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Why is pop so big in Japan?

There's perhaps no other nation on Earth

with the enthusiasm for pop music that Japan has. In fact its love affair with

popular music goes back to the 1920s and the Taisho era, when 'ryukoka' or

'popular song' began to adopt western instruments and techniques. Blues and

jazz from the U.S. also started to have an influence and crooners like Ichiro

Fujiyama began to emerge.

 

But it was when music from the West swept

the planet in the 50s and 60s that Japan embraced it wholeheartedly. Elvis and

rockabilly began to invade the charts, and Japanese bands aping the same style

formed, like The Drifters in 1956. The seismic shift, however, came when The

Beatles arrived in 1966 to play at the Nippon Budokan in Tokyo. Riot police

were deployed, and The Drifters opened for them, only lasting 40 seconds before

having to give up and let the main act take the stage.

 

Beatlemania never really went away

following that performance, and the origins of modern J-Pop can be traced

directly back to the early 60s and its 'group sounds', the style which saw the

creation of mop-topped Japanese bands like The Spiders, The Ventures, The

Tempters and The Tigers. (There was even a psychedelic band called The Mops).

Some sang in English but many stuck with Japanese, which arguably created a

more solid base for the country’s own pop music industry to blossom thanks to

early bands like Happy Ending.

 

Foku, or folk music, began to bleed in to

ryukoka from America, too, in the 1970s, with artists like Shiro Miya hitting

the number one spot with ‘Onna No Michi’, which sold 3.25 million copies. An

album by Yosui Inoue spent 113 weeks in the top ten, 13 of those at number one.

These early incarnations of J-Pop proved that there was a voracious appetite

among young people for these new and exciting sounds emanating not from the U.S.

or Europe, but from their own shores.

 

The 1980s saw an explosion of what became

known as 'city pop', and Shibuya-kei, a genre which emerged from the Shibuya

area of Tokyo, but it was in the late 80s and early 1990s when J-Pop came of

age and became an all-encompassing term for the country's hugely popular music

scene. It was initially used as a term to describe the more western-sounding

bands, such as Pizzicato Five and Flipper's Guitar.

 

But it was also a boom time for bands like

the three-piece rock band Wands, and B'z, the duo comprising Tak Matsumoto and

Koshi Inaba, who have sold to date more than 80 million albums in Japan alone.

Rock band Mr Children, also had phenomenal success, and enduring bands like

Southern All Stars, who formed in the 70s, frequently top charts of the most

influential bands in Japanese music. Meanwhile, GLAY and Dreams Come True, who

both formed in 1988, have dozens of albums between them and sales in the hundreds

of millions.

 

Hikaru Utada emerged in 1999, selling 7.65

million copies of her debut album, a remarkable first step to becoming one of

the biggest stars in Japan, and along with Ayumi Hamasaki is a force to be

reckoned with in terms of female J-Pop artists, between them selling over 100

million records.

 

J-Pop now pervades all Japanese culture

from film and animation to adverts, marketing and video games. In fact, through

video games it has reached a far wider audience across the globe. Games like

the Kingdom Hearts series, the first instalment of which was released in 2001,

features theme music from Hikaru Utada and an all-star voice cast featuring the

likes of teen stars Hayden Panettiere and Mandy Moore, giving it a broad appeal

beyond its Japanese origins. Meanwhile, bands like the pop duo Puffy have made

headway in the States, where they're known as Puffy AmiYumi, and scored their

own animated series on the Cartoon Network.

 

Now a billion dollar industry, there are

innumerable splinter genres in J-Pop, from J-Rock and J-Reggae to J-Ska and

J-Punk (there is also K-Pop over in Korea). Its enduring popularity is

doubtless down to the fact that despite picking up certain influences from

Europe and the U.S., it has its very own style - even pronunciation. It is

Japanese to the core.