Why Japanese musicians don’t need rhymes to sing
Great 歌詞 (kashi, lyrics) often hinge on one simple device: 脚韻 (kyakuin, end rhyme). The Beatles knew it, and their song “The End” makes the point clearly: “And in the end the love you take / is equal to the love you make. ”End rhyme is the English-language songwriter’s most fundamental tool. Parallel structure, repetition, assonance — all of it is pulled together by rhyming line endings. Almost every English pop song relies on it, and it’s part of what makes a song feel like a song.Japanese, however, cannot lean on 脚韻 in the same way. With only five 母音 (boin, vowels), the language simply has fewer possible line-ending sounds. Most sentences also end in predictable patterns — the copula verbs だ (da) or です (desu), meaning “to be,” or the る (ru) or ます (masu) verb endings. In Japanese, rhymes are commonplace, not something that signals poetic craft.
