A question recently from a Patreon member got me to wonder about an incident from several years back involving J-pop star Shiina Ringo (椎名林檎). Is the pop star secretly a Japanese right-wing nationalist? And what sparked all the speculation in the first place? I take a look at discussion from that time period – and what the singer herself said in response. I also took some time to delve into the history behind why the Japanese public reacts so harshly to nationalistic-sounding songs.
Hurray Hurray, Gorgeous Clear Skies
The incident surrounds the singer’s 2014 song “NIPPON”. Shiina wrote the number at the request of NHK for the 2014 Soccer World Cup.
The song and accompanying video were almost instantly controversial. The video itself is pretty straightforward – it’s Shiina performing the song backed by her band. But it does kick off with an ostentatious display of the Hi No Maru, Japan’s national flag.
However, it’s the lyrics that really got everyone’s attention. Lyrics like “Cheers! Cheers! To the front! We’re this generation’s soldiers of fortune!” (万歳！万歳！いざ出陣！) drew criticism for a nationalistic – almost imperialistic – tone.
Ring Wing Pop Controversies
It wasn’t the first – and it wouldn’t be the last – time a singer got in trouble for what some perceived as an overly nationalistic song.
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Perhaps the most famous in recent memory is the RADWIMPS song “HINOMARU”, whose lyrics describing Japan as “the Land of the Rising Sun under the Emporer’s honored name” raised more than a few eyebrows.
It doesn’t take much imagination to realize why such lyrics would be controversial. Outside of its most conservative elements, post-war Japan has played a delicate dance where it attempts to avoid imagery and statements that harken back to the country’s imperialistic past.
Writing for Gendai Media, professor and popular music researcher Masuda Satoshi explains that this sensitivity led to an almost complete, de facto ban on the word “Nippon” in popular music. (For a little more on this, see my piece on the difference between “Nihon” and “Nippon” in post-war Japan.) Artists in the 1990s began to push against that restriction as the country strove to redefine itself in the modern, post-Cold War era. One of the pioneers was Nagabuchi Tusyoshi (長渕 剛), who wrote songs that decried what he saw as the decaying state of the body politic with lyrics such as: 俺の祖国日本よ／どうかアメリカに溶けないでくれ (“Japan, my motherland, whatever happens, don’t melt into America”).
As Masuda notes, this hesitance meant many artists stayed away from political and social issues entirely. In the same way, many celebrities in Japan in general have avoided any involvement in politics. This has also started to change in recent years. For example, the public prosecutor scandal earlier in 2020 drew fierce criticism from a wide spectrum of celebrities, including singer Kyary Pamyu Pamyu.
Shiina Ringo, Commentators Shrug off “Nonsense” Criticism
This trend is, in itself, not necessarily a bad thing. However, it’s safe to say that few in Japan – and even fewer among its neighbors – would welcome overtly nationalistic hymns that harken back to the “good ol’ days” of Imperial Japan.
For her part, Shiina Ringo has dismissed the criticism:
でも、いま大戦中でもないのに、人に「どっちなんだ！？ 右なのか、左なのか」と問うこと自体、ナンセンスだとは思います。難しいですよね。はかりづらいし。
I think it’s nonsense to ask people “What are you?! Right wing? Left wing?” We’re not in the middle of a war. That’s difficult and hard to measure.
For one thing, she notes, the song was ordered by NHK and done largely to their specifications. She says NHK explicitly requested a song that was less Shiina’s style and more a classic, rah-rah number. Shiina described the entire affair as a “litmus test” (literally 踏み絵, or a votive picture of Christ that Tokugawa era officials would demand people step on to prove they weren’t Christian).
Indeed, if you listen to the rest of Shiina Ringo’s work, “NIPPON” stands out. While Shiina’s default style is hard to describe, it’s typically an intriguing mix of rock, pop, jazz, bossa nova and big band sounds that the singer herself has described as “Shinjuku style”. Before she hit it big in 1998 with her debut album Koufukuron (幸福論; A Theory of Happiness), Shiina made and distributed business cards to people in the music industry with the title “Shinjuku-Style One-Woman Band” (新宿系自作自演屋).
Flashy Style, Liberal-Esque Lyrics, and English Loan Words
Other critics and analysts have backed up Shiina’s disavowal that “NIPPON” is explicitly a nationalistic song. Music critic Munekata Akimasa notes in an interview with Asahi Dot that Shiina is well known for her “excesses in form.” The bold statements and visuals in “NIPPON”, he argues, should be seen in that light.
Writer Kajii Ayako agrees, noting that, if you look at the broad swath of Shiina’s lyrics, you’ll find a lot that no right-winger would ever sign on to. Shiina’s song Ariamaru Tomi (ありあまる富; Overly Wealthy), for example, sings about “the wealth we hold in our hands can’t be seen…or stolen…they look on what we have with envy.” Not exactly words you’d expect your average neto-uyo to hum under their breath.
I’d also note that the lyrics to “NIPPON” commit what most right-wingers in Japan would regard as a cardinal sin: the use of English loan words. Shiina sings the words “Hurray” and “Cheers”, as opposed to the much more common native Japanese words 万歳 (banzai) and 乾杯 (kanpai). (In what can only be described as a very Shiina-esque twist, the words are spelled in the Japanese kanji in the song’s official lyrics, which you can see in the video above.) You’d never hear a Japanese nationalist willingly use English loan words. On the contrary, many of them pride themselves on using rare kanji and forms of expression that the rest of the Japanese speaking world stopped using decades ago.
So no, there’s little reason to think that “NIPPON” means that Shiina Ringo is in cahoots with Japan’s ultra-nationalists. In the end, the song was written as NHK requested it. And it was done – as all things Shiina Ringo does are – in Shiina Ringo’s unique style.
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