City Pop: Big In Japan?

One of my favorite releases from last year was Tokyo Nights, a compilation featuring Japanese disco and pop from the 80s. I love it because it’s just so upbeat and fun. The tunes just bounce in a way that I don’t hear that often. The best tracks on the CD remind me of early Madonna or Sheena Easton – unabashedly positive pop music made 100% for dancing.

I adore this record, and wanted to hear more from the artists on it, so I went down to Mecano, a record store located in Nakano. Mecano specializes in 80s music, so I figured that it would be the place to go to get my 80s J-pop disco fix. I talked to the owner, reading off some of the names I was looking for, like Hitomi Tohyama and Junko Ohyashi. 

He laughed.

He laughed a lot.

“No one cares about those artists!” he explained in English before spontaneously launching into a fairly long rant in Japanese. My boyfriend summarized it for me: almost none of the acts on that CD were ever popular in Japan, and they certainly weren’t known for any kind of revolutionary pop music. They were just singers or idols who happened to record a few catchy tunes. No one cares about them now.

Basically, I bought an album of has-beens and never-wases. It would be like a Japanese label putting together a compilation in 2018 that featured hits by Melissa Manchester, Kim Carnes, and Laura Branigan. Not bad artists at all, but not exactly relevant by any stretch of the imagination.

I was the first person to show the guy at Mecano Tokyo Nights, but he says that I’m far from the first foreigner to come into his store and ask for obscure J-pop. It’s becoming a trend for him. One artist he said that people repeatedly come in and ask for by name is Taeko Ohnuki. Specifically, they want her 1977 album Sunshower. He said that the only people who come to his store looking for that record are foreigners. No one in Japan cares about it. Now, I know that’s not entirely true. That album was actually just re-released on vinyl in Japan, so there are some Japanese people out there who dig it. But I do know that westerners are almost solely responsible for the album’s renaissance. 

Remember vaporwave? That short-lived blip of a micro-genre that was all the rage on Tumblr a few years back? Well, that ironic version of ambient music didn’t die – it just morphed to something called “future funk,” which, from what I can gather, is vaporwave you can dance to. It relies heavily on samples, and for some reason, the J-pop of the 70s and 80s (often, and somewhat erroneously, referred to as “city pop”) has proven to be a fertile ground for such samples. 

So many online musicians have been cribbing from the city pop records of the 70s and 80s that now some foreigners are now coming to Japan and buying the source material direct. In turn, Japanese people want to see what all the fuss was about and are now listening to it again as well. This means that acts like Taeko Ohnuki are now returning to the spotlight, while artists like Tatsuro Yamashita, who have always been popular, are finding new audiences.

This is not wild speculation on my part. This is a fact.

That’s a photo I took today at Tower Records in Shibuya. It’s a showcase of Taeko Ohnuki, Tatsuro Yamashita, and other “city pop” acts. None of these albums are new, but they earned a showcase display on the main floor of the store. Why? Because a foreigner was on Japanese TV saying that he came to Japan to buy “city pop.” And he’s not the only one, I’ve gotten several emails now from people who have read my guide to Tokyo record stores, and they all ask the same thing, “where can I buy city pop?”

What’s personally tragic for me is that I’m not really a city pop fan. Disco-influenced tunes aside, it’s just too mellow for me. I prefer Japanese synthpop, that’s my jam. But whatever gets people interested in Japanese music is okay with me. I also just find the whole thing fascinating because it’s basically a reverse “big in Japan” situation.

As you’re probably aware, “big in Japan” is used to describe something or someone, usually a band, who is disproportionately popular in Japan when compared to the rest of the world. Previous examples of this would include The Ventures, Cheap Trick, and Mr. Big (seriously). When I tell people about acts that are big in Japan but completely forgotten elsewhere, they tend to laugh in a dismissive “oh Japan is so weird” kind of way.  And you’ve probably done the same thing, I know I have, so I don’t blame you.

But the next time you hear about some American or European artist who is inexplicably popular in Japan and you start to laugh, stop yourself and remember that as of right this minute, a cottage industry is springing up in Japan to support people from other countries coming over in droves to buy the Japanese equivalent of Belinda Carlisle records and ask yourself: who’s really the weird one?