Here's another funny example how to play with folkloristic or ethnic clichees in melodic construction working with a pentatonic scale. A kind of "Painting by Numbers" procedure, where you need to know the right intervals of a suitable scale - and the melody you construct with these magic notes immediately delivers japanese music.
You just fill up everything with some fourth intervals and we're in business...
STOP! "That ain't working - that's the way you do it...".
But that's just a different asian clichee for chinese music but far from japanese. And anyway: what is an appropriate interval structure to let you associate (typical) japanese music? There's no instruction manual to teach you obvious similarities in the wide range of japanese music. Especially for contemporary japanese pop music it is similar like a quest for the formula to analyse the core of Country music searching in New Country's catalogue.
For my pentatonic scale I tried to recall phrases of more traditional japanese tunes when experimenting with alien intervals for a european ear.
On this way the closest pentatonic structure I finally came up with, was something quite similar to the essence of Nino Rota's film score of "the Godfather". If you reduce the first passages' bars (just until its variation) of the famous main theme to five notes and change the major second of the last three notes to a major third this is basically what I constructed the melody of "Honto?" from.
And if you've got some doubts left, you can express that with one of the few words I've learnt in japanese: ask "Honto?", which means "Really?"
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