It usually happens late.
You are somewhere in a YouTube session that has stopped being intentional. A thumbnail comes up — a woman photographed in 1984, or an illustration of a car on an elevated road at night — and forty seconds into the track something goes wrong in a way that feels good.
You miss it. Whatever it is. A city you have not been to, on an evening that happened before you were born, in a country whose language you do not read.
I have spent about forty years working as a counsellor in Japan, and I taught in Japanese schools and universities for most of that time. I also lived through the decade you are missing.
So I want to do two things in this article. I want to tell you what that feeling actually is, as precisely as I can. And I want to be clear from the start that I am not writing this to take it away from you.
There is a word for it. It is not a real word.
The word going around is anemoia — nostalgia for a time you never knew.
If you have seen it used, you have probably also seen it described as a psychological term. It is not.
It was coined in 2012 by an American writer named John Koenig, for a project called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows — an ongoing attempt to invent names for feelings that do not have them yet.
It became a book in 2021. It spread through social media in the years after that, largely attached to exactly the kind of listening I described above.
So it is a poet’s invention. A very good one. But there is no clinical literature on anemoia, no diagnostic use, no body of experiments.
Searching for “the psychology of anemoia” will produce a great many confident articles and almost no research.
I am being pedantic about this on purpose, and not to be discouraging. The feeling is real and it has been studied — just under a different name, and with results more interesting than the invented word suggests.
What the research actually says
Nostalgia is a genuine field in psychology, with decades of experimental work behind it.
The standard definition is a sentimental longing for one’s own past. That word own is carrying weight.
In the research, the past that nostalgia reaches for is intensely personal, and the person remembering appears in the scene as its protagonist. A classroom. Somebody’s kitchen. A particular quality of light in late afternoon.
You are always in the memory.
Which produces an immediate problem for everything I have just described.
You are not in 1984 Tokyo. You have never been anywhere near it. By the standard definition, nostalgia should have nothing to grip.
There is a partial answer in the literature: nostalgia can be experienced vicariously, and across generations. People report it for their parents’ era, for periods they know only through stories and photographs. So the mechanism does not strictly require the memory. Something else is enough.
What I think is worth explaining is why this particular music is so unusually good at supplying that something else.
Three reasons this music does it so well
This part is my own analysis rather than established research, so read it as such.
One: the sound is not specific enough to contradict you
Most city pop does not describe a scene so much as outline one. Night, a car, water, lights on a building. The edges are there and the middle is unfilled.
And if you do not read Japanese, the lyrics become more abstract still. They arrive as texture rather than statement — which is a loss, and also a very particular kind of permission.
Anything with space in it can be projected into.
So you put something of your own in there. Someone you have not met, a place you have not been, a version of yourself you did not become. The music works as a mirror precisely because it declines to be a photograph.
Two: the imagery reached you pre-idealised
You did not receive this music on its own. It came bundled — neon streets, anime stills, the interior of a car on a wet road, a particular palette of magenta and deep blue.
Notice what is absent from that bundle. No commuter crush. No unpaid overtime. No recession arriving in 1991 and never fully leaving. The awkward parts of the actual decade did not survive the journey.
What survived was a sign meaning prosperous, sophisticated, Japanese, at night.
So the object of the feeling is not 1984 Japan. It is an image assembled from 1984 Japan, edited by four decades of transmission, and it is considerably better designed than the original.
Three: none of your own failures are attached to it
This is the one I would put first if I were ranking them.
A past you actually lived is not clean. Play music from a period you were present for and what comes back is not only the good part. The embarrassment comes too. The thing you said. The person you stopped speaking to. The exam you failed.
Real nostalgia always has some pain mixed into it. That is not a flaw in the emotion; it is a property of the material.
A past you did not live has none of that. There is nothing in it that indicts you.
What you have, in other words, is nostalgia with the pain removed. Frictionless longing. I do not say that dismissively — it is a genuinely unusual thing to have access to, and it explains why the feeling is so much cleaner than the ordinary kind.
The part where I decline to pathologise this
There is a standard move available here, and I want to refuse it explicitly.
The move is: this is escapism. Reality is unsatisfying, so people retreat into an idealised past. Defence mechanism. Regression. Avoidance.
That reading runs against the direction of the research.
Nostalgia has been shown to be empirically distinguishable from rumination, from depressive thinking, and from homesickness. Unlike those, it is broadly positive in character and tends toward desirable psychological outcomes. Recent models describe it as something closer to a homeostatic corrective — a mechanism that offsets the effects of psychological disturbance and adversity rather than one that hides from them. Induce nostalgia experimentally and people’s sense of social connectedness goes up.
Which suggests it is not functioning as an exit. It is functioning as something to push off from.
Forty years of this work has left me with a fairly low opinion of the instinct to diagnose a feeling that is doing no harm. If listening to music from a decade you never saw makes the week more bearable, that is the emotion performing its function competently. It does not require a diagnosis and it is not evidence of weakness.
What it is like from the other side
I should tell you what I have, since it is the only thing I can offer that a hundred video essays cannot.
I do not find this music nostalgic.
I was playing guitar in those years. The popular songs on television I could pick up almost immediately — three or four chords and you had it. This other material defeated me, and it defeated me physically. Am7 and Em7 sit under the hand easily because the open strings do the work. Gm7 and Gmaj7 do not. I could get my fingers into the shape and still not produce a clean sound.
I could hear it. I could not reach it.
That is what surfaces for me. Not neon. A specific failure of the left hand, still available in detail forty years later. (We did not call it city pop, either — but that is a separate article.)
So we are not having the same experience, you and I, and I have stopped thinking that one of us is doing it correctly.
You have something I was never able to have: that decade with the pain taken out. It is not a memory, but it is clearly doing work.
I have something you cannot get: that decade with the pain left in. I would not call it nostalgia. It is, however, the actual thing.
The same recordings are delivering two completely different objects. That seems to me more interesting than deciding which one counts.
One last thing, which may be uncomfortable
You might be reading this as a story about foreigners and Japan. A curious thing that happens to outsiders looking in.
It is not.
Teenagers in Japan are currently deep in a revival of the 1990s and early 2000s — an era none of them experienced. And the striking thing is the vocabulary they use. They do not say it is nostalgic. They say it is new. Interesting because they have never seen it.
Same structure, entirely inside Japan. Affection for a period, with none of the period’s costs attached.
Which makes me think the mechanism you have been feeling is not about Japan at all, and never was. Japan is just where a particularly well-made version of the raw material happens to be lying around.
I will write about the domestic version soon.
anemoia / city pop
