I have crossed an interesting line in my Japanese studies. It's not a big line, necessarily, and I ardently hope it's not the last line I'll cross, or even notice crossing, but the sense of discrete progress is exhilarating all the same. I can now think in Japanese. At least, I can in this very limited and specific sense: within the constraints of a still-tiny vocabulary and a not-yet-complete (even if I could remember it all at once) repertoire of grammar, I can sometimes hear or read something in Japanese, and then react to it in Japanese, with the response-processing in my head taking place in Japanese. Only occasionally, mind you, can I manage this. Most of the time I'm still painstakingly translating everything into English, figuring out how I want to reply in English, and then translating that English back into Japanese. Or, more accurately, most of the time I'm still trying to translate the Japanese into English, realizing it involves some usage I've either forgotten or not learned, and resorting to the growing tower of subtly different dictionaries now weighing down the non-CD-bearing end of my desk. Five minutes later, with a shaky grasp of what was expressed in Japanese, the dictionaries and I are ready to begin assembling earnest errors into a return comment that is, when I'm lucky, close enough to how it was supposed to be phrased that my teacher will be able to correct it without my having to explain its intent in English. Did I ever reach this point with the other languages I've studied? It's a little hard to say. In German, French and Swedish, the word patterns were different, but the thought patterns were largely the same. In Japanese, the thoughts themselves are actually different. Oh, and the words, and the letters. And I still clearly have a long, long way to go, as even in a simple pop song or page of manga I continue to hit basic-looking constructs I don't know what to do with, and about the best thing I can say for my kanji-recognition skills is that if a character I should know by now comes up four times in close succession, I will usually only have to look it up the first, second and third times. Still, it's heartening to make progress. Ninety percent of the language may still be spread out in front of me, but after being exposed to the first ten percent, two or three percent has sunk in deeply enough that I can now use it. Subsistence-level competence is another year away, maybe, but just a month ago I would have guessed two or three.

Hitomi Yaida and some stray Irishmen, however, is not Japan's current delegate to world-music. For that we have Hainumikaze (the translation of which eludes me), the solo debut by Okinawan singer Chitose Hajime, previously known for a well-exploited Deep Forest cameo. Okinawan folk music ("shima uta"; "shima" is island, "uta" song) is based on minimal, drone-ish accompaniments and fluttery singing somewhere between Western melisma and Indian wail, and this album attempts to convert it into palatable pop by recasting the usual stark accompaniment with glimmering acoustic guitars, quiet strings, muted drums (some programmed) and other assorted percussion, not entirely unlike an unplugged version of Deep Forest without all the other ethnic affectations. In Japan, the experiment was a rousing chart success. In the parts of the world not as easily charmed en masse by microtonal vibrato, its commercial potential is probably more limited. If you can imagine Jewel's Pieces of You redone with better (but disciplined) musicians and a whole lot more yodeling, though, and not cringe while imagining it, then you might well like this. It treads an interesting line between primitive vitality and modern professional poise, and after much consideration I think I've concluded that I like Chitose's singing a lot, but hope her next album is more something than this. The pop urges here are a little too disciplined, I think, and I find myself too often wishing that they'd either take a song over completely or just leave it alone. This compromise seems too obviously calculated to me, too carefully polite everywhere it could have been raw or defiant. My hope, I guess, is that this album was successful enough that it earns Chitose a little respect, but not success enough that it burdens her with expectations.

It's instructive, in fact, to compare Hainumikaze to Eri Shingyoji's unabashedly manic third album Power Strip. The level of musicianship on Hainumikaze is significantly higher, especially in the area of actual instruments played with actual human hands, which on Power Strip are badly outnumbered by robots with fused restraining bolts. Eri sings like a Powerpuff version of Emm Gryner, and it doesn't take very much translation effort to suggest that I'm probably enjoying this as dizzy nonsense as much as I would if I understood it. This is the soundtrack to another wing of Japanese culture I haven't spent much time in, where cities never close, all the anime involves elves transforming into war machines, and nobody seems to have anything to do other than bark into glowing cell phones, be advertised to, and wear cooler shoes than you. The cover has a bunch of blurred Eris zipping around an anonymously bleached-out high-rise waiting room in ersatz Road Warrior clothes, and if you know enough for that to suggest a musical style, Power Strip comes about as close as I can imagine to providing it.

Statistically speaking, though, I still generally prefer ethereal to frantic when they're done equally well. globe are one of the bands I dismissed in my first pass, and I even dismissed them again in a second pass, after buying Lights2 and not thinking it sounded much like Every Little Thing. But Lights2 starts its song numbering at eleven, and comes in a box meant for both discs, so I kept listening to Lights2 hoping I'd discover a concrete excuse to buy the first one. While waiting for that to happen, I started liking it.