder to come by in the states, as they don’t appear in the series but are written and sold separately. It’s here that her genius as a songwriter becomes fully apparent–not only to craft such witty, complex lyrics, but with such a range of characters and singers in mind. The Lucky Star character songs are a treasure: I was first exposed to them in my Japanese homestay, hanging out in Akihabara with an otaku friend of my host father’s. “There sure are a lot of them,” I observed; and this man, first and foremost a Gundam fan, confessed: “And I’ve already bought every single one.”

Some time ago, I took a crack at translating some of Ms. Hata’s work myself over at Anime Lyrics, for both AzuDai and Lucky Star, under the tag of “Sister Vigilante.” They show my rather steep learning curve of Japanese, and the later ones are more accurate. I’m especially fond of Sorezore no ONEWAY (Yomi from AzuDai’s image song)–its first stanza is just pure poetry–and Tekireiki na LADY (Kuroi-sensei and Yui-neesan from Lucky Star), surely among the best of hip-hop inspired Japanese tunes.

In any case, here are some other Hata-related links:

Aki Hata on Wikipedia (in case one is too lazy to type it in oneself, I know I would be)

Blog for Tsukihiko, Ms. Hata’s band (JP only)

Aki Hata at IMBD

and finally, a personal site (I have to note, while I have Japanese text support, a lot of the text shows up as gibberish to me; maybe you’ll have better luck)