| Sumario: | The 'New Rock' bands active in Japan since the late 1960s preferred setting rock music to lyrics in English. Thus, when new band Happy End began attempting to sing rock in Japanese, a backlash from English-language rockers led by The Flower Travelin' Band emerged in response. An unusually heated controversy between these two lyrical approaches marked publications in the emerging Japanese rock press in the early 70s. Building upon previous scholarship which connects this so-called 'Japanese rock debate' to narratives of post-colonialism, I argue for interpreting the rock debate foremost as a product of a particular time when rock was seen as a medium that connected a community of youth to a global counterculture. By investigating the actual contours of the discourse in the Japanese rock press, I demonstrate that the issue of language and linguistics was less pressing to New Rockers than more existential issues of identity, ideology, and generational politics. Further, I posit that Happy End was able to succeed with Japanese lyrics not only because of their inventive linguistic adaptations, but because the force of opposition to Japanese lyrics naturally declined as the counterculture ideals of the early 1970s began to fade.
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