Let’s Join TEPCO!, sung by Barakan, is based on Takada Wataru’s 1969 anti-war song Let’s Join the Self-Defense Force, but that one was based on Malvina Reynolds and Pete Seeger’s song Andorra.
The song starts out with Barakan inviting the audience to join TEPCO, just like the anti-war song invites everyone to join the Self-Defense Force. But at the same time, it sounds like an invitation to a paradise vacation. The image shown during the first line “Everyone in the audience, does anyone want to work for TEPCO?” is that of Las Vegas in the 1960s as a place where people went to watch nuclear testing. This sets the tone for the song as a mockery of all the promises of TEPCO about how nuclear energy is the solution to all of our problems. Throughout the movie there are pictures of soldiers looking at a nuclear mushroom cloud. I believe that the song is trying to connect nuclear energy and disaster to war with these images, because it contrasts these images with the image of the stamp that says “Atoms for Peace”. The stamp is shown twice in the song and it accompanies the lyrics “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”, which sounds like a call to war. This is just one example of how contradictions are used as irony and a wake-up call in the song.
Another example of this type of contradiction can be seen when Barakan sings “We’ve got everything you want!”. During that line an image of a Chernobyl liquidator crew is shown and reminds us of what terrible gruesome deaths many of these poor men awaited. I think the line has a dual meaning: On one hand it is reminding us of a commercial line for a luxury vacation spot, but on the other hand it is implying that when working at TEPCO you will get what you don’t want: Disease caused by Plutonium and Uranium radiation. These two are listed in the line before.
The song has a lot of religious references as a mockery of the propaganda acting like silly religious promises that TEPCO cannot deliver. One example is the refrain line: “All the real men are coming to die for TEPCO like flowers that bloom and fall to earth”. It could be referencing the Bible in which Jesus promised that God will take care of you even more so than of the flowers of the field that bloom one day are gone the next day (Matthew 6: 28-30). Another religious reference is the refrain line “It’s like heaven on earth”. This could be referencing the Bible as well. In the “Our Father in Heaven” Prayer, the most known Christian prayer, the plead to God is to let his kingdom and will come “as it is in heaven on earth”. The song is mocking TEPCO leaders acting like gods that promise heaven on earth with the nuclear energy, but they cannot perform miracles and they are not almighty which are qualities you need in order to make nuclear energy a “heavenly gift”. You would need to be able to make the waste disappear and also the radiation after an accident. You would also be able to be in complete control of the nuclear reaction which is definitely something humans are not. The line that follows immediately says: “All those who support nuclear power, please assemble under the reactor.” The song here is mocking supporters of nuclear power as worshippers of it. The lines are accompanied by an image of the Chernobyl memorial of the liquidators in front of the sarcophagus and an image of the inside of the reactor cells. Both images are referring to idolizing something. The image of the inside of the reactor cells is kind of eerie and other-worldly in the way they glow in this mysterious blue light. When the song invites to “assemble”, which is a word that is used very commonly for religious gatherings, the audience imagines a religious service with people worshipping the inside of the reactor.
Barakan mocks the lies of TEPCO in another part of the song as well. When the line “Plutonium is not really so scary” is being sung, an anime character is shown wearing a green helmet and drinking a green drink (see image). This character is from a propaganda video for children and the song is mocking it. According to Matthew Penney, “the 1993 video Our Reliable Friend Pluto was produced by the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation, a group associated with the Japanese government. In it, a cute cartoon stand-in for radioactive element plutonium tells children that not a single case of cancer can be traced to him and that he is even safe to drink!” The expression “Plutonium is not really so scary” is child talk. You talk to children like this when you want to comfort them and say something like “See, now that wasn’t so scary, was it?”. I believe it references to how the government and the nuclear industry treat the citizens: They are little stupid kids that can easily be convinced that there is nothing ‘scary’ about nuclear energy. You can see this propaganda video with English subtitles on http://www.evilyoshida.com/thread-11110.html.
There are many more examples of the contradictions and mockery in the song, but I was only able to point out a few. The melody chosen originates from another mockery song that makes fun of the ridiculous defense budget of Andorra. Pete Seeger sings that he wants to go to Andorra, because it is such an amazing place. And then he makes fun of everything that is wrong with Andorra. This theme is picked up by Barakan, setting a light-hearted melody to a mockery. I believe that music like this is needed very much to express the irony and mockery that many citizens feel in Japan and around the world.
Works cited
Penney, Matthew. “Songs for Fukushima.” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (1970). May 2019. <https://apjjf.org/site/view/4672>.