The Most Important Japanese Boy Band You’ve Never Heard of Isn’t Breaking Up

Fans of Japanese boy band SMAP were so relieved Monday night to hear that rumors the group was breaking up were false that they temporarily crashed Japan’s Twitter network celebrating the news.

Wearing sleek black suits and skinny ties, with mops of hair swept boyishly to the side, each of the five middle-aged members of the group — whose name  is an acronym for sports, music, assemble, people — reassured fans they would remain together at the start of their weekly TV show, “SMAPxSMAP.”

Gossip began to swirl last week after the band’s longtime manager left her talent agency amid a dispute with executives there. Japanese tabloids picked up on the story, and speculated that the tiff could break up the group, which was formed in 1988 and became the first all-male pop ensemble to make it big in Asia. Over the past 25 years, they’ve sold some 35 million singles and albums combined.

But fears over their break-up weren’t limited to tabloids or the Twitterverse. On Tuesday morning, Japanese lawmakers attending a budget meeting in the parliament’s Upper House asked Prime Minister Shinzo Abe what he thought about the band’s news.

Turns out even Abe was tuned into SMAP’s drama: He told members of parliament the group made the right decision to stay together, and then compared the music industry to the political sphere.

“Similar to the world of politics, there must be many challenges for one group to last so long,” he said.

His chief cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, echoed the prime minister at a press conference Tuesday, and said the group’s announcement fulfilled the “hopes and dreams of the public.”

Even though the group ended up staying together, there may still have been a grain of truth to the rumors. Band-member Takuya Kimura said on their show Monday that SMAP was “on the verge of a midair breakup,” adding that “from now on we will only look ahead and strive to go forward.”

For many Japanese, that means a lot more than just getting to enjoy their next hit song. For years, the band has done more than just make teenage girls swoon: Its members have also served as Japan’s de facto cultural ambassadors, and helped ease tensions with neighboring countries.

In 2011, for example, the group became the first Japanese band in nearly 10 years to play a show in China. At the time, a spokeswoman for the Chinese foreign ministry said she hoped the concert would “improve national sentiment between China and Japan,” even as the two sparred over ownership of a chain of islands in the East China Sea.

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