You have a name for this music. We did not.
If you had asked me in 1980 what I was listening to, I would not have said city pop. Nobody would have. The phrase barely existed then. In Japanese it was New Music — nyū myūjikku — a loose category for songs written and performed by the same person, as opposed to the industrial product coming out of the television studios.
The name you use was applied later, from outside, by people who were not there. That is not a complaint. It is the single most useful fact about this music, and almost every English explanation of it skips over the fact entirely.
Because once you know the name came last, the obvious question changes. It stops being what is city pop and becomes something better.
Why is there no definition?
Everyone admits this, and nobody explains it
Read anything about city pop and you will find the same sentence. The definition is vague.
Soul, disco, rock, jazz, fusion. Some of it reaches for bossa nova and samba. Writers give up and call it a mood rather than a genre — a feeling of the city, of summer, of a coastline at night.
That is all true and none of it is an explanation. Plenty of genres are internally varied and still definable. Something specific happened here.
I think I know what it was, and it has almost nothing to do with music theory.
The music that had a shape
To see it you have to look at the other thing that existed at the time.
Kayōkyoku — Shōwa-era popular song. It ran on division of labour. A lyricist, a composer, and a singer, each doing their part. Songs were designed as products and moved through two channels: television and the record shop.
And they had a shape. You heard one once and could sing it. You could do it at a bar. A fourteen-year-old three weeks into guitar lessons could hold down three or four chords and produce something recognisable.
This is not a criticism. It is good design. Music intended to reach everybody should be easy to remember and easy to reproduce. As mass music it was extremely well made.
The other music went the opposite way. Extended and altered chords. Modulations. Structures that do not resolve where you expect. Session players at the top of their profession, and recordings built up with a level of care that only makes sense if nobody is rushing you.
Lovely to listen to. Very hard to play.
My hands could not do it
I have played guitar since I was young.
The kayōkyoku chords came quickly. Within a year I could pick up most of what was on the radio.
The other material defeated me for a long time, and the reason was physical. Am7 and Em7 sit easily under the hand — the open strings do the work for you. Gm7 and Gmaj7 do not. I could get my fingers into position and still not get a clean sound out of the instrument.
I could hear it. I could not reach it. I remember that gap very clearly, forty-odd years later.
I know a jazz pianist. I once asked her what turned her toward jazz, and the answer was Yuming — Arai Yumi, later Matsutōya Yumi.
Nobody hears kayōkyoku and decides to become a jazz musician. That is the size of the difference we are talking about.
(Whether Yuming counts as city pop is itself disputed, which tells you something. If she is neither kayōkyoku nor city pop, Shōwa music needs a third category — and we already had one. It was called New Music.)
So why did they make it so difficult?
Here is where the usual story goes wrong.
You have probably encountered the idea that these artists rejected television. That they refused the commercial machine and kept their integrity, and that this purity is audible in the recordings.
Tatsuro Yamashita is the figure this gets attached to most often. He is famous for not appearing on television, not playing arena shows, and not publishing books. For decades.
In a magazine interview in 2012, he described it differently. At the start, he said, it was not that he would not appear — he could not. He was not invited. Later, having become successful without television, he no longer had any use for it.
Read that again, because the order is reversed from the story you have been told.
He was not refusing television. Television was not asking.
When I came across that, the whole picture reorganised itself.
Think about what a Japanese music programme actually was. Roughly three minutes. A singer facing the camera over a backing track or a house band. A short exchange with the host. Next week, someone else in the same spot.
That format cannot hold this music. The arrangements are not reproducible on the night. You need too many players. The room is not built for that sound. And the songs are simply not the right length or shape.
They were not excluded for their politics or their principles. They were excluded on specification.
Being shut out is a kind of freedom
And here is the part I find genuinely moving.
If television will not have you, you do not have to accommodate television.
The shape of kayōkyoku was a shape the distribution demanded. Memorable, because otherwise it does not spread. Three minutes, because otherwise it does not fit the slot. There were solid commercial reasons for that simplicity.
None of those reasons apply to someone standing outside the building.
So they could let the harmony get complicated. They could let a song run long. They could stay in the studio for days stacking parts. They optimised not for what would sell on television but for what satisfied their own ears — and reached listeners through live shows, radio, and records instead.
The complexity of this music is not primarily evidence of talent. It is evidence of location.
Which is why you cannot define it
Now the original question answers itself.
Kayōkyoku is definable because it had a form. There was a method, a division of labour, a shared target.
The people outside had no shared form to conform to. Each of them followed their own record collection, their own ears, their own studio technique — and went somewhere different. One toward soul. One toward bossa nova. One toward jazz.
They are scattered because nothing was pulling them together.
So when listeners forty years later tried to gather them under one name, they could not find a musical common denominator. All they could find was a mood. Of course. The common factor was never in the sound. It was in where these people were standing relative to the machine.
And then you found it
You know the rest of this story better than I do, because it happened in your part of the internet.
July 2017: an unofficial upload of Mariya Takeuchi’s Plastic Love appears on YouTube. The photograph attached to it is not even from that release — it was lifted from the sleeve of a different single. The algorithm begins recommending it to everybody. Within about a year it passes twenty million plays, and by the time it was taken down it was near twenty-four million.
Then Miki Matsubara’s Mayonaka no Door / Stay With Me starts appearing under TikTok videos in Southeast Asia in late 2020. In October that year the Indonesian singer Rainych posts a cover, and the original becomes a worldwide hit a few months later. The Korean DJ Night Tempo’s re-edits carry a great deal of the rest.
Notice who is missing from that sequence.
No Japanese person set any of it in motion. A foreign listener uploaded it, an algorithm distributed it, an Indonesian sang it, a Korean re-cut it. The Japanese music industry noticed afterwards and hurried to catch up, and the domestic revival arrived as an import.
Including the name. City pop reached me the same way it reached you — from outside, after the fact.
What they were left with
Music made for a three-minute television slot expires when the programme does. That is not a flaw; it did its job.
But these people were shut out of the format, so all they could do was spend time on the sound itself. And the sound did not age.
There is an irony available here — the artists television would not take are now the ones being heard worldwide, in an era when television has lost its grip. I do not think it is really irony. Being outside the specification is exactly why the recordings survived the specification changing.
One last thing, and it is the part I am most curious about.
Listeners abroad describe this music as nostalgic. For a decade they did not live through, in a country they have not visited, in a language most of them do not speak.
I was there, and I do not experience it that way at all. I remember what my hands could not do.
I want to write about that difference properly, and I will.
