>>47193240http://neojaponisme.com/2009/11/16/sakai-noriko-and-japanese-morality/>So when Sakai Noriko was arrested for amphetamines in August, her record label Victor Entertainment — as is the convention — took all of her albums out of distribution. And in this digital age, Victor also had to remove all her songs from iTunes. But here’s where the label messed up: they forgot to remove Sakai songs that showed up on compilation albums.Horror! There were free-floating Nori-P songs out there on iTunes. Surely the Japanese people — who we are told again and again have a low moral tolerance for drug use — rose up in outrage against Victor, Apple, and Sakai for the oversight. Or maybe in more predictable Japanese style, everyone just ignored these offending tracks.
>Actually, that’s not what happened at all: Sakai’s 1995 hit “Blue Rabbit” (「青いウサギ」) was the number one song on iTunes for the week.>If anything, this proves the old adage that “all publicity is good publicity.” Surely the arrest made a lot of casual fans think about Sakai for the first time in years. They thought, “You know what I want to hear? ‘Blue Rabbit.'” So they went to iTunes and bought it. There was likely nothing particularly complicated about their motivations. 