About this song
千本桜
By WhiteFlame feat. 初音ミク
Updated
What “千本桜” means
The song paints a vivid scene of frantic, stylish upheaval, where revolution and celebration blur together into one dazzling but unstable spectacle. It moves through images of a modernized, militarized Japan and a carnival-like battlefield: bicycles bearing the red sun, children and youth caught in a whirlwind of chaos, parade processions, gunfire, and a steel cage-like arena. The repeated sense of distance and noise suggests that ordinary human feeling is getting swallowed by the spectacle, until even a voice calling out can no longer be heard through the night and the darkness. At the emotional center, the song shifts between exhilaration and isolation. The recurring cherry blossoms and the night they disappear into symbolize beauty that is brief, overwhelming, and hard to hold onto, while the repeated structure of the lines makes the world feel cyclical, as if the same grand pageant keeps returning. Against that background, the final movement brings a slight opening: a “song of hope” rises, and the relationship between “you” and “I” becomes more direct, with one singing and the other dancing. Even then, the setting remains the same metallic enclosure, so the ending feels less like escape than a defiant act of expression inside confinement, where performance itself becomes a way to survive the chaos.
Play the song above for the full karaoke-synced lyrics with line-by-line translation in English.
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