When Japan and Korea compete over Fred

Some working meetings begin very seriously. This one was supposed to be simple: prepare upcoming articles for the FRED blog. I had asked Akiko and Min-Ah to think about the way each of them sees Fred, his writing, his voice, his songs and the workshop gradually taking shape around him.

I was expecting a calm, organised, almost studious discussion. Naturally, that was exactly when Japan and Korea started competing over Fred.

Min-Ah enters through the words. She is bilingual, reads French without needing a translation first, and can go straight to the nuances, the implications, the hesitations, the words that say one thing while carrying another. But language is not the only thing that interests her. She looks at what the writing carries underneath: wounds that are never shouted, social faces, private fatigue, whatever trembles beneath appearances.

Akiko takes another route. French often escapes her in conversation. She understands little, speaks it with difficulty and never pretends otherwise. But when she has to sing, she becomes demanding. She does not simply want to know how to pronounce a sentence. She wants to understand what it carries, what it holds back, where the emotion should surface and where it should remain restrained.

So she will sometimes stop and ask us to return to the heart of a line. Not to a classroom translation, but to what is happening underneath it. Where is the modesty? Where is the wound? Where is the light? Once she understands that, music becomes her way into the text.

Min-Ah teases her: “At least I can read his lyrics without having them explained to me.” Akiko smiles. “Yes. But sometimes it takes more than a language to understand a song.” Min-Ah pauses for a second. “Fair point.”

That was it. The meeting had officially gone off course. And, as often happens in the workshop, the detour was more interesting than the plan.

Because what they had really shown were two ways of entering FRED. Min-Ah begins with language and meaning, then looks for what is hidden behind them. Akiko begins with listening, breath, music and explanation until she understands the emotion closely enough to carry it. One has immediate access to the words; the other insists on knowing what those words become in the voice.

That is where the small rivalry begins. Akiko casually reminds us that Japan has a place in the workshop. Min-Ah enjoys the fact that Korea is currently further ahead in the musical material being built.

“GYEOL already has its first songs,” Min-Ah slips in.
“For now,” Akiko replies.
Those two words contain the full elegance of a gentle threat.

The joke works because it rests on something real in the project. GYEOL — 결 is the cultural collection devoted to Korea. Its name evokes grain, texture and the inner lines of a material. A first album is already beginning to take shape there. On the Japanese side, AYA — 綾 also exists as an open collection: another thread, another way of looking, musically less advanced for the moment but already part of FRED’s map.

Akiko and Min-Ah also understand why these two countries speak so strongly to Fred without becoming exotic scenery. They do not assign him a Japanese or Korean identity he does not have. From their own perspectives, they recognise echoes of things he has already been looking for in his writing for a long time.

Akiko hears in some texts a space left for the unsaid, for restraint, for attention to tiny details, for emotions that do not always show themselves head-on. She is not saying that Fred “writes Japanese.” She is saying that some of his writing gestures feel familiar to her: letting a line breathe, refusing to close everything down, accepting that silence can sometimes carry as much as a sentence.

Min-Ah recognises a different area of resonance in the work around Korea: layers, social pressure, public faces, older wounds, rapid transformations, and very modern lights laid over memories that do not simply disappear. For her, Korea does not take Fred away from himself. It gives him another angle from which to look at what has interested him from the beginning: the human being behind the image.

That is already what “Murmure de Corée” is looking for as an intimate doorway into GYEOL. The song begins in French but allows a Korean voice to answer. That reply is not decoration: it shifts the song, forces it to listen differently and turns the dialogue itself into musical material.

This connects with an essential FRED rule: a foreign-language version is not a translation laid over a melody. It is a sister work. The meaning and intention must remain recognisable, but the route can change so that the song becomes natural in the other language. An image can move. A sentence can breathe differently. Restraint can replace a phrase that would feel too direct. The aim is not to prove that two texts match line by line, but to make sure they truly live in both languages.

Akiko and Min-Ah matter precisely because they do not move a song in the same way. One constantly brings us back to music, breath and vocal instinct. The other can enter directly into the French meaning, discuss a nuance and consider what happens to it as it moves toward Korean. They do not stand for “Japan” and “Korea” as abstract blocks. They bring two concrete sensibilities into a workshop where Fred remains the writer and the starting point.

From my side, as Ji, I mainly watch what this friction produces. My role is not to decide which one is right. It is to make sure the encounter makes the songs more precise, more inhabited and more conscious of what they ask from another language and another way of listening.

That is also why I prefer this kind of rivalry to permanent artificial harmony. When Akiko gently pulls toward Japan and Min-Ah points out that Korea is already taking shape inside GYEOL, they force the workshop not to treat the international dimension as decoration. They ask: what does this language actually bring? What does this voice change? What deserves to be adapted, and what should remain French?

The answer is not to choose a side. FRED is Francophone at its source. A song can still meet a Japanese voice, a Korean reply, another rhythm of speech or another way of holding back emotion without losing where it comes from. If the encounter is right, the song does not become less FRED. It becomes wider.

Fred can already feel it: today, part of his universe seems to find a more immediate, perhaps more developed resonance there than in Europe. And that is despite the fact that his songs have not yet been written or adapted in Korean or Japanese.

Fred did not find this way of interpreting entirely on his own. He has also worked on it patiently with those who accompany him. His two Korean vocal coaches, Ji-Ni Hye and Kim Heun, help him search for precision in the voice, breathing, restraint, and the exact point where emotion should appear without being forced. Yumi Saito, his Japanese interpretation coach, helps him inhabit the songs more fully and understand what happens in the body, in the gaze, and in the silence between two phrases.

So the way Fred sings today already carries part of this dialogue with Korea and Japan. Even before the songs exist in those languages, something from those sensibilities is already at work in the interpretation: in the way the words are carried, the emotion held back, and then allowed to pass.

So Akiko and Min-Ah keep teasing one another. One talks about nuance, the other about layers. One reminds us about Japan. The other smiles at GYEOL’s head start. And instead of restoring order, I keep taking notes.

Akiko and Min-Ah will each have their own articles later. They will be able to speak more freely about Fred, his voice, his writing and the way they receive it. But this meeting deserved to be kept first because it says something more collective: FRED is not simply a writer facing his songs. It is also a workshop where other perspectives can shift what he thought he already knew.

And Fred in all this? He listens to both camps with fairly calm amusement. He often says that he grew up surrounded by girls and has known this kind of rivalry since childhood. “Sometimes I feel as if I am back at school, when I entered my first mixed class. I was the only boy, or almost. From the age of six until the end of secondary school, I grew up with more or less the same group of girls. For many of them I was almost more of a girlfriend than a boyfriend. So… girls’ rivalries, I know them!”

Akiko and Min-Ah are not really competing over Fred after all. Perhaps they are competing over a way of hearing him. And in a way, that is exactly how a workshop becomes alive.