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TOKYO (MarketWatch)-When Japanese pop star Kyari Pamiya Pamiyu tweeted a new year’s greeting on December 31, 2012, showing her in a cute pose with the Rising Sun flag used by the Imperial Japanese army in world war II, Korean networks pounced on them. The j-Pop Princess and fashion icon soon deleted the controversial tweet.

But the damage has already been done, with media speculation that the reaction led Kyary to cancel her concert in Seoul, scheduled for March 10 of that year, as part of her “100% KPP” World Tour. The Chiari case brought the topic of patriotism in pop culture into the media spotlight at a time when regional tensions in East Asia were mounting.

But it was hardly the first time politics had invaded pop. From grated soundtracks to old-school “ENKA” songs that praise the glory of Imperial Japan, often blasted from the speakers of right-wing “sound trucks,” to the shimmering melodies of well-coiffed supergroups, “Pro-Japanese sentiment has been present throughout J-Pop history,” Tokyo-based music journalist Patrick St. Michel tells MarketWatch.

“After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Japanese music definitely took part in a more Patriotic and perhaps nationalistic way,” he says.

Whether it’s The j-Pop trio perfume album “JPN” or the boy band EXILE’s post-disaster single “Rising sun,” St. Michel says, the gist of the overall message was: “Don’t give up, Japan!”

“It’s more about promoting a positive view of Japan rather than trumpeting the country as better … or filming in other places, ” he says.

After the earthquake, the media also slowly stopped playing and promoting Korean pop music on the air, culminating in NHK including the sum of zero K-Pop acts in the 2013 Kohaku New year show, St. Michel says.

In contrast, several K-Pop acts were asked to perform for a very popular year-end music program in the years leading up to 2012. In 2010-2011, K-Pop albums topped the sales charts in Japan.

Even the government has enlisted J-Pop as part of its Grand cultural project known as “Cool Japan,” according to Ian Martin, music critic for the Japan Times. “With the Olympics coming to Tokyo in 2020, the government wants the country to look good, so they want cultural industries to promote Japan on the international stage.”

A musical outlet linked to Cool Japan is pretty corny, Martin says, but the government raised eyebrows – and, according to some Japanese, refuted its dark intentions – by recruiting a member of the girl supergroup AKB48 to appear in an infamous recruitment video for Japan’s Armed forces, the self-defense Force.

“There’s this cheesy, cloying recruitment ad that aired the day the government announced it was rethinking the Constitution, featuring one of the AKB girls in it,” says Martin. “It gives perhaps a little glimpse behind the scenes into how the government sees its relationship with pop culture developing.”

The Pro-war stance of the ad has brought to naught those who opposed the reinterpretation of the post-war Japanese Constitution, which banned the country from engaging in armed conflict. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was among those leading the push to allow Japan greater freedom in terms of using its military, passing legislation to that effect last week.

At the darker end of the spectrum, anti-school nationalism can be heard in Japan’s underground music scene, most notably in the sounds of small-frame punk bands.

“There are definitely punk bands that are lean nationalist,” St. Michel says. “I saw a punk band that played a song about how stupid the Chinese people were once. Punk and hardcore have been the place for this kind of artists to emerge for a while .”

According to Saint Michel, even when punk acts are not specifically nationalist in their message, some hardcore acts like maximum hormone use old Imperial imagery in their merchandise.

The presence of U.S. military bases in Japan is also part of the picture, Martin says.

“Resistance to’ American occupation ‘flows neatly into a position containing elements of both left-wing and nationalist views,” he says. This resistance to Western influence “creates a backlash of a desire to celebrate and renew elements of traditional Japanese culture, much like the nasty edge of nationalism lining BritPop in the’ 90s, even when most of its best-known practitioners were from a kind of socially conscious leftist background.”

A good example can be heard in the music of the ethno-punk Bank Seppuku Pistols – seppuku is the word for ritual suicide committed by samurai in feudal days-who play a mixture of guitars and traditional Japanese instruments.

“They don’t consider themselves ‘nationalists’ as much as ‘Patriotic’, although I would say that once you are a foreigner in another country, the difference in nuance between the two words becomes increasingly meaningless,” Martin says. “I heard them make some pretty harsh statements on stage about Yasukuni Shrine.”

Yasukuni, a Shinto Shrine dedicated to Japan’s war dead, is a political hot button. Each visit by the Prime Minister to the site provokes outrage among Koreans and Chinese demanding repentance for atrocities committed by Japanese troops during the war.

Punk is not alone on the nationalist edge of the scene, with hip hop often holding similar political / cultural tastes. For example, a right-wing rap song praising Japan’s controversial position of allowing whaling caused a wave online in 2010.

“I get the feeling Japanese right-wing rap is more likely to do this kind of thing than punk,” Michelle says.

This phenomenon is also not limited to fringe. Saint Michel quotes a television outburst in 2012 when “TV personality Matsuko Deluxe ripped into Korean music and actually said,’ If you don’t like our country, just leave.'”

“I feel a lot of people, at least online, agreed with her opinion completely,” he says.

Ultimately, this desire to keep Japan closed is growing, according to Martin, pointing to a subtly growing trend in Japanese music toward isolationism.

“Indie music seems to be caught up in this trend towards music that emphasizes the Japanese language and focuses in a very narrow way on small aspects of people’s lives, almost pathologically excluding any larger picture,” says Martin.

“Nationalism may be related in the sense that this kind of dodging the big picture may reflect the fear or discomfort in the world that Japanese young people see hanging over their gardens.”

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