Opening

On December 29, 1989, the last trading day of the year at the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the Nikkei index closed at 38,915.87.

This number later became a scar in the hearts of the Japanese people: it would take 34 years, until February 22, 2024, for it to be surpassed for the first time.

In that same month, a six-year-old song topped the Oricon singles chart for the first time: Tatsuro Yamashita's "Christmas Eve."

The stock market and the record charts reached their peaks in the same month. In less than three years that followed, the Nikkei index fell by more than 60%, a water-splashing festival prepared for all of Japan, doused to the end.

When people mention City Pop, many say it is the soundtrack of the bubble economy. That's not wrong, but it actually came a bit earlier: it was born in the years when Japan's economy was on an upward trajectory, and what it recorded was a generation's optimism about life.

Any culture is a product of history, behind which are the intertwined undercurrents of economy, technology, and social life. Every accident, placed in context, may also be inevitable. Today, let's talk about City Pop: how a genre of music recorded the mood of a rising era, and how, decades later, it was heard again by the world.

City Pop: How Japan’s Bubble Economy Made a Genre Immortal · YouTube

I. Children of the Upward Era

In the 1960s, an unprecedented economic miracle was unfolding across the Japanese archipelago. Japan's economy grew at an average annual rate of around 10%, doubling roughly every seven years. In 1968, Japan surpassed West Germany to become the second-largest economy in the capitalist world.

Economic takeoff inevitably brought profound social changes. Cities sucked young people from rural areas like vacuum cleaners; the proportion of the population living in "cities" rose from 37.3% in 1950 to 76.2% in 1980. Starting in the early 1970s, in the government's annual polls, about 90% of Japanese people said their lives were "middle class," which later became known as "one hundred million all middle class."

In the 1970s, growth slowed but did not stop. Of the two oil crises, the first hit Japan the hardest; by the time of the second oil crisis in 1979, according to a later summary by Japan's Ministry of Finance, it was already the least affected among developed countries. The economy shifted from high-speed growth to "stable growth," still around four percent per year.

Life getting better was tangible. In 1964, Japan had just opened up overseas tourism for ordinary citizens; that year, only just over 120,000 Japanese traveled abroad; by 1980, it was 3.9 million. By 1980, nearly 60% of households owned their own car.

For young city dwellers at that time, "tomorrow will be better than today" was not a slogan but a default setting: work would bring raises, weekends meant driving to the beach, and with some savings, one could fly abroad to see the world.

This mood needed its own background music. Yosuke Kitazawa, the compiler of the City Pop compilation released by the American label Light in the Attic, put it simply: City Pop is "music made by city people for city people." A weekly newspaper in Chicago frankly called it "1980s Japanese optimistic disco."

Interestingly, the best years of City Pop were 1980 to 1984, earlier than the actual bubble boom (November 1986 to February 1991). Among the 222 City Pop records most sought after by today's crate-diggers, the most concentrated release year is 1983; on the annual album charts of the time, it was also most prominent in the first half of the 1980s.

It was a grounded optimism: the economy was growing, but not yet crazy. By the time the bubble truly inflated, City Pop had already passed its best years.

However, a generation having money does not mean it has its own songs. Before that, Japanese pop music first had to complete a turn: from "we" to "I."

II. The Traitor of Folk

In the late 1960s, young Japanese were protesting the security treaty and the Vietnam War, and folk music was their weapon. Nobukazu Okabayashi, known as the "god of folk," wrote about Buraku discrimination and poor families; several of his songs were placed on radio stations' "needs attention" lists and were basically unairable.

But by the early 1970s, the wind had changed. In 1970, the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty was automatically extended; in February 1972, the United Red Army took hostages at the Asama Sanso lodge, broadcast live on national television, and soon after, their "purge" and killing of comrades in the mountains was exposed. Public sympathy for radical movements was exhausted almost overnight. Folk music made a 180-degree turn, retreating from collective protest to a four-and-a-half-mat rented room, singing about the little life of a poor couple.

The person standing at this turning point was Takuro Yoshida.

He was born in Kagoshima in 1946, moved to Hiroshima at age 9, and had asthma as a child, missing half of his classes. He was accompanied by the Beatles, R&B, and Bob Dylan. After entering university, he formed a Beatles-style band and often performed at the U.S. military's Iwakuni base; in 1966, he won third place nationally at a folk music competition held by Columbia Records, and a magazine called him "the Japanese Bob Dylan." In 1968, he united several folk groups in Hiroshima and organized the "Hiroshima Folk Village."

In August 1971, the third All-Japan Folk Music Festival was held at Lake Kabura in Gifu, with more than 20,000 attendees. Yoshida was scheduled for the secondary stage, but when his turn came, the sound system gave out. He simply called his backing band on stage, and without a microphone, shouted and sang "Ningen Nante" (What Are People) over and over until his voice went hoarse; a venue of about 200 people was packed with over a thousand. Many say that the banner of folk music was passed to him that night.

Less than half a year later, on January 21, 1972, he released "Kekkon Shiyou yo" (Let's Get Married). With light-hearted guitar and harmonica, the song was only about long hair, a church on the street corner, and a marriage proposal: no politics, no anger. It reached No. 3 on the Oricon chart and sold about 420,000 copies.

On April 22 of that year, at the Nippon Budokan, the moment he stepped on stage, the whole venue erupted with an overwhelming chorus of "go back home."

But the market had already cast its vote. A song about nothing but "me" could also sell well.

In the years that followed, this path was picked up by a name called "New Music." Its most fundamental difference from the kayōkyoku on TV was "write it yourself, sing it yourself": kayōkyoku was an assembly line built by lyricists, composers, management agencies, and TV stations, while New Music was singers writing about their own lives.

The one who set its shape was the daughter of a kimono shop in Hachiōji, Yumi Arai. In 1973, at age 19, she released her debut album Hikōki-gumo (Airplane Cloud). She didn't write manifestos; she wrote about urban girls' romances, weather, and street scenes.

The studio band that accompanied her was called Caramel Mama: Haruomi Hosono on bass, Shigeru Suzuki on guitar, Tatsuo Hayashi on drums, and Masataka Matsutoya on keyboards.

These few names matter. Because in the story that follows, the protagonists are not on stage—they are in the recording studio.

III. The City in the Recording Studio

"What does City Pop sound like?" Many articles answer this question with "refined," "urban," and "languid." But these are all adjectives, not sounds.

If you go through the production credits on the inner sleeves of the records, the answer becomes much more concrete.

First, a network of connections. Happy End (はっぴいえんど) formed in 1969, with members Haruomi Hosono, Eiichi Ohtaki, Takashi Matsumoto, and Shigeru Suzuki. They insisted on singing rock in Japanese, and disbanded at the end of 1972. After that, Hosono and Suzuki worked as a backing band, renamed from Caramel Mama to Tin Pan Alley, recording for singers like Yumi Arai and Minako Yoshida; Matsumoto became a lyricist; Ohtaki started his own label Niagara, and the first record it released in April 1975 was SONGS by a young band called Sugar Babe, whose lead singer was Tatsuro Yamashita and whose keyboardist was Taeko Onuki.

Later on, Tatsuro Yamashita had his own regular lineup. On the 1980 album RIDE ON TIME, the drummer was Jun Aoyama, the bassist was Hiromichi Ito, and the keyboardist was Hiroyuki Namba. On Mariya Takeuchi's 1984 "Plastic Love," the drummer was still Jun Aoyama, the bassist was still Hiromichi Ito, the backing vocals included Taeko Onuki, and the saxophone was played by the American musician Ernie Watts.

The same group of people, in the same few recording studios, recorded for different singers all year round. The so-called "City Pop sound" was, to a large extent, the sound of this small group of musicians: the Swiss scholar Moritz Sommet has analyzed that this kind of music often uses tension chords and sixteenth-note grooves, with almost no pentatonic scales and none of the melisma of enka. In other words, it deliberately made itself sound "not like Japan."

Then there's where the money came from.

In the spring of 1980, several major Japanese cosmetics companies fought a commercial jingle war; Shiseido used Mariya Takeuchi's "Fushigi na Peach Pie" (Mysterious Peach Pie). That same year, Tatsuro Yamashita himself appeared on camera to shoot a commercial for Maxell cassettes, with "RIDE ON TIME" as the soundtrack. The song reached No. 3 on the singles chart.

A song selling cassettes became City Pop's first big hit single. This was no coincidence.

If you dig up the Recording Industry Association of Japan's statistics over the years, you'll see a turning point that few people mention: in 1980, the production value of Japanese LP records reached 136.2 billion yen, and total record output was 275 million units—both historical highs of the vinyl era. From 1981 onward, it went down.

And another line was going up: music cassettes, from 21 billion yen in 1975 to 90.3 billion in 1980, rising all the way until 1988.

In June 1980, a store called "Reikōdō" opened at the south exit of Mitaka Station in Tokyo, where renting a record cost only about one-tenth of the purchase price. Two years later, there were already more than 1,600 record rental stores nationwide. Record companies sued, and the Diet finally amended the Copyright Act in 1984, specifically establishing the "right of lending."

Rent a record, take it home and record it onto a cassette, put it in the cassette player in the car, or in the Walkman in your pocket.

This was City Pop's real playback scenario: not the fancy bars of the bubble era, but the late 1970s and early 1980s, a young person who had just bought a car and just moved into the city, on the commute, on the coastal highway, pressing play.

In March 1981, Eiichi Ohtaki released A LONG VACATION, with a cover by Hiroshi Nagai of blue skies, swimming pools, and palm trees. The following year, on October 1, 1982, the first day CDs went on sale in Japan, it was among the first batch of records released, catalog number 35DH 1. CDs only surpassed all vinyl in value in 1987, and by 1990 only one-third of households had a CD player.

City Pop's best years fell exactly between the peak of vinyl, the rise of cassettes, and the dawn of the CD. It was a kind of music carried along by new machines.

IV. The Term "City Pop"

So what about the name "City Pop"?

I originally thought that's what people called it back then. Looking into it, it's not that simple.

In 1976, a record advertisement already used the characters "シティ・ポップ"; in July 1977, the music criticism magazine Record Geijutsu called Minako Yoshida, Tatsuro Yamashita, and others "シティ・ポップス" musicians. That same year, the guitar magazine Young Guitar wrote "City Music," and the author himself said it was just a "feeling word."

Sommet analyzed 52 Japanese review texts from 1977 to 2016. The first appearance of "City Pop" in a newspaper was in the Yomiuri Shimbun in October 1981, praising a new album as "a very tasteful urban pop." The year with the most mentions of the term was 1982, and mostly when introducing new artists. His conclusion: after 1982, mentions became fewer and fewer; after 1987, the term almost disappeared from reviews.

Record companies, however, were reluctant to let it go. In the National Diet Library's catalog, Toshiba EMI was still releasing "City Pop" seasonal compilations in 1986 and 1987, and Sony released a "City Pop Collection" in 1989. In other words, during the hottest years of the bubble, "City Pop" was just a vague marketing category on record store shelves, meaning "trendy pop music for adults," rather than a widely recognized genre.

In 1988, Tokyo FM radio station J-WAVE launched and coined a new term: J-POP. According to journalist Hiromichi Ugaya's book, they had also considered using "City Pop" at the time. In the end, they didn't.

This reminds me of another example. Japanese scholar Yusuke Wajima wrote a book called "The Fabricated 'Japanese Heart' Myth." He found that the idea that "enka is the heartfelt voice of the Japanese since ancient times" was actually constructed in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Enka, treated as "tradition," was labeled later; City Pop, treated as "bubble soundtrack," was also labeled later.

V. The Bubble Came, the Protagonist Changed

Of course, the bubble was real. We still have to talk about it, because it explains another thing: why later generations are so willing to tie City Pop to the bubble.

In stark contrast to Japan's good times, across the ocean, the United States was like ants on a hot pan. To curb inflation, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates extremely high, and money from all over the world flowed to the US. From September 1980 to February 1985, the dollar rose more than 50% against major currencies. The dollar at that time was like an internet celebrity over-tipped in a livestream, its value skyrocketing.

For a wheat-farming, cattle-raising farmer in Kansas, let's call him "Tough Guy Sam," it was a nightmare: the dollar was too expensive, his wheat and beef couldn't sell abroad, while Japanese cars and electronics were getting cheaper and cheaper in the US. Seeing his Japanese friends clinking glasses and celebrating, while the agricultural products in his own warehouse were almost ready for a "fossil exhibition," Uncle Sam couldn't sit still: it was time to turn down the music next door.

On September 22, 1985, the US invited the finance ministers and central bank governors of Japan, West Germany, France, and the UK to the Plaza Hotel in New York to jointly push the dollar down. Once the exchange rate gate opened, it couldn't be closed: in the month the Plaza Accord was signed, 1 dollar averaged 236 yen; by December 1987, it was only 128 yen. The value of the yen almost doubled.

To save exports, the Bank of Japan kept cutting interest rates, and money flooded into stocks and real estate. According to estimates by the Economic Planning Agency at the time, the land price of Tokyo alone was worth the entire United States. In 1989, Mitsubishi Estate spent $846 million to buy 51% of the Rockefeller Group in New York, later increasing it to 80%; in the same year, Sony bought Hollywood's Columbia Pictures for $3.4 billion.

Bubble-era Tokyo indeed needed a background soundtrack. But the loudest on the record charts at this time were BOØWY's rock, Hikaru Genji's idol songs, and increasingly fast and loud dance music. The term "City Pop" appeared less and less in reviews.

The only City Pop hit that "shared the frame" with the bubble that year was the opening song "Christmas Eve." But it was written in 1983; it topped the charts in 1989 because, starting in 1988, JR Central used it in a Christmas ad for the Shinkansen: a girl waiting for her lover on the platform, the train arrives, and the song plays.

The bubble didn't create City Pop; the bubble just bought it and used it as ad background music.

Another song is worth mentioning. In 1984, Mariya Takeuchi returned after a two-year break following marriage, and her album "VARIETY" reached number one on the weekly charts. The song "Plastic Love," about Tokyo nightlife, was released as a 12-inch single in 1985 and only reached number 86.

Remember this number: 86.

VI. After the Bubble: Money, Labels, and Records

In 1990, the bubble burst. The Nikkei Index fell to 14,309 points in August 1992, down more than 60% from its peak; commercial land prices in six major cities eventually fell by more than 85%. Japan's economic growth rate dropped from 4.9% in 1990 to 0.8% in 1992, and turned negative in 1993.

The most expensive things of the bubble era ended up like this:

In November 1994, Sony announced an impairment charge of 265.2 billion yen, about $2.7 billion, for Columbia Pictures.

In May 1995, the owner of Rockefeller Center filed for bankruptcy protection. A member of the Rockefeller family said Mitsubishi had invested about $1.4 billion and lost about $600 million.

But the record industry did not collapse. Japan's record production value kept rising until 1998, reaching 607.5 billion yen, a historic high; the 1990s were the era of million-selling CDs. City Pop didn't starve to death; it just went out of fashion. The new generation wanted J-POP, faster drum beats, and choruses they could shout out at karaoke. Those records were shoved into bargain bins at secondhand stores, left there for over a decade.

Then, in 2002, a record guide called 'Japanese City Pop' was published; in 2004, the 'Light Mellow Wa-mono 669' edited by critic Toshikazu Kanazawa was published, listing 669 records in one go. Diggers began taking these lists and flipping through records one by one in the bargain bins.

City Pop as a 'genre', with a recognized list of classics and a lineage from Happy End to Tatsuro Yamashita, actually took shape only at this time. Sommet puts it bluntly: Happy End was retrospectively constructed as the genre's sole ancestor, while its relationship to the genre is actually only partial.

In other words, what we today call 'City Pop' was born twenty years later than the records it refers to.

Seven, Algorithms and Diggers

On July 5, 2017, a YouTube user named 'Plastic Lover' uploaded 'Plastic Love'.

By pulling up archived snapshots on the Wayback Machine one by one, you can see how it grew: two months after upload, 1.07 million views; January 2018, 5.38 million; November 2018, 22.49 million. Then the video was taken down due to a copyright claim over the cover photo; restored in 2019, and by November 2020, 42.75 million.

That song, which ranked 86th that year, was heard by the world more than thirty years later.

But it didn't fall from the sky. Before it, there were Vaporwave producers who began sampling City Pop around 2013, and Future Funk around 2015; in Japan, in 2015, 'Music Magazine' ran a 'New City Pop' feature, grouping young bands like cero and Yogee New Waves under it, some of whom were not too keen on the label.

The label changed again. What many people today call 'City Pop chords', the so-called Just the Two of Us progression, that name became popular among music fans only around 2018, and its classic example is actually a 1980 American song.

In 2020, it was the turn of Miki Matsubara's 1979 debut single 'Mayonaka no Door' (Midnight Door), which, thanks to a cover and a TikTok video, topped Spotify's global viral chart for more than ten days in a row. She had died in 2004.

Why these songs in particular?

A scholar used a term: anemoia, nostalgia for an era one has never experienced. A 2018 study by the St. Louis Fed found that American households born in the 1980s had 34% less wealth in 2016 than predicted by age. For this generation, the Tokyo of City Pop—always summer, always driving at night—is like a postcard from a place they've never been.

But I think 'nostalgia' alone is not enough. Because what algorithms can recommend are only songs where both things are present: first, someone seriously made it back then; second, for decades afterward, someone couldn't bear to throw it away. The first half belongs to Jun Aoyama, Hironori Ito, and Tatsuro Yamashita; the second half belongs to those diggers who flipped through records in bargain bins, compiled lists, and uploaded videos.

Eight, Back to the Records

Today, City Pop has returned to the record shelves.

In 2023, Tatsuro Yamashita's 1982 album 'FOR YOU' was reissued on vinyl and cassette, entering the Oricon weekly chart at No. 4. The last time this album made the top ten was 40 years and 11 months earlier. In 2024, Japan's vinyl production value reached 7.887 billion yen, exceeding 7 billion for the first time since 1989.

And Tatsuro Yamashita himself has hardly put his works on subscription streaming to this day. To hear his albums, the most direct way is still to buy a record.

Conclusion: Three Fates

Writing this, I actually want to say something unrelated to music.

In these forty years of City Pop, three things have headed toward completely different fates.

The first is money. The most expensive assets of the bubble era—Rockefeller Center, Hollywood film companies, Tokyo land—within a few years either went bankrupt, lost value, or fell by 80%. The Nikkei index took a full 34 years to return to the number of the last day of 1989.

The second is the label. The term 'City Pop' was rarely used by musicians, abandoned by critics after a few years, used by record companies as a shelf category, picked up by diggers twenty years later, and then redefined by the world another ten years after that. Each round was applied by later people.

The third is those hours in the recording studio. Minako Yoshida and Taeko Onuki, who never made the annual top fifty back then, and 'Plastic Love', which ranked 86th. They did not win their own era, yet forty years later, they became what people all over the world are rummaging through boxes to find.

Money evaporated, labels changed, the songs remain.

This makes me think of ourselves. Our generation is very used to 'instant settlement': release a song, check the play count the next day; finish a task, immediately want an evaluation, a label, a ranking. But the story of City Pop shows that today's charts cannot calculate the value of a work; and the person who finally labels you may very well not be born yet.

Since names are given by later people and the accounts are settled by time in the end, the only two things we can control are: do the work in hand well; and, if you like something, go find it yourself—there's no need to wait for others to tell you what it's called or what it's worth.

The diggers are the ones who walk a step ahead of their time and keep its accounts for it. The City Pop roster is exactly what they unearthed, record by record.

You can have one of your own, too.

References

Every figure and quotation in this article has been checked against its source item by item (primary data first; secondary sources cross-checked against primary sources wherever possible). Main sources:

Primary Data and Literature

  • Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ), "Music Software Production Results by Type over Time": link; "Japan's Record Industry 2025": link

  • FRED: Nikkei Stock Average NIKKEI225, Japanese Yen Exchange Rate EXJPUS

  • Economic Planning Agency, "Annual Economic Report for Fiscal 1969 (Showa 44)": link

  • Population Census, share of population in cities (IPSS): link

  • Cabinet Office, Consumer Confidence Survey, diffusion rate of durable consumer goods: link

  • Cabinet Office, Urban Land Price Index for the six major cities: link

  • House of Representatives, Law Database, Act No. 46 of 1984 (Showa 59) (lending rights): link

  • National Diet Library Search (bibliography of "City Pop" compilations and record guides): link

  • Wayback archive of the "Plastic Love" YouTube page: link

  • UPI, 1989-10-31 and 1991-07-12 (Mitsubishi Estate's acquisition of Rockefeller Group): link

  • Christian Science Monitor, 1995-05-15 (Rockefeller Center bankruptcy protection): link

  • Bloomberg, 1994-12-04 (Sony write-down): link

  • St. Louis Fed, "A Lost Generation?" (2018): link

  • Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO), annual number of Japanese outbound travelers: link

  • Ministry of Finance, Policy Research Institute, introduction to "Fiscal History 1972–1990" (oil crisis): link

Research Literature

  • Moritz Sommet, Intermediality and the discursive construction of popular music genres: the case of Japanese City Pop: Link
  • Edited by Yuji Shibasaki, What is City Pop?, Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2022
  • Yusuke Wajima, The Fabricated "Japanese Heart" Myth, Kobunsha Shinsho, 2010
  • Hiromichi Ugaya, What is J-Pop?, Iwanami Shinsho, 2005
  • Michael K. Bourdaghs, Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon, Columbia University Press, 2012
  • Cantinelli, "Anemoia and the Vaporwave Phenomenon", Imaginaires #26, 2024: Link

Secondary Sources (Parts cross-checked with primary sources are noted in the ledger)

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