If this column is going to be about one thing in 2015, it will be politics in music.
That doesn't mean politics in the limited sense of old men sleeping in a building in Nagatacho; rather it means politics in the sense of the underlying power relationships that dictate how music happens.
The recent brouhaha over veteran rocker and Southern All Stars frontman Keisuke Kuwata's baiting of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe over the new year, and his subsequent climbdown, seems on the face of it to be a simple matter of left versus right, especially when contrasted with AKB48's Haruka Shimazaki, who last summer urged people to join the army with the full backing of the state.