The Endless Life Cycle of Japanese City Pop
In the waning weeks of 2020, a Japanese pop tune from 1979 shot to No. 1 on Spotify’s viral charts. Titled “ Mayonaka no Door / Stay With Me ” and performed by a then-19-year-old Miki Matsubara, the song is as breezy as a convertible ride at twilight, with Matsubara’s wistful vocals floating over a funky bassline, jaunty horns, and twinkling production touches. Switching between Japanese and English, she pleads for a lover-turned-cold to stay in the relationship, haunted by the memory of him from the night before. The song first appeared in anime and Japanese culture TikToks last October, but the official peak of “Mayonaka no Door / Stay With Me” on the app came six weeks later, in early December. TikTok creators of Japanese descent filmed themselves playing it for their mothers , who’d light up upon recognizing the hit from their youth. It is almost too cute to bear. The moms close their eyes in bliss, belting and dancing like they’re at karaoke.
The viral success of “Mayonaka no Door / Stay With Me” has brought yet another surge of international interest to city pop , a loosely defined Japanese genre with R&B and jazz influences, dating to the late 1970s and 1980s. At the time, Japan was the world’s second-largest economy, threatening to overtake the West with its corporate dominance and cutting-edge machines. Upwardly-mobile Japanese citizens indulged in luxury clothes, imported wine, and international travel, enjoying unprecedented freedoms. The advent of the Sony Walkman and more sophisticated car stereos allowed them to customize their on-the-go listening; suddenly, casual strolls through the city and weekend joy rides assumed a romantic, movie-like sheen. City pop emerged as the soundtrack to this cosmopolitan lifestyle. The music is often exuberant and glitzy, drawing inspiration from American styles like funk, yacht rock, boogie, and lounge music. Emulating the easy vibes of California, the music’s sense of escapism is often embodied by the sun-soaked cover art of Hiroshi Nagai , one of city pop’s iconic designers: Sparkling blue water, slick cars, and pastel buildings evoke fantasies of a weekend vacation at sea. But the splendor and ease embodied by city pop soon fell out of fashion: in the 1990s, Japan’s economic bubble burst, plunging the country into its “lost decade.”
Recent man-on-the-street interviews reveal that the term “city pop” doesn’t even register with ordinary Japanese citizens, even if they recognize artists popularly associated with the genre. “My wife was the target audience, and I had to explain it to her,” says Jayson Chun, a University of Hawaii-West O‘ahu professor who lectures on Japanese pop music and anime. “Back then, people just called it music.” But in the past few years, what we know as city pop has been undergoing a revival in the West. A January 2020 segment of the Japanese variety show Nippon! Shisatsudan investigates the trend of foreign tourists scouring for city pop records in the Shibuya district of Tokyo. “Is it true this type of music is popular in America?” the reporter asks a lanky white guy in glasses. “Yeah,” the guy replies, citing the role of the internet and YouTube in particular. Later, when he picks up a 1985 record by Japanese singer Toshiki Kadomatsu , the cameras immediately cut to the shocked reactions of a Japanese audience.
Essentially, city pop is Western music that’s been adapted by the Japanese, now coming back to us as a retrospective source of fascination. The head of the internet music label Business Casual once said that listening to city pop was like “seeing old commercials from another world, selling the same brands and consumer products but in a different way than I remember.” It is familiar enough to be comforting, but implicitly exists at a slight remove; the Japanese lyrics preserve an aura of exoticism and mystery, giving Western listeners room to freely project their desires. On YouTube, where city pop flourishes, listeners dwell fondly on artificial memories of Japan: “I remember back in the day when I’d drive through the Tokyo streets at night with the window rolled down, neon lights on buildings, everyone having a good time, the ’80s were great,” wrote one commenter to the popular mix “ warm nights in tokyo [ city pop/ シティポップ ], before the illusion dissolves: “Wait a minute, I’m 18 and live in America.” Every city pop upload is filled with similar comments.
Typically, when people in the West talk about city pop, “we’re really talking about ourselves, and how we view Asia,” says Chun. A deeper examination reveals even more layers: Western mythologies of Japan as our techno-capitalist future, the internet’s acceleration of global exchange, and the uncanny role of recommendations algorithms in fostering nostalgia for an artificial past.
The upswing of city pop likely originates with the Japanese themselves : a few decades ago, domestic crate diggers started critically reevaluating vintage Japanese music, or wamono . According to DJ Chintam—the co-author of the massively popular Wamono A To Z records guide, and co-curator of last year’s Japanese jazz funk and rare groove comp —the concept of wamono didn’t exist before the mid-’90s: “Playing Japanese music in DJ sets was almost taboo,” he once told Resident Advisor . But the UK rare groove scene, which sent evangelists hunting after obscure funk, soul, and disco, prompted him to start scouring for domestic records at the turn of the century; around 2008, he started noticing some interest among collectors overseas. Now these deep cuts are regularly sampled by house and disco DJs: “For those outside of Japan, wamono is rare groove,” Chintam said.
Still, your average Western music enthusiast probably didn’t know about city pop until a few years ago. Japanese music isn’t particularly accessible overseas: The country has been exceptionally slow to embrace streaming, prioritizing the consumption of CDs, and its expansion into foreign music markets has also been sluggish. One recent breakthrough was the compilation Pacific Breeze: Japanese City Pop, AOR & Boogie 1976–1986 , released in 2019 by the reissue label Light in the Attic as part of their Japan archival series . The project, which now has a sequel , took four years to bring to fruition. “A lot of the Japanese labels didn’t understand why an indie label from America would want to license this stuff, so it took a lot of convincing,” says Yosuke Kitazawa, one of Pacific Breeze’s three curators. “We didn’t even know that the titles were popular on YouTube—they were curated from records that we all owned.”
Poke around YouTube for long enough, and you might suspect that its algorithm is biased toward vintage Japanese music, whose hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of YouTube views feel disproportionate to their native fame. “Almost any instance of listening to a rare electronic or jazz album might soon send you to the East,” observed Andy Beta, in a Vulture piece investigating how Japanese ambient albums like Midori Takada’s 1983 Through the Looking Glass developed cult online followings. In an essay for SPIN, Andy Cush similarly noticed that, regardless of his initial selection, the YouTube algorithm would inevitably route him to Hiroshi Yoshimura’s 1986 ambient record GREEN . One Rate Your Music user generated an entire list of “ Japanese YouTube Recommendations Core ”—including Mai Yamane’s 1980 classic “ Tasogare ,” notably sampled on Young Nudy and Playboi Carti’s unreleased viral hit “Pissy Pamper / Kid Cudi.”
One of the most explosive Japanese YouTube recommendation hits in recent memory is “ Plastic Love ,” Mariya Takeuchi’s 1984 disco-funk track about trying to dance away heartache. Selling a modest 10,000 copies upon release, the song suddenly spiked in popularity after an anonymous user named “Plastic Lover” uploaded an eight-minute version onto YouTube in July 2017. The song soon rose to the top of the music discovery subreddit r/listentothis , and proliferated further through memes and fan art. The video now has over 55 million views, although it was temporarily taken down after photographer Alan Levenson mounted a copyright strike over the thumbnail photo, a dreamy black-and-white headshot of Takeuchi. Nearly every young city pop fan I’ve talked to has cited “Plastic Love” as their gateway to the genre, and the YouTube algorithm as their route. Surprisingly, the song wasn’t available on Spotify until two months ago.
Why does city pop thrive in the currents of YouTube? The term “YouTube-core” commonly refers to calming mood music like “ lofi hip hop radio - beats to study to ,” which can be looped in the background for hours as you grind away on work. Visually defined by its Miyazaki-style illustration of a girl studying, “ lo-fi beats ” is anonymous and functional by design—its individual artists have almost no name recognition. Meanwhile, city pop—which coincided with bigger studio budgets and advancements in recording technology—is carefully arranged by well-respected professionals: “ king of city pop ” Tatsuro Yamashita , for example, is one of Japan’s most successful solo male artists ever, with over a dozen studio albums and various film/TV composition credits. But YouTube doesn’t recognize these nuances—the algorithm will simply route listeners from “lo-fi beats” videos to “Plastic Love.”
Moreover, YouTube users might title their city pop mixes using lo-fi’s SEO-friendly template: a genre followed by its optimal listening scenario, i.e. “ japanese city pop when feeling the summer’s warmth .” There is already a “ 24/7 city pop beats ” radio stream. Considering how unabashedly commercial the music of boom-era Japan was, city pop’s commodification, or even meme-fication, might be fitting. Many hit songs first served as theme music for TV commercials, which in Japan functioned as promotional vehicles. “You’d have 30-second ads where they’d preview the song’s hook—the commercials would advertise the songs, and vice versa,” Chun explains. “You could consider this the pre-internet equivalent of TikTok.”
Before it became a viral phenomenon, city pop had already made its way around certain corners of the web. Fans would trace the original samples in vaporwave and future funk (vaporwave’s French house-inspired offshoot) remixes, discovering songs like Anri’s “ Good Bye Boogie Dance ” and Kaoru Akimoto’s “ Dress Down .” At one point, a 2016 remix of “Plastic Love” by South Korean producer Night Tempo had surpassed the original on search engines; Takeuchi herself later thanked him for breathing new life into the song. These remixes could be laughably light-handed, barely modifying the original: as one Reddit user griped , “Why reward effort if you can just speed up Japanese songs and get a cute anime girl for your album cover?” But the slight alterations make the music brighter and funkier, more like an evening on the dancefloor. To put it in the parlance of YouTube, listening to the “ Future Funk Mega Mix ” feels like driving home alone after an uproarious party, clinging onto the vibrancy of the night. Looped anime GIFs—a defining aesthetic of YouTube-core styles, from lo-fi beats to “slowed + reverb” remixes —only enhance that sense of longing. On screen, a middle school girl transforms into Sailor Moon. Later, a human and robot hand embrace, then slowly slip away.
In their 1995 book Spaces of Identity , the British academics David Morley and Kevin Robins coined the term “techno-Orientalism” to depict how Japan had become “synonymous with the technologies of the future—with screens, networks, cybernetics, robotics, artificial intelligence, simulation.” During the ’70s and ’80s, Japan’s economic ascendency disrupted the idea of the West as the engine of modern progress; U.S. auto workers panicked about Japanese car imports, and Japan’s later acquisitions of U.S. real-estate and entertainment companies fanned anxieties that it was vying for America’s soul . A grim image of Japan (and other East Asian countries) surfaced in American popular culture: It was imagined as a techno-futurist empire run by soulless automatons, a stereotype furthered by cyberpunk fiction like William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner . “Within the political and cultural unconscious of the West,” Morley and Robins noted, Japan represents “the alienated and dystopian image of capitalist progress.”
A few scholars have interrogated the techno-Orientalist dimensions of vaporwave, which regularly deployed Japanese signifiers while satirizing the bubbly, hyper-consumerist culture of the ’80s and ’90s. Every track on Macintosh Plus’ Floral Shoppe , arguably vaporwave’s defining album, is listed in Japanese; the language’s inscrutability to Western audiences heightens the perception of a faceless global techno-capitalism. The cover art is subtly more foreboding: mint-green Japanese characters are placed alongside a Greek bust and an image of a pre-9/11 New York City skyline (apparently taken from an ’80s Fuji video-cassette ad ). As musicologist Ken McLeod has pointed out , the Floral Shoppe cover seems to comment on “the merging of East and West,” projecting “the evolutionary decline of commercial empire.” Each component can be interpreted as a symbol of a great civilization that has waned, or will in the future.
When we talk, McLeod comments that many internet-based genres harbor a kind of “retro-futurist melancholy,” as well as an obsession with “the accelerating collapse of capitalism as epitomized by the collapse of the Japanese dream.” Boom-era Japan, with its neon metropolises and abundant consumer freedoms, embodies a lost promise of capitalist utopia that was crushed in the ’90s by the country’s recession. By savoring its music, listeners can both indulge in and mourn the beautiful, naive optimism that seemingly defined the time—as well as its bracing visions of what would lie ahead. As one commenter on a YouTube city pop mix wrote, echoed by many others, “I miss the future.”
Nostalgia, as the theorist and media artist Svetlana Boym once wrote , involves “a superimposition of two images—of home and abroad, of past and present, of dream and everyday life.” The emotional response to city pop centers on these twin imaginations: of Japan and the United States, the ’80s and now, the prior promises of capitalism and its current reality. Online, listeners dwell on artificial memories of boom-era Tokyo but also idyllic childhoods watching cartoons, reaffirming Boym’s claim that nostalgia “appears to be a longing for a place but is actually a yearning for a different time.” And while the internet rushes us through time, making one year feel like decades, it also offers us portals to divergent alleyways. YouTube has resurrected obscurities from the past and cultivated a mass audience for them. TikTok, its own distinct beast, amplifies these existing algorithmic hits while flinging its own into the mix, massively accelerating the music’s reach. A man films himself chugging cranberry juice and vibing on a skateboard; in the blink of an eye, Fleetwood Mac returns to the Hot 100 chart for the first time in over 40 years.
On TikTok, one creator—an 18-year-old anime superfan named Bastian, or @tokyokage —has been trying to get city pop to go viral. He discovered the genre last year while listening to his YouTube playlist of anime opening songs; “Plastic Love”—what else?—appeared in his recommendations. Since then, he began making city pop recommendation TikToks, spotlighting favorites like Junko Ohashi’s “ Telephone Number ” and “ Fragile ” by Tatsuro Yamashita (the latter may be familiar to fans of Tyler the Creator’s IGOR ). He is shrewd with his picks: in January 2020, Engelwood’s “Crystal Dolphin ”—an elementary future-funk remix of Kingo Hamada’s 1982 song “ Dolphin in Town ”—randomly went viral on TikTok. Months later, in August, Bastian shared a video about Hamada’s original song with the caption, “Like if you remember this sound!” It became his most popular TikTok in the city pop series, with over 200,000 likes. “For people who want to be more in tune with Japanese culture, city pop just sounds amazing,” he tells me.
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Following its “lost decade,” Japan leaned into its youth culture and multimedia enterprises, realizing the potential lucrativeness of exporting fandom overseas. This strategy has paid off: anime is arguably more popular globally than ever before. Last year on Netflix, anime programming ranked in the Top 10 across almost 100 different countries, reportedly reaching over 100 million households. Two months ago, Sony purchased the world’s largest anime streaming service, Crunchyroll, for a whopping 1.2 billion dollars. On TikTok, anime aficionados represent one of the platform’s top niche communities , becoming a formidable driver of viral sounds . Before “Mayonaka no Door / Stay with Me” became affiliated with Japanese mothers reliving their youth, it was boosted by a TikTok trend in which anime fans used a green screen filter to compare heights with their favorite characters. Beyond the anime-centric visual branding of city pop online, there are genuine ties between the two: city pop stars including Miki Matsubara and Mai Yamane sang on anime soundtracks.
Though Japan’s cultural exports have drawn Western interest for decades, the contemporary enthusiasm for Japanese anime, video games, and other youth culture reflects how its image has become more palatable to Americans over time. “Everything in Japan just looks more pleasing,” says the popular anime TikTokker (and city pop fan) @ghetto.otaku , or Chris. Emphasizing his love for cherry blossoms, he says he’s captivated by on-screen depictions of Japanese scenery, especially compared to the “buildings and rowhouses” he’s seen in Philadelphia all his life. In some ways, this fascination feels like the inverse of city pop’s starting point. Haruomi Hosono , one of the most influential figures in modern Japanese music and a pioneer of city pop via his early band Happy End, once said that his childhood in post-occupation Japan was so steeped in American entertainment he even regretted that he wasn’t American. His work with Yellow Magic Orchestra offered what he called “exotica from an oriental perspective,” a subversion of the mid-century lounge music that served as a crude fantasy for travel-starved Americans.
Even though the internet has helped close the distance between the U.S. and Japan—you can scale Mount Fuji using Google Street View —Japan is still seen by us from afar, subject to preconceptions and pining. Like exotica before it, YouTube city pop promises a romantic escape across the Pacific that’s somewhat detached from reality, feeding the imaginations of young homebodies scrolling online. At the demand of his fans, Bastian curates a public Spotify playlist called “ City Pop Serotonin Vibes ,” aimed at young listeners who are seeking out a certain change of scene. The playlist image is of an anime girl, and if you’ll believe the tagline, “it’s like being on the streets of Tokyo!”
