YAWARA! ED 1 FULL — Stand By Me [English Subtitles] — Rika Himenogi

Описание: YAWARA! A Fashionable Judo Girl is a show that caught me off guard, usually I will take a gander at random animu and lose interest, but this china toon hooked me for ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FOUR EPISODES. I'm not exactly the king otaku that knows all the tropes, but I was surprised to see a show that did the One Punch Man premise two decades before it. Sort of, it's not as strict with the gimmick, but Yawara is a female judoka that is so overpowered that will absolutely wreck her competition. But the quasi-shōjo twist lies in the fact that she feels conflicted about it and doesn't really want to do Judo anymore. But instead pursue the life of an ordinary girl, to the dismay of her grandfather who trained her, and a sports reporter that falls in love not only with her, but with her athletic prowess. The show goes in the same cycle multiple times, she hates it, gets angry, refuses to judo, then twists and turns occur and she barely manages to arrive at a tournament and even though she's in unfavorable circumstances she manages to win big. You can't believe the nail biting drama when this happens like 20 times and it still manages to keep me guessing if she's going make it this time. I really am just a monkey.
I'm not sure how fateful it is to the source material, but halfway I was surprised to find out it was based on a manga by Naoki Urasawa (the guy who made Monster, 20th Century Boys, Pluto). I thought it was weird he made a sports manga, but he actually made another 23 volumes manga about tennis.
Keeping that in mind, what got me into the show wasn't Urasawa, it was actually because I liked this ED so much that I wanted to take a peek what the show was about. I find it to be the perfect final form of an ED, it has all the anatomy down perfectly. An OP should be upbeat and bombastic, an ED needs to be its antithesis and wind down the show in a sort of contemplative way. As if you were watching a sunset and reflecting on the events that took place.
However let me break down some of the visual details I put forth here. First of all I don't remember half of what I did, I started this thing a year ago if my files aren't lying to me, and I kept coming back to it later months apart completely confused what was going on in the project file, especially today when I decided I was going to do the final touches. But anyway, the ED is about a minute long but the full song is almost 4 minutes, so I had to stretch out the visuals by finding loop points. And even though the bluray has pretty good quality I was compelled to upscale it using an ESRgan model that tries to replicate that animation cel look, which I'm sort of a sucker for. It's not perfect, there are some details that bother me, but I still toned it down by mixing it with the original frames, so it doesn't look so aggressively fake. "Luckily" youtube's compression will wash away some of those artifacts as well.
Another little detail that I did enjoy was separating the 2 spectrograms into the instrumental and the vocals, and a sort of peak meter that resembles an abstract mouth whenever Rika Himenogi sings. And everyone that follows this channel should know by now how much I love Obi Strips.
Now, let me get the most retarded part out of the way, I don't speak Japanese, I can't read it either, what follows naturally is that I should not be legally allowed to translate the lyrics for this, and yet I have committed the cardinal sin. It's probably all wrong, but I don't know anyone that could help me in this. Let me explain my dumb method. A user named RetroPanda has a full English translation, but his English manages to sound stiffer than mine. Then there's a partial translation in the FroZen-EviL rip of the show, but that's just the short version from the ED. So I found a transcription of the original lyrics in Japanese and I passed it through various robots, always trying compare it to with the human translated ones I had. It went something like this: I would feed the lyrics to DeepL, google translate and all the other services and just picked and chose whatever sounded nicer, yeah I know, very scientific here. Then when I was settled I would take it and feed it to ChatGPT and ask it to compare with the original script and what it thought should be changed. Then I would take that and go to copilot, and on and on until I settled with Deepseek that was released just last week. I would take their suggestions and just cherrypicked what I thought sounded nicer. Again, I know all of this is mental, but I wanted to add lyrics to this goddamn music. I imagine it's probably the gist of it, even if not the most accurate. One thing that I find funny is adding those 「ＪＡＰＡＮＥＳＥ ＱＵＯＴＥ ＭＡＲＫＳ」 even though they make little sense in english, but I think they use them when they add roman text mixed with their moonrunes, and somehow it always looks hilarious to me.

Lyrics: Takashi Matsumoto
Composition: Wataru Yahagi
Arrangement: Mitsuo Hagita
Performed by Rika Himenogi