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Originally Posted by masaegu
Right. That is my take at least. If she is saying something like 「どういう気持でいまあたしにキスをしてくれたのかな 」 in her daydream, it would forever be impossible to understand her lyrics.
The only possible alternative I could think of is 娘, read as こ, but not as むすめ. This is pretty normal in song lyrics. The reason Shiina opted for ひと, I think, is that for this particular song こ would sound too cute. 「子」 used here looks too childish.
It is not using 人 in place of 男 that I was talking about. I was talking about writing 男 and reading it as ひと. To read is as おとこ can sound too direct and too female-chauvinistic. It can sound like one is looking at a man as a piece of meat.
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This makes sense to me intuitively. One thing I noticed about Japanese is that the polite form is gender-neutral, and once you start using gender-specific ways of talking you are no longer being polite.
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If you are automatically translating "ひと = person", you will not get this custom. Even in real life conversations, we use ひと very often to refer to someone's lover. If a woman says 「あのひと」, it refers to her lover. Same word is used by a man to refer to his lover. If you translate it to "that person", it destroys everythng. When we write 「あのひと」, we would use 「あの男」「あの女」often with the furigana ひと over the kanji. Shiina probably avoided using 「かわいい女」 or 「かわいい娘」because it can make it look like enka lyrics. Please rememeber that the pronunciation comes first, the letters second in this custom.
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I see how it is now. I guess our language or culture is in this respect relatively sexist. I wrote a paper on enka before. I'm guessing that because of the nature of enka music, a person can say おんな and it won't have the same sexual connotations if it was used in rock.
I like the Japanese way, so I decided not to make the interpretive leap and instead use the direct translation of "people." It might sound a little off to the English listener who expects to hear "girls," but that's just because our culture is not as evolved in this respect. It's still grammatically correct and understandable.
I have uploaded a new update, which can be seen here:
YouTube - ‪Shiina Ringo - Tadashii Machi / "The Right Town" (subtitled) 【HD】‬‏
What do you think? This will be the final version, unless you can find anything else that needs improvement.