Rankin' Taxi is a Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

ese reggae

Reggae

Reggae is a music genre first developed in Jamaica in the late 1960s. While sometimes used in a broader sense to refer to most types of Jamaican music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that originated following on the development of ska and rocksteady.Reggae is based...

 artist, from Yokohama

Yokohama

is the capital city of Kanagawa Prefecture and the second largest city in Japan by population after Tokyo and most populous municipality of Japan. It lies on Tokyo Bay, south of Tokyo, in the Kantō region of the main island of Honshu...

. His 2011 anti-nuclear

Anti-nuclear

The anti-nuclear movement is a social movement that opposes the use of nuclear technologies. Many direct action groups, environmental groups, and professional organisations have identified themselves with the movement at the local, national, and international level...

 song 誰にも見えない匂いもない(You can't see it, you can't smell it) with Dub Ainu Band

Oki (musician)

, known professionally as OKI, is an Ainu Japanese musician, from Kanagawa Prefecture. He studied industrial arts at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. His father, Bikki Sunazawa, was a renowned wood sculptor. Oki uses the tonkori, an Ainu stringed instrument, in his...

, despite receiving little airplay in the mainstream Japanese media

Japanese media

The communications media of Japan include numerous television and radio networks as well as newspapers and magazines in Japan. For the most part, television networks were established based on the capital contribution from existing radio networks at that time...

, attracted the attention of the New York Times in June 2011 in an article by Dan Grunebaum titled Japan's New Wave of Protest song

Protest song

A protest song is a song which is associated with a movement for social change and hence part of the broader category of topical songs . It may be folk, classical, or commercial in genre...

s, after it became popular online following the Fukushima nuclear disaster.