Song Meaning: StaRt - Mrs. GREEN APPLE

Few major-label debut songs put this much instrument on the table inside the first eight bars. According to the song's Wikipedia entry, the intro of "StaRt" begins with a timpani roll, then a violin enters, then a harpsichord, all of them braided around the band before the first vocal arrives. A timpani roll. A harpsichord. On the first track of a J-pop band's first major release. The Japanese music site Skream! described the song as "amusement-park or high-speed chamber-pop," which is closer to right than any single genre tag I can think of: there's a circus-tent quality to the arrangement that the rest of the band sound has to keep up with rather than the other way around.

This was Mrs. GREEN APPLE's major-label debut, released July 8, 2015, as Track 1 of the mini-album Variety. Frontman Motoki Omori was eighteen, still a high school senior at the time of recording. He'd reportedly chosen a correspondence-style high school specifically so he could pursue a major debut while officially still a student, and he wrote the words, wrote the music, and co-arranged the song with Ryosuke Nakanishi. Speaking later about the production, Omori said he tried to blend rock and pop in good proportions, but at first couldn't get the pop feel he had in mind, and the work was difficult. You can hear that struggle, in a productive way: the song is constantly negotiating between confetti-cannon brightness and something cooler, more skeptical, sitting underneath.

Which is the trick of "StaRt." It opens like a curtain rising on a celebration. It calls for ritual applause. It throws a ララララ♪ at the listener almost immediately. And then, two thirds of the way through, it stops to wonder how anyone is supposed to believe an "I love you" once they've heard those words too many times. The song is older than it acts. That tension, the brassy front and the sober inside, is what most English-language summaries of "StaRt" miss, and it's what makes the song still work as Mrs. GREEN APPLE's statement of purpose more than ten years on, long after the band themselves have outgrown the five-piece lineup that recorded it.

A curtain that opens by asking for the closing applause

やっとこさ　幕開けだ
ほら　寄って集って！　お手を拝借！
スタートラインに立った今
そう　武装と創と造で登場！！！！！

yattokosa makuake da
hora yotte takatte! ote wo haishaku!
sutaato rain ni tatta ima
sou busou to sou to zou de toujou!!!!!

Finally, the curtain's up.
Come on, gather round! Let's have your hands!
Standing at the starting line right now,
yes, here I come, armed, creating, making!!!!!

Four lines do a lot of work here. やっとこさ is a slightly old-fashioned, faintly comic word for "at last," the kind of phrase a stage announcer or a weary uncle would use, never quite straight-faced. お手を拝借 is the phrase you hear at the end of Japanese New Year's parties, weddings, and corporate gatherings: the moment when someone steps forward and asks the room to join in 三本締め, three rounds of three claps plus a final clap, ceremonial closure for the night. Calling for it at the start of a song is a structural inversion, almost a joke. The closing ritual is being staged at the opening curtain. The song begins by asking the listener to perform the gesture that normally signals an end.

That inversion is the song's first thesis statement. Most J-POP debut singles work hard to convince a new listener that the band has just been born, that everything is fresh, that the moment is unprecedented. "StaRt" does the opposite: it borrows the phrasing of an ending and uses it to open. The implication, dropped quietly under the bouncy production, is that beginnings only work when you know how endings sound. Years later, this would be a recognizable Mrs. GREEN APPLE move. The band's 2020 declaration of "Phase 1 Complete" before going on hiatus, the religious-themed live tour titles drawn from Old Testament endings (エデンの園, NOAH no HAKOBUNE, BABEL no TOH), the entire impulse to think of an artistic life as a series of staged closings and reopenings: all of it is hidden inside that お手を拝借 in the second line of the band's debut.

The five exclamation marks (count them, there really are five) on the next line cement the comic-grand register. Then comes the line that everyone notices: 武装と創と造で登場. Four characters that all sound either sou or zou: 武装 (busou, armament), 創 (sou, creation), 造 (zou, making), 登場 (toujou, entrance). It's a phonetic drumroll in a single vowel cluster, performing entry as an act of small-scale warfare. The line is also less throwaway than it sounds. In September 2015, two months after the song dropped, Mrs. GREEN APPLE held their first-ever solo show at Shibuya WWW and titled it Mrs. ONEMAN LIVE 〜武装と創と造〜. The lyric became the name of the band's first stage. Whatever Omori thought he was writing in that first verse, the band took it as a self-defining phrase and walked out under it. Not many debut songs are this load-bearing.

Why a debut single calls its listeners マヌケ

一人でも多くのマヌケが居るなら
正すことから始めましょう。

hitori de mo ooku no manuke ga iru nara
tadasu koto kara hajime mashou.

If even one more idiot is around,
let's start by setting them straight.

マヌケ is the word that should give an English-speaking listener pause. It translates as "fool" or "idiot," but the texture is closer to "doofus" or "numbskull": colloquial, dismissive, faintly comedic, the kind of word you'd use about a friend who keeps forgetting his keys, not the kind you'd use about an enemy. Calling listeners potential マヌケ in your debut single is a register choice with real teeth. Compare the obvious alternatives. 馬鹿 (baka) would land harder, almost cruel. 愚か者 (orokamono) would tip into theatrical condemnation, the kind of word a samurai-drama villain would shout. 知らない人 (someone who doesn't know) would be polite to the point of nothing. マヌケ keeps the criticism cartoonish, the kind of word that lets a song get away with telling its audience to wake up without actually telling its audience to wake up. It's the texture of a flick to the forehead from someone who is on your side.

What follows is more striking still. 正すことから始めましょう. The verb 正す means to correct, to set straight, to fix what is wrong. This is the band's debut song, on their debut album, on a label they've just signed to, and it explicitly proposes that the first thing this band wants to do, once it walks onstage, is fix what's broken in the room. Look at how few major-label debut singles in J-POP take this tone. Yorushika's "ただ君に晴れ" begins with a long, beautiful cinematic instrumental. YOASOBI's "夜に駆ける," released four years after "StaRt," opens with a piano motif that doesn't show its hand for thirty seconds. Even RADWIMPS' "前前前世," which hit just a year after "StaRt," begins by addressing a "you" already loved. "StaRt" begins by saying: come closer, idiots, we have work to do. Then it sells the line as celebration.

This is also where the song first reveals its second face. The bright surface keeps insisting on joy; the lyric underneath keeps proposing that joy is contingent. Whether or not you can be happy is something you have to be tested on. 微々たるもの, "the smallest, most negligible things," is where 愛 (love) is hiding, and if you can't notice it there, you fail. さあ試されよう, "alright, let's be tested," is not a phrase pop songs usually offer their listeners with this much glee. The exam framing comes wrapped in a ララララ♪. The combination of a final-exam ethic and a kindergarten-songbook chorus is so specific to this song that it almost reads as a coded warning to anyone who would later try to imitate the band's style: the surface and the substance can be moving in completely different directions, and that's the whole point.

Sun on the town, water on the heart

パッパッパッ　晴れた町に
チャプチャプチャプ　雨の心
独りじゃないと否定出来るように
僕は探すんだ

pa-pa-pa, hareta machi ni
cha-pu-cha-pu-cha-pu, ame no kokoro
hitori ja nai to hitei dekiru you ni
boku wa sagasu n da

pa-pa-pa, in the cleared-up town
cha-pu-cha-pu-cha-pu, in a heart full of rain
so I can deny that I'm alone,
I keep searching.

The chorus is where "StaRt" stops trying and just works, and it works almost entirely on sound. パッパッパッ is the kind of dry, percussive onomatopoeia Japanese reaches for when a small thing pops or bursts: a flag snapping in wind, sun cracking through clouds, hands clapping. チャプチャプチャプ is wetter, softer, the sound of small water lapping at the edge of a basin or rain hitting puddles. Vowel-wise, the contrast is brutal. The first row is all hard A's against pa-pa-pa percussion. The second drops into low U vowels with the soft cha-pu-cha-pu-cha-pu of water. A bright, bouncy outer world. A damp, inward inner one. The song just lays them next to each other with no transition, no bridging metaphor, and trusts the listener to feel the gap.

Japanese makes this kind of sound-painting available in a way English cannot. Onomatopoeia in Japanese is not a children's-book device. It's a primary mode of adult expression, with formalized categories (擬音語 for actual sounds, 擬態語 for states or feelings made into sound). チャプチャプ is technically 擬音語, an actual splashing sound. But the pairing with 雨の心, "rain in my heart," tips it toward 擬態語 territory, where the sound of small water has become the feeling of low, leaking sadness. The chorus is not describing the weather. It is describing the emotional weather, but through the same sound-vocabulary the language uses for actual rain. A native Japanese listener does not have to consciously translate any of this. The two onomatopoeic bursts arrive already loaded with weight, color, and temperature, and the song trusts them to carry the chorus on their own backs.

What lands hardest in the third line, though, is one specific verb. 否定 (hitei), to deny, to negate. The lyric is not 独りじゃないと証明出来るように, "so I can prove I'm not alone." It's 否定出来るように, "so I can deny that I'm alone." The two phrasings are almost logically equivalent. They are emotionally not equivalent at all. To deny something, you have to first imagine it as the default state. The line presupposes that loneliness is the prior assumption, what the narrator wakes up believing, and that the work is finding evidence to overturn it. This is a small grammatical choice carrying a whole worldview, and the kind of thing that doesn't survive a casual translation. Most fan-translations I've seen render the line as "to prove I'm not alone," which is sweeter, easier, and not what the song says.

The chorus melody, meanwhile, just keeps climbing. Listeners online have noted that the hook moves up roughly an octave during the chorus, which is part of why the song is so easy to recognize after a single hearing: the climb does the emotional work the lyric is too proud to do plainly. By the time the line reaches 僕は探すんだ ("I keep searching"), the verb is so unweighted, so quick, that it almost slips past. The song's central act of effort is hidden in the throwaway syllable. The only person putting work in is the narrator, and even he is doing it inside parentheses.

Worth noting: the chorus is not the same the second time. The first chorus ends 独りじゃないと否定出来るように / 僕は探すんだ ("so I can deny that I'm alone, I keep searching"). The second chorus ends 独りじゃないと否定してくれる貴方を / 僕は探すんだ ("the you who will deny it for me, I keep searching"). The agent of the denial has shifted. In the first chorus, the narrator is doing the denying himself; in the second, he's looking for someone else to do it for him. 貴方, written with a politely formal kanji rather than the casual あなた, is the only second-person pronoun in the entire song, and it appears only here, only once, only at the moment the narrator gives up trying to deny aloneness on his own. By the final chorus, the line returns to 否定出来るように, the original reflexive form, and pairs it not with 探す but with 唄う, the verb for ritual song. The arc is small but exact: try to deny it yourself, look for someone who will deny it for you, then go back to denying it yourself, but this time by singing.

なで肩ブームでイイでしょう!?

一人でも多くなで肩が泣くなら
なで肩ブームでイイでしょう！？

hitori de mo ooku nadegata ga naku nara
nadegata buumu de ii deshou!?

If even one more set of slumped shoulders is crying,
then a slumped-shoulder boom would be fine, right!?

なで肩 literally means sloping or rounded shoulders, the opposite of square ones, and the phrase functions on two registers at once. In Japanese physiognomy, なで肩 names a body type: gendered as a soft, gentle, slightly drooping silhouette, sometimes affectionately, sometimes not. But 肩を落とす, "to drop one's shoulders," is also the standard Japanese idiom for being dejected, beaten down, defeated by the day. The verse uses both meanings simultaneously. If more people are walking around with literal slumped shoulders, then let's make slumped-shoulders the new trend, the new ブーム. It's the song's most weirdly tender joke. Instead of telling listeners to straighten up and be happy (which is what a standard pop-anthem chorus would do), it proposes that everyone agree to slump together and call it a movement. The cure for collective dejection is collective dejection rebranded.

The second verse keeps the joke running. ナニヶ原, "what-ga-hara," where ヶ原 is the suffix attached to historic Japanese battlefield names like 関ヶ原 (Sekigahara, the 1600 battle that decided the founding of the Tokugawa shogunate) or 三方ヶ原 (Mikatagahara, where Tokugawa Ieyasu lost so badly he supposedly soiled himself), pretends to name a great battlefield while leaving the actual name as just "what?" The line tells the listener: yes, this is a war zone, but I can't be bothered to give it a real name. 苦悩 (anguish), 煩 (troubles), and 悩 (worries) line up as a mock-grand procession of suffering, capped with the offhand 上等! ("bring it on!"). Even the song's despair is staged. This is the verse where you can hear most clearly how young the writer was, eighteen, conscious of being eighteen, conscious that almost any sincere statement of suffering would sound performative, and his solution is to keep the performance visible and lean into the cartoon. It's a real risk, and what makes it work is that the joke never closes the gap. The cartoon stays cartoon, the suffering stays suffering, and the song refuses to tell the listener which one is the truer reading.

Inside that mock-grand procession sits the verse's actual statement. 「忘れたくないなぁ」を如何に増やせるかだ. "The question is how to increase the moments of I don't want to forget this." This is where the song's quiet thesis lives, just under the joke. Forget happiness as a state. Aim for the much smaller, much more achievable goal of accumulating moments specific enough that you would not want to forget them. That sentence is more useful as a life instruction than most actual life-instruction songs. It's the kind of line you can stop the song to write down.

And then the bridge into the second chorus delivers the song's sharpest pivot: 微々たるものでも愛に気づけぬなら / スタートに戻ろう. "If you can't notice love in even the smallest things, let's go back to the start." The first chorus had ended on the question 微々たるものでも愛に気づけるか ("can you notice love in the smallest things?"). The second chorus ends with the failure clause: if you can't, go back. This is the sentence the song's title is hiding. StaRt is not a one-time event. It's a place you return to whenever you've stopped seeing the small things. The mid-word capital R is sitting there to tell you the start is somewhere inside the word, not at its edge.

How to believe "I love you" if you've heard it too many times

I can, You can, We can, って
耳にタコが出来る程聞いた
I love you の言葉だって
どこから信じればいいの？

I can, You can, We can, tte
mimi ni tako ga dekiru hodo kiita
I love you no kotoba datte
doko kara shinjireba ii no?

I can, you can, we can, yeah,
I've heard it so often I've got calluses on my ears.
Even the words "I love you,"
where am I supposed to start believing them?

This is the bridge, and it is the moment the song stops performing. The phrase 耳にタコが出来る, literally "calluses form on your ear," is a common Japanese idiom for hearing something so often you've gone deaf to it, the auditory equivalent of a worn-down callus on a guitarist's fingertip. Putting English motivational slogans (I can, you can, we can) and the most worn phrase in any pop language (I love you) inside that idiom is brutal. The song is not rejecting these phrases. It is admitting that they have lost their grip on meaning, and asking, sincerely, almost desperately, where am I supposed to start believing them. どこから信じればいいの? Not whether to believe. Where to begin.

The bridge is also the only place in the song that engages directly in English. Up until this moment "StaRt" has been a Japanese song with a Latin-script title and some tuneful nonsense syllables. Then it imports English phrases the listener already knows are devalued, the language of hashtags, motivational posters, pop-song shorthand, and uses them as exhibit A in its case for a meaning crisis. I love you の言葉: the Japanese marker の言葉 ("the words 'I love you'") makes "I love you" into a museum object, a thing to be examined rather than spoken. Reading the line aloud, you can almost hear quote marks getting placed in the air. That a Japanese song from 2015 was already this skeptical of imported affirmation-language is, in retrospect, ahead of its time. By the late 2010s, Japanese songwriters across the spectrum (Kenshi Yonezu, Vaundy, Aimer) would build careers on the same skepticism, but Omori was already there at eighteen.

箱に荷物を詰めただけ
気持ちが軽くなった様だ
悲しみも仕舞うべきところに
仕舞うべきだ

hako ni nimotsu wo tsumeta dake
kimochi ga karuku natta you da
kanashimi mo shimau beki tokoro ni
shimau beki da

Just packed some stuff into a box,
and somehow my heart feels lighter.
Sadness, too, should go in its proper place.
That's where it should go.

And then the bridge resolves on a domestic image so quiet it almost falls off the song. Just packing things into a box. Not unpacking. Not moving on. Just deciding that some things have a place where they belong, and that putting them there is enough. After the chamber-pop fanfares, after the slumped-shoulder jokes, after the meaning crisis, the song offers as its answer the simplest possible household action. 仕舞う means to put something away, to store it, the verb you'd use for folding clothes back into a drawer or putting dishes back in a cabinet. The line proposes that sadness is a thing you organize rather than a thing you defeat. It is, quietly, the most adult line in the song, written by a teenager whose own band was about to take over the next decade of Japanese pop.

The repetition in the last two lines (仕舞うべきところに / 仕舞うべきだ) is doing real work. Most song lyrics about sadness reach for a transformation verb: heal, overcome, release. This one just says "put it in its place" twice. The grammatical structure 仕舞うべき (should-put-away) carries a quiet, almost moral force. Not "I will put sadness away." Not "let's put sadness away." Sadness should be put away, in an impersonal, almost grammatical voice that borrows the authority of common sense from the language itself. The Japanese is doing what English would need a much longer sentence to do.

Why this song is still the one they sing at New Year's

By the final chorus, the song has shifted: パッパッパッ晴れた町に / パッパッパッ晴れた笑顔. Both lines now start with the same dry pa-pa-pa percussion. No more チャプチャプチャプ rain. The wet, low-vowel half of the chorus has dropped out, replaced by another bright row. Whether you read this as the song earning its sunshine or just deciding to perform sunshine harder is up to you. Either reading is defensible. The song does not insist.

Then the last line lands. 明日も唄うんだ, "tomorrow I'll sing again, too." Note the kanji choice: 唄う rather than the more common 歌う. Both are read utau and both mean "to sing," but 唄 carries an older, more performance-bound register, closer to "to perform a song" than "to sing." It's the kanji you'd see on the hand-painted sign of a small live-music bar or in the title of a folk song, not in a school music textbook. Choosing 唄う rather than 歌う is choosing to frame the act of singing as a ritual one undertakes, not just a feeling one expresses. The song ends with a commitment to keep performing the ritual whether or not the meaning crisis has been resolved. There is no resolution to the question of how to believe "I love you" again. There is only a promise to keep singing into the question.

This is also why "StaRt" still works ten years on. The song was originally written, per the band's own production notes, at the start of 2015 and depicted "the feeling of entering the new year," a literal new-year song. Two years later, in June 2017, Kao Corporation licensed it for their Merit shampoo CM, putting it in front of a much wider audience than Variety alone could reach. The licensing was after the fact: the song was not commissioned for the campaign, and the connection between Merit's "summer freshness" pitch and the song's actual themes is more brand vibe than meaning. (In 2023, Mrs. GREEN APPLE would write a different song, "Doodle," specifically for Merit, suggesting Kao eventually figured out the difference between catalog use and commissioned use.) Eight years after release, on the CDTV Live! Live! Year-End Special 2023→2024, the band performed "StaRt" alongside Ado's "私は最強," its first major TV performance, a New Year's frame brought all the way back. By then Mrs. GREEN APPLE had completed Phase 1 in 2020, restructured into a three-piece, opened Phase 2 with "ダンスホール" in 2022, scored an anime smash with "ライラック" for Forgotten Battery, and become with "ケセラセラ" one of the dominant J-POP entities of the decade. The debut song still fits.

The reason it fits is that "StaRt" was never really a song about beginnings. It was a song about returning to beginnings, which is why the title's mid-word capital R matters. The capital S says "start." The capital R, sitting in the middle of "StaRt" where you don't expect a capital, says: the start is something you go back to, something hidden inside the word. 「いつでもスタートで居よう」, let's always be at the start, is the line that gives the rest of the song its operating instruction. Not a song for the first day of something. A song for any day you remember you've forgotten how to feel small things. The eighteen-year-old who wrote it knew this already. The frontman now leading sold-out dome tours, almost a decade later, apparently still does.

📖 Read the full lyrics with English translation and romaji → /en/artists/mrs-green-apple/lyrics/start/

📝 Learn the Japanese in this song → Coming soon

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