Make Believe Mailer 04: Second Time's The Charm
How outgoing prime minister Shinzo Abe interacted with music...and how it responded to him
Picture of Shinzo Abe holding a guitar courtesy of a YouTube video
For the first three years I lived in Japan, the expectation both within the country and internationally was that whoever served as prime minister was only going to be doing so for a brief spell. A month after I arrived in the Kansai countryside, Japanese voters ended decades of Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) rule — bookended by three one-year PMs — by ushering the rival Democratic Party of Japan into power, with Yukio Hatoyama’s appointment to prime minister being compared to Barack Obama taking the presidency by some U.S. cable news channels. Then he stepped away after a year...with his successor doing the same, and his successor doing the same too. The only “Hope” here was the hope the next guy could go more than 12 months.
The LDP returned to power in 2012, and Shinzo Abe — previously an example of a one-and-done PM — got a second crack at the highest level of politics in Japan. This spell, he stuck around, for a record-setting amount of time for any prime minister in the country. It was a total double-take from the near-decade prior, when the position was more like musical chairs than anything else. Yet every run has to end at some point, and Abe announced a couple weeks back that he’d be resigning in September due to health concerns (the same reason he resigned during his first go).
Despite being able to hold the position down for about the same time as a two-term President in the United States, Abe’s tenure as PM could feel divisive. Well, at least in a left-leaning social media bubble — voters overwhelming went for the LDP in every election during his second go, though maybe you should find a Substack about Japanese politics if you want any actual depth there — where his nationalistic and right-wing positions received constant scrutiny (sometimes tipping over into collar-tugging comparisons to Adolf Hitler).
So...how did Abe interact with music, and how did artists respond to a period where one dude loomed so large over the nation? It’s complicated, to say the least.
Abe’s interactions with actual musicians was relatively limited, reserved to brief promo pics conveying a sense of “cool” by hanging out with idols Momorio Clover Z (above) or Johnny’s band TOKIO. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what music he listens to for fun — though the Abe-meets-J-pop moment I remember the most is him taking time out of a meeting of the Diet to comment on how happy he was over the news that boy band SMAP wouldn’t be breaking up (they did later that year, and whatever sadness he felt over their dissolution wasn’t recorded).
Abe also served as PM during the peak of the “Cool Japan” initiative, an effort to spread soft power that was established before his tenure but one that he “seized upon.” Cool Japan as a government project largely failed, going into the red and producing nothing that could really be held up as a success. Though it should be noted that the idea of “cool, Japan” very much enjoyed a resurgence in the 2010s — anime has become so hip that it doesn’t need to be promoted, because rappers all over simply default to celebrating it, while other artists can drop in references to Tamagotchi or city pop without any background needed. The 2010s reaffirmed how cool Japan is...just not via anything that taxpayers were shelling out for.
Yet that’s actually a pretty good example of how deftly Abe used pop culture to his benefit on the global stage. As a soft power tool, it was off the mark, but Abe was lowkey a meme master. He’s a big eater, he installed that beaver knocker that went viral, and he dressed up as Mario to promote the Olympics in Rio. He appeared at the 2014 edition of the otaku-baiting Nico Nico Chokaigi to speak to nerds on their turf (watch it here, and wait until the very end to see a cameo from...me).
Most bizarrely but also perhaps most importantly, Abe connected with then president-elect Donald Trump by showing him Pikotaro’s “PPAP.” That the aforementioned cheetah-print fanatic kept popping up in the U.S-Japan narrative in the years to come says...something.
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His use of music as political tool always functioned best when it was indirect, or at least not shoved in your face. See the two notable missteps during his second period in charge. First, the Self-Defense Forces used AKB48 member Haruka Shimazaki to recruit people in a much-discussed ad that came out at the same time he was trying to change the Constitution (more on that later). Second, and just this year, he totally misread a Hoshino-Gen-started viral trend about staying home due to COVID-19, creating his own take on it and getting lambasted. The less directly he engaged with music, the better.
Yet his tenure also inspired strong musical reactions from Japan’s neighbors, in particular South Korea. While relations between the two countries have been frought for decades due to...I mean, c’mon, you can do better than me to explain this...Abe’s second term re-stoked tensions between the two, in part because of his nationalistic bend. It was a near-decade marked by the BTS shirt controversy, music videos filmed on the disputed Liancourt Rocks (above being one example), and offerings like Red Velvet’s “Happiness” or TVXQ’s “Love Line,” wherein anti-Japan sentiment seeped into the usually apolitical realm of K-pop.
So...how did domestic artists respond?
Japanese music tends to get pegged as staying as far away from politics as possible which...isn’t totally true, though still true enough. The 2010s, in particular, found musicians both major and underground pushing back against the government. It just wasn’t an Abe-centric part of it — the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami coupled with the nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi inspired constant protests and anti-nuclear music from across the country. This was significant (I recommend Noriko Manabe’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televisedfor more on this topic) but ultimately had nothing to do with Abe, at least not directly.
Remember Park Geun-hye???
Leave it to the established bands with nothing to lose to get it started. Southern All-Stars poked fun at Shinzo Abe in the song “Peace And Hi-lite”...and global politics circa 2013 (we were so innocent!)...complete with a video featuring a person wearing a Fathead-sized Abe mask slap-fighting with someone sporting a Park Geun-hye one. Two years later, lead singer Keisuke Kuwate took a shot at the PM by wearing a Hitler-style moustache on NHK’s Kohaku Uta Gassen while performing the same tune...though far more ballsy was him directly making fun of Abe while he was in attendance at a Southern All-Stars show a few days before. He apologized for the prior, but he was out in front on something bigger.
Six months later, Abe was pressing to revise Japan’s pacifist Constitution, specifically the article banning the country from having armed forces that can intervene internationally. This sparked the fiercest demonstrations against the government since the post-3/11 activity, guided in part by younger groups such as SEALDs. These demos made music a central element — beyond chants, they had DJs, such as the muggy night in July I stopped by one in front of the Diet building to find a group of people shouting along to Daft Punk’s “One More Time” — which carried over to the huge August 30 demonstration of that year, featuring a guest appearance from Ryuichi Sakamoto. Around this time, noise rock artist Xinlisupreme embraced the anger and released the song “I Am Not Shinzo Abe,” a direct statement similar to YG’s “Fuck Donald Trump” in how it just gets to the point and doesn’t let up.
Perhaps, though, it has been the year’s afterwards from that flashpoint — which, let’s note, worked, Abe failed in changing Article 9 and derailed what would have been the biggest change to how the country functions since World War II ended — that underline how the Abe years impacted music. There weren’t songs calling for Abe to get the boot...but the biggest female act of the past five years is Aimyon, who sings about the often dreary realities of being young in late 2010s Japan. Ditto to Kenshi Yonezu, and to 2020 breakthroughs such as YOASOBI, all who take a more downtrodden look at modern life. The world they describe is stagnate and tough, not dystopian but just a drag. Underlining them is a desire for something different — well, after about eight years, Japan will finally get just that.