On 4 May 2009, Kuwata Keisuke, lead singer of Japanese rock band Southern All Stars, performed a parody of Abbey Road on Music Tiger, a show that he was hosting for Fuji TV, one of Japan’s television networks.⁠ His Japanese lyrics criticized corruption in Japanese politics and commented on the volatility of financial markets, rising national indebtedness, climate change, North Korean missiles, American troops in Japan, and the death penalty, among other sociopolitical issues. The episode was titled, ‘Soramimi Abe Road’ (‘Imagined Abe Road’), named after Abe Shinzō, the former prime minister (2006–2007, 2012–2020).

This broadcast was extraordinary for several reasons. First, Japanese musicians usually steer clear of politics. The music and broadcasting industries have guidelines against recordings that ‘disturb the national or public order’, ‘disgrac[ing] the authority of the Government or its agencies’, or ‘interfere’ or ‘influence’ topics under national deliberation. Furthermore, musicians have little incentive to record political material, because many Japanese see them solely as entertainers; when musicians veer into politics, they face public backlash and a loss of media exposure. Musicians are especially careful on television, a primary means of introducing artists and songs. They usually refrain from expressing viewpoints that could alienate the corporations and government agencies that advertise on television programs.

Perhaps Kuwata got away with this rebellious gesture because Japan was at a political crossroads in 2009. Support for the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which had held power since 1955, had plummeted. Japanese society was strained under the prolonged post-bubble-era recession of the 1990s and the Great Recession of the late 2000s, yet since 2006, Japan had had a revolving door of prime ministers – Abe, Fukuda, and Asō – whose cabinets were marked by multiple corruption scandals and resignations. Kuwata addresses this extraordinary turnover in ‘Golden Slumbers’. As the titles of these ministers scroll across the screen, he sarcastically asks:

Seriously? You're really leaving, public officer?
Cunning minister who's resigning, do not cry.
I don't understand your true intentions behind your changed stance.

In his version of ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, Kuwata addresses a scandal whereby the government lost track of 64 million pension claims, some government employees falsified records, and Green Pia resorts, supported by pension funds, incurred massive losses. Calling it a ‘grand theft of tax revenues’, he contrasts how ‘the system’s full of loopholes’ for the VIPs while ‘low-income families are out of luck in old age’. In the chorus, he sings,

The data on pensions disappeared while Masuzoe wasn't looking. How stupid is that?
While Masuzoe wasn't looking, the data was deleted until you're dead.
If you knew, you wouldn't pay it.

Kuwata mimics the sounds of the English lyrics by choosing Japanese words with consonants that are similar to the English ones. On the International Phonetic Alphabet chart, they are similar by either the method of articulation or place of articulation. For example, plosive consonants like /p/, /t/, /k/, and /g/ are pronounced by suddenly releasing airflow; he substitutes these consonants for each other. /k/ and /g/ are frequent substitutions because they also have the same place of articulation, in the back of the mouth.

The death penalty and punishment are both inhumane
Save dangerous people and bloody scenes through manipulation

In ‘She Came in through the Bathroom Window’, Kuwata substitutes /m/ for another nasal consonant /n/, the fricative /θ/ for /s/, the plosive /p/ for /t/, the plosive /t/ for /d/, the fricative /s/ for /ʃ/ (sh), and the plosive /p/ for /k/. Matched vowels and consonants are in bold, while similar consonants and vowels are in italics.

Kuwata also chooses Japanese words with vowels that are close to the English vowel, then distorts his pronunciation to align with the English vowel. In ‘The End’, he substitutes the Japanese word ‘ōrai’ (‘coming and going’) for ‘all right’. The o in ‘ōrai’ and the aw in ‘all’ are not the same vowel, but they are both back vowels, making them sound similar.

Oh yeah, all right. Are you gon-na be in my dreams tonight?
o—––ie, ō-rai ā yu- kai- na go en ga t'rim'ts' tōnai-b'

(Families, comings and goings, ah, it’s pleasurable connections that make things flow inside the party)

The final lines are,

Eternally putting the next fiscal year in trouble
A beautiful country ... A dream.

‘Beautiful country’ is Abe’s catchphrase for his conservative vision, including revisions of history textbooks and restoration of a full military force. As the music winds its way to the final cadence, the video morphs into a parody of the Abbey Road album cover in ukiyo-e style, with a composite of Hokusai's ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’ and ‘Fine Wind, Clear Morning’ (of Mount Fuji) with the Diet Building at the center. In place of the four Beatles, caricatures of the four most recent prime ministers (Koizumi, Abe, Fukuda, and Asō) are shown on a pedestrian crosswalk, crossing the imagined Abe Road:

Three months after the ‘Abe Road’ broadcast, the LDP was roundly defeated in the lower house elections of 2009: sixty percent of its incumbents lost their seats. The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) won a landslide victory, ending the LDP’s 54-year rule of Japan.

The DPJ’s turn in power was short-lived. Like the LDP, it suffered from short-lived prime ministerships, with Hatoyama, Kan, and Noda each serving terms of about a year. After the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster devastated northern Japan in 2011, its problematic response led to loss of public support. Ozawa’s defection from the DPJ, along with 49 allies, significantly weakened the party.

The LDP thus regained power in December 2012, with Abe returning as prime minister. He consolidated power in subsequent general elections in 2014 and 2017. By the time he resigned in August 2020, Abe had become the longest-serving prime minister in Japanese history.

Abe championed controversial policies. He led a group that favored revising textbooks to eliminate Japanese war atrocities. He oversaw the passing of the State Secrecy Law (2013), which has been cited as hampering freedom of information and discouraging investigative reporting; Japan’s press freedom ranking fell from eleventh in the world in 2010 to 72nd by 2016. Abe’s Cabinet reinterpreted the constitution so that Japanese armed forces could engage in ‘collective self-defense’ of allies, and the LDP pushed through the Security Bills (2015), which made such actions legal. Both measures were opposed by a majority of the population and were protested in large demonstrations.

In this heated atmosphere, Southern All-Stars released ‘Peace and Highlight’ in summer 2013. That year had been marked with intensifying hate demonstrations by the right-wing group Zaitokukai against ethnic Koreans living in Japan. The Zaitokukai marched through Koreatowns, shouting ‘Kill Koreans!’ Counter-protesters went to impede their progress.

‘Peace and Highlight’ refers to this tension. It begins as follows:

On the news that I was casually watching,
A neighbor was angry.
No matter how they have been discussed,
These arguments do not change.

Textbooks run out of time
Before addressing modern history,
Even though that's what one wants to know the most.
Why does that happen?

Many listeners took the ‘neighbor’ to be neighboring countries in East Asia, particularly South Korea and China, while the second stanza was taken to refer to the controversy over revisions of textbooks to minimize the negative impacts of Japanese imperialism. The second verse notes, ‘It’s insane to have the world controlled by an emperor with no clothes’ – interpreted by some listeners to mean Abe. Referring to Japan’s defeat in World War II, it asks, ‘Didn’t you learn your lesson in the twentieth century?’ The chorus calls for hope, love, and understanding, and the video makes references to John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s bed-ins. The single debuted at number one on the Oricon charts.

On New Year’s Eve, the band performed ‘Peace and Highlight’ on NHK’s Kōhaku utagassen (Red-and-White Song Contest), the annual New Year’s television show that typically records the highest ratings of the year. Kuwata appeared wearing a Hitler-like mustache; many observers took it to be a parody of Abe. But what the right wing focused on was a joke Kuwata made regarding his Purple Ribbon of Honor, an award for artistic achievement given to him by the emperor. In this context, right-wing trolls proclaimed ‘Peace and Highlight’ to be an ‘anti-Japanese song’, and their outrage spread from social media to tabloids and women’s magazines.

On January 11, right-wing protesters amassed in front of his agency, demanding that Kuwata apologize. Four days later, Kuwata and his agency posted an apology on its official website, regretting the Purple Ribbon joke, claiming that the mustache was only for a laugh and did not represent anyone, and saying that the song was about world peace.

Reactions to the apology were mixed. While the incident did not have a long-term negative impact upon Kuwata or the Southern All-Stars, it also signalled a change in the atmosphere for political speech by musicians. As cultural critic Fujita Naoya noted, if a massively popular artist like Kuwata must bow to pressure, others will be intimidated, silencing cultural expression.²Shizuoka Shinbun, 18 January 2015. The media environment had shifted from open criticism in 2009 to greater reticence with the advent of the Secrecy Law in 2015. Internet trolling and cancel culture were on the rise. Japan was less inviting to humorous political takes in mainstream media.

‘Abe Road’ marked an end of several eras: the end of a long phase of LDP dominance, a period of rising media openness, and an environment in which popular musicians could criticize the Japanese government. Even so, Kuwata likely got away with the political messages of ‘Abe Road’ precisely because it was framed as a humorous parody of a well-loved album by a well-loved band.