The Mystery of the Missing Peter Cetera Song

Buried in the archives of the hyper-positive '80s Japanese commercials, a music mystery unravels, featuring UFOs and cigarettes.

Written by Wonjune Lee

Image courtesy of Philip Morris

There really is no better glimpse into an absurdly optimistic time and place than Japanese commercials from the ‘80s. From overly happy Coca Cola ads to the iconic 30-second love story of the late night “X-Mas Express,” there’s something about the designed-to-sell positivity of these commercials that captures the imagination — and music is a huge part of this captivating effect. 

Japan banned tobacco commercials in 1998, but they remain some of the country’s best-made commercials from the decades prior. The tobacco industry imposed restrictions dictating how smoking could be depicted in advertising, so many of the commercials follow the golden rule of marketing to the letter — They seek to sell an associated emotion, not the products themselves, and a huge part of this emotion is established through the use of music. 

It’s interesting to take a trip down the unpopular pieces of music used in Japanese commercials, but imagine the surprise when a track comes on, apparently from a chart-topping artist, that you’ve never heard before — like on this Parliaments commercial featuring, according to the credits, a Peter Cetera song.

Cetera isn’t some hard-to-find indie gem. Along with many ballads recorded with his band, Chicago, his independent single, “Glory of Love,” (featured on the “Karate Kid 2” soundtrack) is one of those tracks that keeps ‘80s radio stations alive; but it also makes for potentially insufferable karaoke nights with any nostalgic Gen-Xers. This is all to say that it’s quite a surprise to hear a decent song from Cetera, let alone a song that hasn’t been included on every ‘80s playlist on earth.

A Google search based on the lyrics of “Stay With Me” didn’t reveal much.  In 1987, Cetera released the -songin Germany,but not in the United States. There were also some YouTube videos of the track, but the details about the song’s release history and background was suspiciously sparse, which is truly unusual for something from a well-known artist. A Spotify search of the newly-discovered song title, and a comb-through of Peter Cetera’s discography on the platform, revealed even less. The song is nowhere to be found on Spotify, something even more unusual for an artist with hundreds of millions of streams. So it was back to where the search began: YouTube. One of the previously mentioned search results on Google was a YouTube video with a thumbnail of the “Stay With Me” vinyl cover. It’s a somewhat typical, hazy neon ‘80s-style cover featuring a beaming UFO, somewhat reminiscent of what you might find on the cover of prog rock albums from the era; but above the bright pink title, there’s a peculiar line — “東宝映画「竹取物語」　主題曲”

In English, this translates to “Theme Song for Toho Movie, ‘Taketori Monogatari.’”

Photo courtesy of Warner Music Japan

“Taketori Monogatari,” or “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter,” is an extremely famous Japanese folktale, featuring a Moses-style lost child raised by a poor farmer who found her. The child, Princess Kaguya, turns out to be extraordinarily divine.  She grows up to be an incredibly beautiful woman, and the most powerful men in Japan —  including the Emperor — all try their hand at courting her. They all fail, and she flies up to the Moon to rejoin her people in the skies. This is a really rough summary of a story so influential that it might be where Mount Fuji gets its name from, but the important thing in the context of “Stay With Me” is that it’s not really surprising that there would have been a movie of a tale that is very deeply ingrained into Japanese culture.

What is surprising is that the movie, set in Medieval Japan, had an English Peter Cetera ballad as its theme song. And judging from the trailer, the movie itself looks pretty off the rails too. It’s a strange sci-fi reimagining of the bamboo cutter tale, where Princess Kaguya is an alien. When she goes back to the Moon people, she takes a UFO and heads to outer space, hence the prog rock-ish album cover. The song is so unexpected and weird, and definitely make one wonder how something like it came to be made.

While it’s difficult to find information on what led to this peculiar creation and collaboration,, it’s not hard to imagine that it might have involved a familiar story that’s played out many times across the course of Japan’s opulent “bubble era.”. During this time period, so many Japanese commercials and movies featured western celebrities, that there’s an hour long compilation of the phenomena on YouTube. The title of this compilation video, “Japan had a lot of money before the bubble burst,” shows a lot about the attitude with which this phenomenon happened — it was a display of success to be able to hire mostly white western celebrities; and it was apparently done for no other reason than that it was possible.. 

The use of “Stay With Me” in Takemonogatari speaks to the idea that music by Western artists gives prestige to what it’s featured in. The idea that Western celebrities are somehow a level above  domestic ones is emblematic of the wider Asian inferiority complex when it comes to the West, which serves as both a driver and a curse for many Asians. On one hand, this complex, with the underlying belief that Asians have to be more clever, more talented, and quicker than those in the West to even be considered to be on the same playing field, drives intense Asian competitiveness seen across many fields, including the fierce ruthlessness with which K-Pop groups develop and market talent. On the other hand, it’s hard not to wonder whether this inferiority complex is the main force behind the fierce nationalism seen across the region, from North Korea’s belief that it needs nuclear weapons to maintain its independence, to China’s insistence of tight control over Hong Kong, whose remnants of British rule serve as reminders of its “Century of Humiliation” by Western powers. 

Maybe it’s too much to interpret all of this out of one unspectacular Peter Cetera single that barely saw the light of day outside of Japan. Maybe it should just be taken for what it is: a silly thing that happened in a silly time. At the very least, it’s pretty funny to see a traditionally-dressed Japanese woman get beamed up to a UFO with an English ‘80s ballad playing in the background.