In April 2011—one month after the devastating M9.0 earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent crises at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in northeast Japan—an antinuclear demonstration of over 15,000 participants took over the streets of Tokyo. Leading the protest was the raucous sound of chindon-ya, a Japanese practice of musical advertisement dating back to the late 1800s. Contextualizing the anti-nuclear protests within a larger arc of Japanese social movements, this talk explores how the particular sounds of chindon-ya transposed from the commercial to the political, and what historical moments, translocal relations, and social differences were being articulated through chindon-ya sounds, especially vis-à-vis Anne Allison’s notion of “affective activism.”