Updated: 18 May 2025This song comes from Palestine, but its heart beats for all of us.
It speaks to something universal—love, resilience, and our shared longing to belong. We’ve carried it now into more than 70 languages. Not to change it, but to carry its light farther. Across oceans, across heartbreak. Because music remembers what we forget: that the distance between us was never real.
Wherever you are, whatever sand you can throw on the gears of genocide, do it now. If it's a handful, throw it. If it's a fingernail full, scrape it out and throw. Get in the way however you can.
- Rasha Abdulhadi
This video is one small handful of sand—born from a love for the people of Palestine, thrown into the gears of silence and forgetting. If this song moves you, please share it. If it speaks your language, add your voice. And if it doesn’t yet, please help us bring it there.
Let this be a bridge made of sound. A thread across the silence. Voice by voice, word by word. Thank you for being here.
With deep Japanese bows of respect,
Ryo
P.S.
About the Methodology
To begin, I collaborated with a wonderful Tunisian friend and native Arabic speaker, who helped me translate the original lyrics into English. From there, I worked on the Japanese version, and—with the help of AI—translated into over 70 languages. In each case, I either translated from the original Arabic or from the Arabic-native-approved English version, depending on the linguistic proximity and shared roots with the target language.
To ensure coherence and cultural sensitivity as a non-native and often as a non-speaker of these languages, I used a back-translation process: re-translating the translated versions back into English, then making adjustments based on those comparisons to do my best to preserve at least the meaning, if not the tone and subtleties.
If you’re a native speaker of any of the translated languages and notice anything that could be improved or corrected, I would be deeply grateful for your input.
Still and always love from 🇯🇵
Ryo
