It's been a long time and I took a break from music until I could actually enjoy it again. I vaguely remember the track being (I think) "one more time" and so there was the voice/instrumental motif accompanying the rather limited lyrics, the motif that opens the song fading in and continues as the background, maybe the drum motif in the background, and the number of times it was repeated (I think over 200 times). There's also a timbral modulation some time later and some drum changes marking structural changes. And a bell at the end.

What is more interesting, and hard to really discuss if you are not familiar with the genre (which I was not and still am not) is why the song writers would use them and what they reference explicitly and implicitly and so on. I would love for anyone to tell me more about the song and its context!

Actually, thinking about music, or anything, like this is terrible. I read a book on Japanese architecture whose author (an awarded architecture professor from the US) I have forgotten which was basically listing as context-less observations everything she saw. For example "and this is a join typical of the suki-ya house, it's made by hand out of this wood and with these tools. Then it goes here. The suki-ya house has a table here used for writing. The walls are made with plaster over a bamboo mesh." etc. I learnt very little, although I knew a lot of factoids afterwards. But there are writers (like Marc Peter Keane [1]) who are much better, because they introduce everything with their meaning and where they stand in the tradition and mindset and history of the culture that produced it.

[1] e.g. http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Garden-Design-Marc-Keane/dp/0... which is actually a nice very basic introduction to how Japanese history shaped its aesthetics.