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This chapter explores the role of Japanese musicians in the antinuclear movement and the factors that motivate them to participate despite strong disincentives. While Western entertainers attract media coverage to their causes, the Japanese media has ignored, censored, attacked, and blacklisted politically engaged entertainers. Musicians invested in antinuclear activism are often parents, were outsiders as children, or come from towns damaged on 3.11 or near other nuclear plants. They also need to be able to risk taking a political stance, by either not being affiliated with a major label, or having sufficient stature or longevity to market themselves despite lost media exposure. In addition to performing, musicians publish papers (Gotō Masafumi) and educational websites (Shing02), organize antinuclear events (Sakamoto Ryūichi), and run charities (Likkle Mai, Ko, and Anamizu Masahiko).

As music festivals are a space apart from everyday lives, both musicians and audience members can feel freer to engage in political expression at them. After describing politically themed folk and rock festivals from the 1960s to the ’80s, the chapter discusses three antinuclear music festival series with different communication approaches—informational, where arguments are presented, or experiential, where an immersive environment opens one’s mind to different points of view. Initiated by Sakamoto Ryūichi, the No Nukes series takes an informational approach, using videos between acts, program notes, and NGO booths to make antinuclear arguments. The Atomic Café at Fuji Rock Festival is a separate, informational space within one of Japan’s largest music festivals. In contrast, the Project Fukushima Festival refrains from explicit antinuclear statements; festivalgoers experience Fukushima by participating in activities. Of the three festivals, Project Fukushima enjoyed the widest media coverage because it appeared to be supporting Fukushima rather than railing against nuclear power.

Despite a Chernobyl-level nuclear disaster and the largest protests in fifty years, Japan is poised to restart nuclear reactors. A major dampener to political change has been the reluctance of the media—as well as popular musicians—to discuss antinuclear views. The word “Fukushima” is avoided (in favor of “3.11”) in discussions of the nuclear accident, and even rappers censor themselves. This chapter discusses the types of censorship in global popular music and the self-censorship prevalent in Japan. Three parameters determine musicians’ political behavior—their position in the music industry, the space in which they are playing, and the political conditions at the time. The four spaces of musical protest—cyberspace, demonstrations, festivals, and recordings—are analyzed in terms of Lefebvre and Harvey’s framework of perceived, conceived, and lived space. Depending on their position, the space, and political conditions, musicians adjust the level of self-censorship, the form of audience participation, the frame of the message, and the messaging technique.

This chapter explores how the openness, mobile accessibility, and potential anonymity of the internet have helped Japanese citizens overcome the spiral of silence and enabled them to disseminate information, discuss the issues, and mobilize for action (Slater et al. 2012). Given its relative lack of censorship, cyberspace is a depository for music that the recording industry would normally discourage (e.g., Saitō Kazuyoshi’s “It Was Always a Lie”); remakes that would otherwise be subject to copyright payments; and songs by anonymous citizens. In addition, cyberspace enables participation through musical collaboration (e.g., remixes) and it mobilizes citizens, as in the rock band Frying Dutchman’s virtual parade based on their song “Human Error.” Mobile-internet uploads and live twitcasts have provided alternative news flows and archives of antinuclear protests. However, false rumors on the internet have also damaged activist musicians and events.

This chapter describes the power structures and financial incentives that have kept nuclear power in place in Japan despite a catastrophe. These structures have persisted since the 1950s, when future Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro and a U.S.-supported media blitz promoted nuclear power. Following the Fukushima disaster, frustration with information disclosure and revelations of past cover-ups at nuclear facilities undermined the “safety myth” that Japanese nuclear power was accident-free. Most citizens now believe that the Fukushima nuclear disaster was the result of a “nuclear village” of vested financial interests encompassing the nuclear industry, bureaucrats, politicians, academics, and the media; most favor a phase-out of nuclear power. Despite historically large and persistent protests, the Japanese government plans to restart nuclear reactors. Similarly, the Abe Shinzō administration has ignored widespread public objection to the Secrecy Law and the reinterpretation of the Peace Constitution.

This chapter discusses the sound trucks and drum corps of antinuclear demonstrations since the Fukushima disaster and conflicting philosophies behind them. Adopting Thomas Turino (2008)’s categorization of presentational vs. participatory performance, the chapter traces the shift in performance style on sound trucks from primarily presentational in Shirōto no Ran’s demonstrations in 2011, where rappers, reggae singers, and bands performed prepared pieces, to more participatory in the Metropolitan Coalition Against Nukes’ demonstrations of 2012, where the majority of performance time was spent on calls and responses of Sprechchor (slogans) between rappers and protesters, in time to the beats. This shift in style coincided with a change in emphasis within the antinuclear movement from the diagnostic frame of informing the population, to the motivational one of encouraging citizens to make their views heard. It reflects Charles Tilly (2008)’s theory that contentious repertoires change incrementally with shifts in political opportunities and personal connections.

This conclusion reconsiders the constraints under which artists operate in conjunction with those that govern each of the four spaces of protest performance—cyberspace, demonstrations, festivals, and recordings. While major-label musicians largely stick to festivals and recordings, independent musicians are freer to voice political opinions and play important roles in demonstrations and cyberspace. Cyberspace has widened the geographical and temporal reach of demonstrations and festivals. By making them open to reinterpretation or aggressive attacks, the internet has reduced the safety of the festival as an enclosed space and intimidated some from speaking out. Nonetheless, the live spaces of demonstrations and festivals still allow for greater directness, with less need for the metaphors of commercial recordings; they also provide natural settings for music in motivational frames. The book advocates for further studies of music in social movements by considering how music interacts with space and hegemonic control.

This chapter considers the production and reception of The China Syndrome, a 1979 Hollywood film starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, and Michael Douglas. Depicting an accident at a fictional nuclear power plant, the film sparked controversy even before opening night. The nuclear industry and conservative commentators lambasted its antinuclear message. Yet the film received some of its harshest criticism from leftist reviewers, who claimed that it failed to foster activist feelings and to imagine citizens playing any role in shaping the energy future. While questions about the blurring of fact and fiction shaped the initial reception of The China Syndrome, the notorious accident at a nuclear power plant on Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania—only twelve days after the movie’s release—made the intersection of film and reality even more salient and politically charged. The spectacle of mass culture merged with the spectacle of media coverage to make the movie’s premonition of nuclear meltdown into an oppositional vision. As the crisis at Three Mile Island seemed to imitate the film, The China Syndrome became a surprising tool of protest, a movie that circulated beyond the screen and outside the theater to popularize and advance the antinuclear movement.

This chapter considers media coverage of the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident. Television reports imparted a sense of urgency that emphasized the potential explosiveness of the situation. News broadcasts made spectators feel like witnesses to a crisis that could, at any moment, turn into a deadly catastrophe. After the crisis ended, photographs of Three Mile Island’s cooling towers became icons of the accident, visual reminders of the tense moments that gripped the nation. Popular imagery mobilized public fear and helped validate the emotional politics of the antireactor movement. Yet these images also detached the accident from broader manifestations of energy crisis and focused public attention on the nuclear power plant as the sole locus of environmental danger. This chapter contrasts the extensive coverage of Three Mile Island with the media’s neglect of the massive radioactive spill in the Rio Puerco, on lands held by the Navajo Nation. The short-term, immediate danger of the China syndrome and Three Mile Island became increasingly visible in American public culture, but the more extensive timeframes of risk remained marginal to spectacle-driven framings of environmental crises.

A multilayered system of self-censorship by the record industry association (Dorsey 2013), individual record companies, and producers discourage the use of lyrics that argue a political point or criticize individuals or organizations. With nuclear power as a taboo issue, major-label artists have relied on allegories, metaphors, and metonyms to express their antinuclear sentiments. The chapter categorizes these techniques by size and method: allegories as the basis of a concept album (Acid Black Cherry); metaphors spanning a song (Saitō Kazuyoshi); chains of metaphors and metonyms in quick succession (Quruli); and musical metaphors that align with Johnson’s image schemas of containment, paths, and cycles (Asian Kung-Fu Generation, Johnson 1987, Saslaw 1996, Larson 2011). Musicians also quote songs with similar messages or as reminiscences of the past and purposefully mispronounce words to suggest near-homonyms. Such techniques have more in common with those observed in countries with one-party systems, such as Castro’s Cuba (Manabe 2006b), than in the United States.

Texas Utilities is a big company. Through its subsidiary, TU Electric, it provides electric service to a large chunk of Texas, including the Dallas- Fort Worth metropolitan area. It employs some 10,000 people. Its sales are around $5 billion a year. It has assets near $20 billion. Yet this corporate Goliath was brought to its knees by a single determined woman, a former church secretary named Juanita Ellis. For nearly a decade, Ellis fought Texas Utilities to a standstill in its battle to build the Comanche Peak nuclear power plant. During that time the cost of the plant zoomed from an original estimate of $779 million to nearly $11 billion, with much of the increase attributable, at least indirectly, to Ellis. Company executives, who had at first laughed at the thought of a housewife married to a lawn-mower repairman standing up to their covey of high-priced lawyers and consultants, eventually realized they could go neither around her nor through her. In the end, it took a negotiated one-on-one settlement between Ellis and a TU Electric executive vice president to remove the roadblocks to Comanche Peak and allow it to begin operation. No one was really happy with the outcome. Antinuclear groups denounced the settlement as a sellout and Ellis as a traitor. Texas Utilities bemoaned the years of discord as time wasted on regulatory nit-picking with no real improvement in safety. And the utility’s customers were the most unhappy of all, for they had to pay for the $11 billion plant with large increases in their electric bills. So it was natural to look for someone to blame. The antinuclear groups pointed to the utility. TU Electric, they said, had ignored basic safety precautions and had built a plant that was a threat to public health, and it had misled the public and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The utility, in turn, blamed the antinuclear groups that had intervened in the approval process and a judge who seemed determined to make TU Electric jump through every hoop he could imagine. The ratepayers didn’t know what to believe.

This chapter analyzes social movements in 1960s U.S. and Japan as part of related currents in Cold War discourse, examining ideas and rhetoric that linked antinuclear, anti-Vietnam War, the civil rights, national liberation, and black activist groups. Their struggle to ensure human rights became common ground in Hiroshima as historian Howard Zinn and SNCC’s Ralph Featherstone met with hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) and an antiwar group lead by writer Oda Makoto.

This chapter considers the ways in which the urban landscape impacts performance in street demonstrations. As Parkinson (2012) and Sand (2013) have noted, Tokyo is short on open public space, forcing protest organizers to choose between direct claims making in government districts and public visibility in shopping districts. The chapter explains how elements of the urban landscape, as categorized by Kevin Lynch (1960) and Quentin Stevens (2007)—districts, paths, nodes, boundaries, and landmarks—enter into the planning of protests and affect the performance of protests. It discusses the factors affecting the urban soundscape, as inferred by the acoustic experiments of Kang (2000, 2001, 2006) and others. It considers how the urban landscape and soundscape, as determined by these elements, affect the performance and reception of antinuclear demonstrations, by walking through two demonstrations in Shibuya—TwitNoNukes, with drums only, and No Nukes More Hearts, with sound trucks.

The introduction lays out the main theme, argument, and structure of the book. It states that this study explores the emerging politics of peace, both as an ideal and as a pragmatic aspect of international relations during the early Cold War. By tracing the myriad ways in which a broad spectrum of people involved in and affected by the Cold War used, altered, and fought over this seemingly universal concept, it deconstructs the assumed binary between realist and idealist foreign policy approaches generally accepted among contemporary policymakers. It argues that a politics of peace emerged in the 1950s and ’60s as a result of the gradual convergence between idealism and realism. A transnational politics of peace succeeded only when idealist objectives met the needs of realist political ambition. It maps three dynamic arenas that together shaped the global discourse on peace: Cold War states, nongovernmental peace advocacy groups, and anticolonial liberationists. The gradual development of a politics of peace at the grassroots level paved the way for a more pragmatic politics of peace among political leaders. The politicization of peace thus both obstructed and advanced the cause of peace.

Leonard Bernstein had been a vocal activist for nuclear disarmament since the early years of the Cold War, and the growing antinuclear movement in the 1970s and 1980s provided a platform for his advocacy. He renewed his commitment to the cause when President Reagan announced the “Star Wars” program in 1983. For his sixty-fifth birthday, friends and colleagues wore blue ribbons to show support for a nuclear weapons freeze. Bernstein himself gave an impassioned speech calling for an end to the nuclear arms race at a concert in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where he introduced to the audience a young conductor from Hiroshima, Eiji Oue.