🎧 Listen to the Discussion(two hosts talk through their thoughts on this article)
This is an AI-generated audio overview of this article, created with Google NotebookLM. Two hosts discuss the article together, sharing their own thoughts and commentary — it is not a reading of the article text.
Photo by DOKYUNG KIM on Unsplash
How I First Met This Song
I first heard this not long after I'd settled in London. It's the last track on Queen's A Day at the Races. A gentle guitar line, and then — out of nowhere — Japanese words in the chorus. I still remember how startled I was. "Teo torriatte, konomama iko." Hand in hand, let's carry on like this. I'd only just started a new life in a foreign country, and hearing Japanese pop up like that felt like someone tapping me on the shoulder.
Turns out the song came out of Queen's Japan tours in the mid-70s. Brian May wrote it for the fans there, and an interpreter who'd travelled with the band on tour did the Japanese lyrics. This was before Queen were massive worldwide. Japan got there first, in a way — and this song was their thank-you.
Something I Couldn't Have Understood in My Twenties
Back in my twenties I was at medical school, quietly unsure if it was really the right path for me. I was too busy just getting through each day to think much about a song like this. "Being apart" was just a word to me then. I never once listened to it thinking of an actual person.
Then I left medical school, moved to London, and threw myself into the Japanese food trade. I put real distance between myself and most of what I'd known — family, old friends, the places I grew up around. I let go of nearly all of it. And honestly? Back then, the excitement of starting something new felt much bigger than any sadness about what I'd left behind.
A Small Question About Life
What this song's really asking, I think, is: are we ever truly cut off from people once they're gone from our lives? Buddhism has a word for this — ai betsu ri ku, the pain of being parted from someone you love. It's one of those sufferings that just comes with being alive.
I lost my mother when I was still at secondary school, and my father while I was at university. At the time I was too caught up in the grief to really sit with what any of it meant. Now, at 66, it's different. Around sixty, partly thanks to COVID, I lost my wife's parents and a few close friends, one after another. Every time, "I can't see them again" has hit harder than it ever did when I was young. But at the same time, this song's whole idea — same moon, same wind, no real distance — makes a lot more sense to me now than it used to.
What I Hear Now, at 66
These days I split my time between the UK and Osaka. Winters in Japan, the rest of the year in my English garden. It's a strange rhythm, but in its own way, it's a kind of practice in staying close while apart.
I grow over ten varieties of David Austin roses back in England. All winter, while I'm off in Japan, they just sit there quietly getting on with it — and by spring they're blooming again, as if they'd been waiting for me the whole time. There's a line in the song about lighting a candle in the quiet of the night, and I always think of those roses getting through a winter nobody's watching, keeping something alive until the season turns. You can tend a flame even when you're not there.
I got into stocks and property back in 2015, in my mid-fifties. Sitting with something that won't pay off for years teaches you the present moment isn't everything. You stop reacting to every little wobble and start thinking further ahead. That's not so different, really, from staying connected to someone far away — you keep tending it, even without any chance of seeing them soon.
Since retiring, I've spent winters travelling round Thailand and the Philippines too. Different language, different culture, people I'll probably never see again — and yet a five-minute chat or a shared laugh has stuck with me anyway. Every time that happens, this song's line about time being "but a paper moon" stops sounding like poetry and starts sounding like something I actually know.
Britain does the stiff upper lip thing — "Keep Calm and Carry On" and all that. Japan has its own version, this idea of ma, the meaningful pause, the bit left unsaid. Every time I hear this chorus doing the same job in two completely different languages, I notice how alike these two places actually are. Both rather good at letting something matter without saying it out loud.
For anyone curious about the life behind this song, A Life in Lyrics: The Official Creative Legacy of Freddie Mercury, put together by his lifelong friend Mary Austin from his own unseen archives, kept lyric drafts, sketches and unseen photos across his whole career. It came out to mark what would've been Freddie's 80th birthday. Worth a look, if you're curious.
(As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)In Closing
This song wasn't written alone in some London studio — it came out of an actual meeting with fans in Japan. I find that quietly moving. A bond that deep, formed across a language neither side fully shared — it tells you being apart and being disconnected really aren't the same thing.
You don't need words for that. Just knowing someone else is looking at the same view can be enough. If you're reading this and you're apart from someone who matters, or thinking of someone you can't see anymore — the same moon is very likely shining over them too, tonight. That's what this song is quietly telling us, I think.
Reference Links
Read the Lyrics (UtaTen, a Japanese/English lyric database): https://utaten.com/lyric/ea00001004/Please enjoy the full lyrics on this external database site.
Other books you might like
You're welcome to take a look.
EAST TO WEST: The Heart of Haiku, the Light of Scripture
There's something in these haiku, too, about staying connected across distance. This was my father-in-law's final work.
View on AmazonCataract Surgery-A Memoir: Double cataract surgery in Osaka, Japan
Another new experience at 66 — an honest account of the cataract surgery I went through.
View on AmazonSushi Business in Britain: the complete four-volume series
A novel series following thirty-five years in the British sushi trade, from apprentice to factory manager to a small sushi school.
View on AmazonAbout Queen
Queen formed in London in 1970: Freddie Mercury on vocals, Brian May on guitar, Roger Taylor on drums, and John Deacon joining shortly after on bass. Freddie was born in what was then the British territory of Zanzibar, now part of Tanzania, to a Parsi family of Indian descent, and spent his boyhood in India before the family moved to England. Growing up across so many different cultures is generally reckoned to be part of why his stage persona was so theatrical, so happy to cross boundaries.
Brian May, who wrote "Teo Torriatte," studied physics at Imperial College London, and you can sort of hear it in his songwriting — carefully built chord progressions paired with real emotional weight. The 1976 album A Day at the Races came out on the back of the huge success of A Night at the Opera, and this song closes it, written as a thank-you to Queen's fans in Japan.
Early-70s Britain was going through a rough patch economically — the oil shock, strikes, that sort of thing. In the middle of all that, Queen won young audiences over with a sound that mixed operatic drama with pop hooks, never quite sitting inside the usual rock mould. Japan, meanwhile, was in the last stretch of its post-war boom, and there was huge appetite for Western culture. Queen bothered to tour smaller cities too, not just Tokyo and Osaka, and it won them a devoted following. Japan became somewhere the band genuinely loved — often giving them a warmer welcome than they got at home.
Freddie died in 1991, aged 45. He rarely talked about it in public, but his fondness for Japan stayed with him quietly his whole life — you can see it in the traditional Japanese room and garden at his London home, and you can hear it in this song.
