NIPPON

Few songs in recent Japanese popular music have so deliberately weaponized the idea of national identity while remaining genuinely thrilling as a piece of music. The arrangement is orchestral and theatrical in the extreme — strings, brass, percussion, and traditional Japanese elements woven together with electronics in a way that feels both ceremonial and forward-facing, like a ritual updated for the present tense. The tempo is march-like, commanding, designed to put bodies in motion without being crass about it. Sheena Ringo's voice is the organizing principle: precise, slightly theatrical, capable of sudden intimacy within a massive sonic frame, and deployed with the controlled intensity of someone who has thought carefully about every syllable. She draws on Shōwa-era aesthetic sensibilities — the heavily stylized, maximalist pop culture of Japan's postwar economic boom — and that influence saturates the song, which was created for the 2014 FIFA World Cup Japan campaign. The song is not naive patriotism; it's something more complicated and interesting, an aesthetic argument for what Japan is and what it might be, rendered in music dense enough to sustain many interpretations. This is a song for large stadiums, for moments of collective feeling, for when you want music that was composed with history explicitly in mind.