Yumekukan : Guide To Dreamland

So a Japanese song title / artist / show name is giving you a headache. You know what it is from the Fansubs or MP3 that you've downloaded, but darn, they are in romanji. "Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro", "Ichirin no Hana", "Seki Tomokazu", etc etc etc.

These are Japanese titles. Japanese names. To the Japanese they are presented in Kanji, Hiragana and/or Katakana (usually kanji-hiragana mix). Online converters aren't going to help, and the Language bar can only do so much with the mountain of Kanji to choose from sometimes. So we'll use the good ol' Internet to help us find our answer :)

For example, the brilliant artist who sang the Ending Theme for the FF7 : Crisis Core game. She's known as Ayaka and her song title is "Why". Pretty simple isn't it? :)

Well, pitching in her name in Romanji on Joysound brought up the following result :

Sad, huh? :( That's okay. The internet is at our fingertips, and answers are always just a search away. So.

1. Do a simple internet search on your Japanese title.

Including informational site keywords like "Anime News Network" or "Wikipedia" would make this search A LOT EASIER. Trust me. And to make your life even easier, here, have a search bar :D (results open in a new window)

2. Check your search result

An optional step but singers like Ayaka only commercialise their first name, so you may have a few different people popping up in your result. Check their data for something you can verify to be them.


3. Retrieve the Japanese Name

Usually they're in the biodata section up top (both wiki and ANN). Again, singers like Ayaka (Younha, Madonna, etc) only use their first names. You can try their full names first. If that fails, just use their first name.
Tip : Japanese names are traditionally (FAMILY NAME) (FIRST NAME).


4. Pop it into Joysound's search bar

Just one warning : MAKE SURE YOUR CATEGORY IS RIGHT!!!!!


5. Use the search bar to narrow down to your song

You could also slowly navigate through the number of pages if there's more than one :)


6. Click on the correct title for your song

Occasionally there are several versions of a song. This one in particular seem to have an MTV unplugged version. Anyway, click the title and open up the page for your song :)

7. Copy down the Song Number for your song

It's located down the page on the left hand side. Found it? YAY! :D

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In case I didn't make myself clear the first time, THE SONG NUMBER IS MOST IMPORTANT. IT'S THE REASON WHY YOU'RE IN THIS SECTION IN THE FIRST PLACE.

With this song number you can immediately input the song into your 'Karaoke List' without having to go through the trouble of searching thru the book (huge and somewhat outdated) OR the remote control (still quite troublesome).

Note : I'm aware that Yumekukan also has Korean/Chinese songs. Unfortunately I'm not sure how these songs could be searched on Joysound. You can try typing the Artist names in English and see if that works :)