Sukiyaki (Ue o Muite Arukou)

The lyricist Rokusuke Ei wrote the words to Ue o Muite Arukō while walking home from the 1960 Anpo protests against the security treaty between Japan and the United States. The protests had failed to stop the treaty, and his frustration went into a song about a man who looks up as he walks so that his tears will not fall. Ei deliberately kept the lyric general enough to be heard as a song about any lost love. Hachidai Nakamura wrote the melody, and Kyu Sakamoto sang it in 1961. It became the number one song of the year in Japan. Abroad it acquired a name that has nothing to do with it. Sukiyaki is a beef hot pot dish; the word never appears in the lyric and was chosen only because it was short, catchy and recognisably Japanese to English speakers. A Newsweek columnist compared it to releasing Moon River in Japan as Beef Stew. Under that title it spent three weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in June 1963, the first number one there in a non-European language. No other Asian act topped the Hot 100 until BTS in 2020, and the record has sold over 13 million copies worldwide. NASA played an instrumental version to the Gemini VII astronauts, and Japan Post put it on a stamp in 1999. After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, the song was used in commercials urging people to keep walking with their heads up. A quiet protest song in disguise became one of the most hopeful melodies Japan has given the world.