A few days ago I was watching the boring stock market channel on TV in Japan when there appeared on the screen a commercial for an investment product. Not earth-shattering news, I know. But there was something about the commercial that threw me for a loop.

The investment product, which is really a government investment strategy for individuals, was NISA, Nippon Individual Savings Accounts. NISAs offer tax breaks and other incentives so that, the government hopes, private citizens will pump more of their money into stocks and mutual funds. Whether it’s a good idea for people to give up their yen so that fund managers can have more chips to place on the stock exchange roulette tables in Tokyo, Manhattan, and elsewhere is one problem. My suspicion is that the Japanese government wants everyone to join the global capital crapshoot as a way to get us ready for the eventual diminishment and demise of the pension system here. But, well, that’s neither here nor there for the time being. Watch the stock market channel and suffer the breaktime advertising consequences, I guess.

What really got me was not the ad for NISA but the music that was playing in the background. It was “Linda, Linda,” the 1987 smash hit from the Japanese punk band The Blue Hearts (video here). Once a splendid anti-establishment anthem for the young and angsty, as your faithful correspondent used to be, “Linda, Linda” is now elevator music for investment sales pitches.

Maybe I should have chalked up the retrogression of “Linda, Linda” to the invincibility of capitalism. Jerry Rubin’s arc from hippie to yippie to yuppie might be some kind of social constant. The Blue Hearts, whose on-stage antics (see here) do not exactly inspire confidence in their ability to assess investment products, may have just been, like all the other alienated youth of the world, stuffed suits waiting to break free from their leather jacket chrysalises.

But that is not quite it. The lyrics to “Linda, Linda” are an homage to beauty, to gentleness of soul — one might even stretch to poetics, to metaphysics. It takes a bit of imagination, but my below translation of the song’s words gives some glimpse of what I understand to be singer and lyricist Komoto Hiroto’s paean to the goodness that our senses cannot detect.

I want to be as beautiful as the sewer rat,
because they have a beauty that doesn’t show up in photographs

If I ever get the chance to meet you and speak with you,
I want you to know, in that moment, what the meaning of love is

Like the sewer rat, gentler than anyone
Like the sewer rat, warmer at heart than anything else

If I ever get the chance to meet you and speak with you,
I want you to know, in that moment, what the meaning of love is

Even if it’s not love or infatuation, I will never let you go
I have one strength that will never be defeated

It would be one thing if Komoto and The Blue Hearts were just cynical materialists who punk-rocked their way to wealth one decade and then investment-peddled their way to even greater wealth later on. Then it would be understandable to hear “Linda, Linda” playing in the background of a NISA spot. But as the lyrics above indicate, Komoto and company are not cynical materialists. They believe in beauty, gentleness, and love. They have, I think you could say, a metaphysics.

Maybe this explains why Kawaguchi Junnosuke, the Blue Hearts’ bassist, had a post-punk career as a PR man for The Happiness Realization Party, the political wing of Kofuku no Kagaku. Kofuku no Kagaku is the beyond-out-there cult centered around the now-deceased personage of Okawa Ryuho, a man who, in his heyday, claimed to be the great god El Cantare. Before he announced his apotheosis, Okawa was a disillusioned Wall Street trader. Romantics and seekers and disaffected spiritualists tend to gravitate to the Okawa side of the kooky spectrum. Some percentage of people who fall out of the rat race (the sewer rat race, you might say) will find their way to a gathering of hoodwinked weirdos.

But I don’t think that NISA sits at the other end of that spectrum. I don’t think investment is on that spectrum at all, actually. Someone as sensitive to the invisible movements of the spirit as Komoto is does not get to a NISA commercial by following a romantics’ path. I would surmise that he got there by abandoning it. Or maybe it’s just that The Blue Hearts, whose other songs have been used in many other TV commercials in Japan, don’t see any contradiction between investment schemes and aching after the inner strength that keeps the soul fixed on what is beautiful and true.

Taking a step back from NISA and The Blue Hearts and taking in society more broadly, the stifling conventionalism that bred punk and other such rejections worldwide during my generation remains almost completely untouched. Those who seek beauty, the metaphysical breaking-through into this world of some shocking aspect of God’s majesty, will be as unsatisfied as ever with the world of workaday materialism in which so many of us live. Some of those people will probably continue to straggle into cults. Some others will probably continue to bend the knee to the dollar, or to the yen, begging for a truce and an end to the inner turmoil that glimpses of beauty always bring to us created beings. Life grinds you down. It’s not easy to believe in greater things when there is so much else to fret and fuss about.

But others, maybe a few, will lift their eyes up and wonder why there would be anything immaterial in the first place. Komoto sings of gentleness, of love, of beauty, of things that do not appear in photographs. Someone made those, and much more. Ask that question, and the beauty that shocks you will also open the door to your salvation.