The punks who played at Seibu Kōdō and the student activists that ran Seibu Kōdō, most of whom hailed from the occupied dorms, were not always on the best terms. There was, from the beginning, a division of labour (or simply a division) between the cultural and lifestyle rebellion of the punks and the politics of the activists. This is not to say that punks were not at all political. They were. However, Kansai punks were not conventionally political; their engagement was less about ideology and more about a general defiance of social norms. 

The death of Emperor Hirohito in 1989 provided Kyoto’s punk scene a platform to assert this defiance. The national mourning declared by the government and maintained by the media imposed silence, but punks, who thrived on noise, were naturally oppositional. 1989 was a watershed moment in Japan's modern history. But it was also a watershed moment in Japan's punk history, as the band boom of the new decade saw the genre increasingly commercialised as major labels hunted for profits from promising acts.

Most of Kyoto’s punk bands participated in X-Day. In punk culture, as punk scholars emphasize, “the message is the medium, and the medium is the message” (Dunn, 2016, 157). X Day embodied this principle: the medium — loud, chaotic performance — became a vehicle for subtle political expression. The line between overt and covert politics was often blurred, particularly between student activists and working-class punks, and the event drew on both local history and global punk influences. Seibu Kōdō had long been a site of autonomous cultural activity, paralleling politicized spaces in North America and Europe like the Blitz in Oslo or Common Room in Jakarta; and Japanese punks were inspired by other punk scenes, adopting their anger and defiance rather than their political agendas. This context allowed punks to transfigure their defiance into the anti-imperialist protest organized by more politically-minded groups.