Fans of Japanese music often scour the net looking for printed lyrics. Many of the sites that host them “protect” their content from being reprinted elsewhere, usually with lame Javascript hacks.
The oft-reviled uta-net.com goes high-tech, wrapping lyrics in a Flash app. I’d never looked into the specifics of their method, because everything I was looking for was available somewhere else, but today I had a song from 1968 that was obscure enough that they were the best choice.
I’m a fairly clever fellow, says I, so surely I can use one of the many free SWF-decoding tools to crack this open, even if it’s compressed and obfuscated. So I downloaded the Flash-encoded lyrics, and, just on a whim, opened them up as a text file. I found this:
きのうケメ子に会いました 星のきれいな夜でした ケメ子と別れたそのあとで 小さい声でいいました 好き好き 僕はケメ子が好きなんだ
僕はケメ子が好きなのに ケメ子はなんにもわからない 僕の気持をお星さま ケメ子に伝えて下さいな 好き好き 僕はケメ子が好きなんだ
僕はケメ子の夢を見た お手々つないでハイキング 大きなおむすび十個持ち ケメ個が八つに僕二つ 好き好き だけどケメ子が好きなんだ
私の名前はミス・ケメ子 あなたはかがみをもってるの はきけをもよおすその顔で 私を好きになるなんて キライキライ 私はあなたがキライです ^@<86>^F^F^A^@^B^@^@@^@^@^@
Yup, stopped me dead in my tracks, you did. That’s some fine security work there, Lou.
(the version of the song I’m interested in is from the out-of-print Hello!Project album Folk Songs 4; Kemeko no Uta is sung by a lovestruck guy who shyly confesses his feelings to Kemeko, only to be shot down brutally in the last verse. The amusing bit in this version is that the last verse is sung by Kei Yasuda, whose nickname is, of course, Kemeko)