In search of WO KOMETE

So, this is going to be a needlessly long post because I want to talk about Sawada Kenji, one of the Japanese loves of my life (the others being Moriyama Mirai, and Fujii Fumiya), so hang in there with me, okay?

But first, let's talk about WO KOMETE. My textbooks has the very unhelpful definition of "feelings put in the middle". Well, that's the literal translation, in any case. I spent about one half of a lesson with my Japanese teacher when I lived in Japan trying to figure out what this means, and I'm still not feeling terribly confident, but I'm pretty sure I have the main gist of it. It basically means thats something is charged with a certain emotion or feeling.

The structure is as follows:

Noun + をこめて (+ rest of sentence)

The most typical way you'll ever see this is with 愛をこめてor こころをこめて. The former is usually translated as "with love" and the latter as "wholeheartedly", though I would probably translate that as "with all my heart".

Fortunately, for ai wo komete, I have a great example. I don't know if you are an old school anime freak, or not, but if you are you will probably recognize this:

Uh-oh. Do you hear that? It's the sound of me about to digress. Hold on to your hats!

1.  Space Battleship Yamato is a space opera that I don't think I want to delve into too deeply, largely because I've forgotten most of what I've seen from it, and the episodes I've seen were seen out of order. Now, if you want me to talk about Galaxy 999, then we don't have a problem. Of course, we're not.
Yamato is huge. I found it in my best theme songs of anime sheet music book, old men at karaoke bars are forever singing its theme song, and it has spawned movie after movie, and series after series. It is, to me, the Star Trek of the Japanese cult nerds.
What I can say about the series for certain is that it follows the lives of the people aboard the spaceship Yamato, which is on a mission to save their planet. Before the start of the series, Earth has been irradiated by an alien race. Why? Well, that's a spoiler, so  I won't say. The planet is uninhabitable, and the humans who survived by living underground will die within a year due to radiation poisoning themselves. They are outclassed by the aliens in every way, until they find blueprints for a ship and a message telling them that they can find a device that will save their planet by cleaning the radiation. They secretly build it in the remains of an old Japanese battleship (the eponymous Yamato), and set out to save the human race. That's it. 

2. The sweet voice you hear in that video above are the dulcet tones of Sawada Kenji, probably one of the most famous Japanese singers of all time. He was formerly the lead singer of The Tigers, which was sort of like The Japanese Beatles, then he went on to have a brilliant solo career full of sparkles and shiny things, become a highly regarded comedian, and act in some truly spectacular films. All in all, not bad for one life. He's also one of the few Japanese celebrities that you can watch grow old on television. Very rarely do pop stars retain their popularity for as long as he has.
The Japanese, however, tend to know him by his nickname, Julie. In the 60s, it was popular to give pop idols female European names. I have yet to figure out why this is. In any case, he was named Julie because he loves Julie Andrews. 

He also has a tendency to do this to women:

Okay, now that that's over, let's get on to the grammar!

The song is called ヤマトより愛をこめて. This should be easy enough, since I just told you what ai wo komete means in English. The translation is:

To Yamato (the spaceship), with love.

Easy? Right? You will find ai wo kometei in all sorts of songs, like in this FUJIFABRIC song that I can't embed! That's okay, I'm going to link you to the exact second he says it.

ならば愛をこめて
手紙をしたためよう 

Naraba ai wo komete   

tegami wo shitatatemeyou 

If that's so, let's write a letter
with love

Of course you can use WO KOMETE with other words. For example, take this video about the Touhoku earthquake:





This translates 祈りをこめて (inori wo komete) as "pray for Japan" and I think that's about as close as you're going to get. The idea is that the video is filled with prayers for those affected by the 2011 Touhoku Earthquake.

Lastly, I'm going steal a sentence from my textbook because I think it will also help explain the sentence:

• 母はわたしのために心をこめて、セーターを編んでくれた。
• Haha ha watashi no tame ni kokoro wo komete, SEETAA wo andekureta.
• My mother wholeheartedly knitted a sweater for me.

Aw, how sweet! The weird Japanese explanation I gave you above about putting a feeling into something really makes sense in this sentence. Here, the WO KOMETE is describing she put her heart into making the sweater for her son/daughter.

I suppose I could go on, but I think we all agree it's time to wrap this up. It's been a long post, for sure, but it was fun with Julie here, right?

I also, once upon a time, made a very stupid vlog when I still vlogged dedicated to Kenji Sawada. You can see it here.