Intermediality and the discursive construction of popular

music genres: the case of ‘Japanese City Pop’

Moritz Sommet, Universities of Cologne and Fribourg (moritz.sommet@unifr.ch)

Rev is ed a nd expa nded v ers ion of a pa per p res en ted at the 15 th EAJS International Con feren ce 2017 (L is bon, A ug.
30 – Sept. 2, 2017 ). A Japa nes e v ers ion of th is man uscript (trans la tion: Ka tō Ken 加藤賢) h as b een pub lish ed a s:

Some, Mō rittsu モーリッツ・ ソメ [Sommet, Moritz]: Popyu rā onga ku n o j anru gainen ni okeru ka n-
media-sei to gens etsuteki kōchiku: ‘ja pan īzu sh iti pop pu’ w o jirei n i ポピュラー音楽のジャンル概念にお
ける間メディア性と言説的構築 ―「ジャパニーズ・シティ・ポップ」を事例に―, Handai ongaku gakuhō
阪大音楽学報, 16/17 (2020): 1 5-42.

This d ocuments con ta ins both the English man uscript of the paper an d a post-p rin t of the publis hed Ja panese
tra nslation .

Abstract
Commonly said to embody the 'urbane' and 'refined' lifestyle of metropolitan Tokyo and to prefigure the
transnational and consumerist characteristics of today's mainstream J-Pop, Japanese City Pop has undergone
several recontextualizations since it first surfaced in the last quarter of the 20th century. I use City Pop as an
example to interrogate the intermedial qualities of the processes at work in the emergence and sustenance of
popular music genres. I first examine some common multi-semiotic (aural, visual and textual) characteristics of
the musical products most commonly classified as City Pop, conceptualizing the genre as an example of
intermedial translation. I then relate the results of this examination to select material from a small diachronic
corpus of Japanese-language musical intertexts built from music history books, disc guides, and newspaper and
music magazine articles published between 1977 and 2016. I identify actors in the discursive construction of City
Pop as a genre and trace changes in the musical and extra-musical qualities attributed to it. Our contemporary
understanding of the term 'City Pop' and our perception of the artists it points to are shown to have been strongly
shaped by enthusiast press articles and popular musical histories written by a relatively small number of Japanese
music journalists who integrated disparate and often contradictory artistic productions into a coherent
genealogical narrative centered on the folk-rock band Happy End. My findings indicate the comparatively strong
importance of etic text-based narratives over emic musical properties or short-term music industry marketing
strategies in the construction of City Pop as a popular music genre, pointing to the fundamental primacy of
language/writing in what Jens Schröter has termed ‘ontological intermediality.’

Key words: intermediality, musical genre theory, discourse analysis, City Pop, Japanese popular music, Happy End

Contents
Genre theory and intermediality in popular music studies............................................................. 2
The city and the beach: intermedial translation and the 1980s City Pop ecology .......................... 4
From City Music to City Pop: writing and rewriting a genre ........................................................... 7
Stable genre attributives of City Pop............................................................................................. 13
Conclusion: City Pop, genealogical narrative and ontological intermediality ............................... 15
Coda: Between irony and nostalgia: City Pop in the West ............................................................ 16
Bibliography................................................................................................................................... 18
Discography ................................................................................................................................... 21

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Genre theory typically asks after the conditions that cause musical genres to come into being, and after
the function they fulfil for artists, their audience or other parts of musical communities. This paper
proposes a new way to look at these questions: I am interested in the role of media and intermediality
in the constitution of popular music genres. If pop music can commonly be defined as a media-crossing
interplay of aural, visual and textual signifiers, then how can we describe this interplay within the
confines of a specific popular music genre to illuminate the boundaries and diachronic dynamics of
said genre? In other words: how do elements from different media interact in the constitution of
popular music genres? And are some of these media more important than others - do they dominate
others? The focus of this paper thus extends to the question of intermedial dynamics and media
hierarchies, a frequent problem in intermedial and inter-art theory (cf. Caduff et al. 2007, Wolf 2010).

As a first step towards answering these questions, I propose a small case study of a particular musical
genre, Japanese City Pop. City Pop, as will be shown, has gone through several revivals and
redefinitions since its inception in the last quarter of the 20th century. Most recently, its latest revival
in the mid-2010s has garnered considerable media attention among pop music fans in Japan. It has led
to the emergence of many, mostly Tokyo-based indie pop, dance, rock or funk acts that are now either
calling themselves City Pop artists or are being labelled so by etic actors such as music journalists or
CD vendors. The apparent musical diversity of the acts partaking in this boom has prompted complaints
that the definition of City Pop has become so muddled that there are few reasonably coherent links
anymore between older and newer forms of the genre. The English-language newspaper Japan Times
went so far in 2015 as to call the revival ‘literally a trend in name only’ (Aoki 2015). I propose to clear
up some of the confusion surrounding this recent revival of City Pop while examining the role of diverse
media that were and still are active in the construction and reconstruction of the genre. To this end, I
examine a diachronic corpus of Japanese-language musical intertexts built from music history books,
genre guides, newspaper and music magazine articles and Internet publications dating from between
1977 and 2016. I will analyze the discursive construction of City Pop as a genre within these texts and
relate the information gleaned from the corpus to the intermedial dimension of genre construction,
i.e. the importance of non-textual artifacts and media that can be said to have played a role in the
definition and re-definition of City Pop.

Genre theory and intermediality in popular music studies

As a starting point and for the sake of simplicity, we may adopt Fabbri’s broad and social-
constructionist definition of musical genres. Fabbri (1999: 7) holds that “a genre is a kind of music, as
it is acknowledged by a community for any reason or purpose or criteria, i.e., a set of musical events
whose course is governed by rules (of any kind) accepted by a community”. I will not make a
terminological distinction between smaller or larger subdivisions such as metagenres or subgenres (cf.
Shuker 2005). Thus, I will discuss broad meta-genres such as J-Pop (an umbrella term established in
the 1990s to describe almost all kinds of pop music produced in Japan) and smaller and more specific
musical genres under the same framework and definition.

Genres, even defined in such broad terms, are fundamental to our understanding of music as well as
the functioning of the music itself. A listener’s ability to distinguish between genres is a necessary skill
and a basic cognitive tool in the processing of music, allowing him or her to map raw aural perceptions
to cultural patterns that imbue said perceptions with meaning (cf. Fabbri 1999: 6). On the economic
level, the genre distinction works as an essential interface between the music and its market (cf. Frith
1996: 76, Negus 2013: 27), while on the social level genres can serve as strong markers of collective
identity. Both of these latter functions are especially important in modern popular music after the

2
Second World War, which is simultaneously highly commercial and anchored in youth cultures,
including subcultures that are hostile to commercialization. Thus, in popular music, genres can be said
to be more conflictual than in art music since they are ‘particularly messy [….] rooted in vernacular
discourse, in diverse social groups, […] destabilized by shifting fashions and the logic of modern
capitalism‘ (Holt 2007: 14). They are ‘only “relatively” stable patterns’ and always ‘open to innovation,
manipulation and change’ (Hodges 2015: 46). And finally, genre definitions ’can never be fully defined
in popular music because different eras use them for different purposes’ (Weisbard 2013: 404).
Popular music genres frequently undergo recontextualization and redefinition as they adapt to
technological change, as they are repackaged to younger audiences or otherwise appropriated for
commercial interests, or as musical communities reappropriate them in turn.

While popular music historiography has frequently focused on these diverse actors and interests that
influence the construction and development of genres, the role of intermediality in this process has so
far garnered comparatively little interest. This is surprising when one considers that pop music is widely
regarded as an intermedial art form in itself. Insofar as it adopts the song format, pop music can
obviously be classified as a form of plurimedial intermediality that, like the opera, synthesizes lyrical
writing with music (cf. Wolf 2010: 462). But the aesthetics of Western or Western-influenced post-war
pop music often tend to go beyond this basic form of intermediality and emphatically embrace other
non-musical elements. Diedrich Diederichsen (2014) has pointed out that pop music integrates
conventionally non-musical sounds into its repertoire of musical expressions that foreground the
mediality of the music (such as distortion noise in guitar play). Through its dependence on the star
system and its roots in youth culture, it also puts a particular focus on both the artist’s performance
and the listener’s psychological identification with their star; and it makes more prominent use of
visual media elements that enable these mechanisms, such as music videos and cover art, than do
other forms of modern music. Conceptualizing this intermedial nature of pop music, Ole Petras (2011)
has developed a semantic model of a web of intermedial ‘Signifying Units’ that operate on different
levels of meaning, interact by mutually reinforcing or modifying their respective signification, and
continually cross media borders to do so. Read this way, the motifs used e.g. in the cover art of an
album do not just ‘influence’ a listener’s perception of ‘the music itself’, but rather form an integral
part of the meaning generated by the music as a whole through their interaction with other signifiers
such as song lyrics or musical cues. Pop music thus signifies intermedially and is typically received
intermedially as well by its listener communities and fans. Moreover, this intermedial process of
meaning-making does not just work at an intra-compositional level (i.e., by the diverse elements that
can be identified within the boundaries of any given work of pop music: a song or album or concert),
but also by extra-diegetic means, including even signifiers that are not conventionally considered part
of music. Within pop music’s star system and fan culture, etic narratives developed e.g. by music
journalists can easily complement emic musico-poetic signifiers to mold the music’s production and
reception.

This intermedial nature of pop music becomes relevant to question of genre construction when we
consider that popular music genres are defined and spread through the very same intermedial means
that have been sketched out above, but especially through visualization, ‘via cover notes, pictures,
magazines, movies’ (Holt 2003: 92). Taking inspiration from Yuri Lotman (2001), a popular music genre
can be conceptualized as a semiosphere that is ‘transtextual and transmedial’ and operates in both a
synchronic and a diachronic dimension. Within this sphere operates a musical-ecological system that
engages in ‘semiotic translation’ between various types of aural, textual and visual signifiers and

3
‘musicalizes’ them, creating musical meaning out of medially diverse cues (cf. Marino 2015: 240). 1
What holds these intermedially translated signifiers together and forges them into a more or less
distinct genre is supposedly sometimes nothing but the name of the genre in the question: something
‘which is so meaningful that it may become […] the unique element capable to synthesize the identity
of that particular music’ (ibid.: 252).

The city and the beach: intermedial translation and the 1980s City Pop ecology
We can apply this concept of genre as intermedial translation to Japanese City Pop, which today is
broadly associated with a canon of visual productions from the early to mid-1980s that come in various
media forms: cover artwork, photographs, the text and layout of CD booklets or record lyrics sheets,
music magazine articles, or music videos. A handful of artists, most prominently the illustrators Nagai
Hiroshi 永井博 and Suzuki Eijin 鈴木英人, have founded the art style that governs this canon in the
early 1980s with their images of summery beaches, seaside highways and swimming pools. Their
illustrations, inspired by the pop art of Warhol and Liechtenstein and the landscapes of the American
West Coast, dominated the covers of radio program magazines such as FM Station and could also be
seen on the covers of albums by City Pop artists like Yamashita Tatsurō 山下達郎 or Ōtaki Eiichi 大滝
詠一. While they typically show beaches and the sea, these motifs appear not as natural environments,
but rather as places of leisure seen from the perspective of weary urbanites, mostly framed by symbols
of the comforts of civilization. Later City Pop covers from the mid-1980s typically make use of
photographs of similar motifs instead of illustrations, and sometimes combine them with more
conventional pop star portrait photography. Less iconic, but still present, was a style of cover art that
appealed more directly to the big city theme implied by the genre name and sought to portray a sense
of modern sophistication by depicting affluent urban environments. As in almost all City Pop art of the
time, these urban settings look either US-American (typically evoking California) or ‘transnationally’
metropolitan, showcasing the skylines of cities such as Tokyo or Yokohama, but giving few or no hints
towards the Japanese origin of these cityscapes. This iconography of the city and the seaside remained
remarkably consistent throughout the genre’s original lifespan and serves as its most easily identifiable
characteristic. As music journalist Ian Martin (2016: 84 f.) once put it, "basically any 80s albums with
pictures of swimming pools on the front are probably city pop.”

1
This semiosphere of genre of course interacts with other sub-semiospheres, and with the meta-semiosphere
provided by the wider culture, etc.; for an example of how this interaction, which is not the focus of this paper,
could be conceptualized, see Ndalianis 2015.

4
Figure 1: Beach-themed 1980s City Pop cover art. From left to right: Ōtaki Eiichi, Ame no uenzudei 雨のウエンズデイ(1982)
– art by Nagai Hiroshi ; Piper, Summer Breeze (1983); Kadomatsu Toshiki 角松敏生, On the City Shore (1983)

Figure 2: City-themed 1980s CIty Pop cover art. Matsushita Makoto 松下誠, First Light (1981); Kadomatsu Toshiki 角松敏生,
Hatsukoi 初恋 (1985); Piper, Lovers Logic (1986)

Indeed, it might be easier to identify City Pop by these visual characteristics than by its musical qualities.
City Pop as it emerged in the early 1980s blends elements from so many various existing (and often
more clearly defined) popular music genres that it has hardly developed a musical identity of its own.
Broadly speaking, the music typically features a bright, clean and polished sound, resulting from a
particular mixture of electronic and analog instruments and production methods. It tends towards
rhythm-oriented musical patterns and vocal expressions influenced by African-American musical styles
such as R&B, (light or smooth) jazz, fusion and soul, often employing tension chords and 16-beat
rhythms. But it also makes use of structures more reminiscent of the ‘white’ American pop and rock of
the 1950s and 1960s, and it sometimes uses elements of disco, Latin music or synth-pop. What defines
City Pop most clearly in its cultural context is the absence of any obvious markers of a Japanese musical
identity. Other than its mostly Japanese-language lyrics, it usually contains no traces of the musical
characteristics that are conventionally thought to be ‘Japanese’ in modern popular music: no
pentatonic scale, and none of the singing techniques associated with enka 演歌 and other types of
older kayōkyoku 歌謡曲. The lyrics, too, reflect the culturally odorless nature of City Pop through
frequent code-switching between Japanese and European languages, most commonly English. English
words or fragmentary phrases, written in either katakana or Latin characters on the lyrics sheets, are
often employed on the hook or the chorus of a song (cf. Kō 2011: 181). In some cases, code-switching
with English is even used to introduce end rhymes, a concept usually alien to the poetics of both

5
popular music lyrics and literary lyrical writing in Japanese. Sugiyama Kiyotaka’s 杉山清貴 song Futari
no natsu monogatari ふたりの夏物語 (1985) is an example of this method, combining alternating
Japanese and English verses into a chorus with an AABB rhyme scheme:

オンリー・ユー Onrī yū Only you

Kimi ni sasayaku I’m whispering to you
君にささやく
(Memory) (Memory)
(Memory) Futari no natsu monogatari Our tale of summer
ふたりの夏物語

In these ways, City Pop can be said to prefigure the transnational musical qualities of 1990s J-Pop. 2
Indeed, most of the artists that were associated with the genre moniker J-Pop when it originally
emerged in the late 1980s as a creation of the radio station J-Wave are also considered veterans of
City Pop. The station originally even considered simply adopting the City Pop label for its program ‘J-
Pop Classics’ (cf. Ugaya 2005: 7-8). But more importantly for the purpose of my argument, these
examples show that, consistent with an intermedial theory of genre definition, the lyrics of City Pop
often intermedially translate and thus reproduce and reinforce the characteristics of album and
magazine covers and musical sound to create genre characteristics. The visual, aural and textual
signifiers discussed above all share a certain transnational and ‘Americanized’ flavor. City Pop lyrics
often deal with summertime, beaches, holiday resorts and leisurely drives along the coast, with a lesser
emphasis given to big city themes. Even city-themed lyrics often incorporate exotic locales into their
metropolitan background, creating even greater thematic coherence by directly blending the genre’s
two most common motifs, as exemplified by Nakahara Meiko’s 中原めいこ song Kon’ya dake DANCE
DANCE DANCE 今夜だけ DANCE・DANCE・DANCE (1982):

常夏の島 は discotheque Tokonatsu no shima wa discotheque The island of eternal summer

Tokai no umi ni ukanderu is a discotheque /
都会の海に浮かんでる
Floating in an urban sea

One reason the city by itself does not figure very prominently in many City Pop lyrics might be that the
genre first rose to prominence in a media ecology that newly emphasized mobile over stationary music.
The Walkman had already been on the market for some time since its introduction in 1979 and had
begun to change listener behavior (cf. Hosokawa 1984). More importantly, cassette decks, car stereos
and FM radio stations were rapidly gaining in popularity in the early 1980s. Much of this equipment
was produced by Sony, which sought to generate profit by creating synergies between record and
equipment sales. In the late 1960s, the company had entered the music publishing business through a
joint venture with CBS and had emerged as Japan’s largest record company by 1978. Using Sony
equipment, audiences would now record their favorite music on the radio, often receiving information
on what would air when from specialized magazines such as FM Station, and then drive to the beach,
to a holiday resort or similar destinations while listening to City Pop on their car stereos. 3 In later years

2
Suzuki (2017: 248-264) discusses this transitional aspect of the genre, situating City Pop at the nexus of the
larger stream of traditional kayōkyoku, 1970s style New Music and 1990s J-Pop.
3
Cf. the compilation album CITY POP~SONY MUSIC edition (2003) for a selection of relevant music by artists like
Satō Hiroshi 佐藤博 or Ōtaki Eiichi that were signed to Sony at the time. However, other record companies such
as Warner Music also published 1980s City Pop.

6
audio CDs, which were introduced in Japan in 1982, would become another major source for these
driving music tapes. The lyrics of many City Pop songs reflect the genre’s driving BGM leanings with
frequent references to cars and roads, but also by being written in ways that make them fit to be used
as background music to a joyride. They were unobtrusive enough not to disturb the conversation
between the driver (typically male) and his passenger (typically female, and a potential love interest),
and consequently favored mood-setting and scenic descriptions over more complex narrative
structures. Simultaneously, they aimed to show off a certain sophistication that the driver could hope
reflected on him and his tasteful choice of music (cf. Saitō 2011: 225). The aesthetics of City Pop lyrics
by writers such as Urino Masao 売野雅勇 strongly remind some observers of advertisement slogans,
and many City Pop songs were indeed used as CM songu CM ソン グ , or theme music for TV
commercial spots (cf. Suzuki 2017: 252).

Thus, City Pop is ‘urban’ music primarily in the sense that the main intended audience consisted of
affluent urban professionals who had their own cars and could afford all the technical equipment that
was necessary to partake in this musical ecology. From this, we can also see that City Pop was geared
mostly towards an audience that was older than that of teenage pop. 4 City Pop was what the
generation listened to that had grown up with the Beatlemania and wasei poppusu 和製ポップス of
the 1960s and had by now come into some money, along with their younger siblings. This was also a
generation that had largely left politics behind. We find little traces, if any, in City Pop of emphatic
political messaging or expressions of frustration about society that had still been present in 1970s folk
music. This apolitical nature is another reason why City Pop is often called the sound of the bubble era,
an age of economic optimism when the values of the post-war consumer society were fully embraced
by many Japanese.

A product of this 1980s environment, City Pop also died with it. It lost vitality as a musical trend in the
latter half of the decade, first giving way to a rock-centric ‘band boom’ and then losing any remaining
visibility as the broad paradigm of J-Pop emerged and the musical ecology of City Pop was replaced by
other technological distribution and listening models (cf. Ugaya 2005: 4-5).

From City Music to City Pop: writing and rewriting a genre

The relatively narrow and specific genre definition laid out above becomes more complex, however,
once we add the written word to the media mix and look at etic (journalistic) writing about City Pop.
The small corpus that forms the basis of the following discussion was compiled from 52 Japanese-
language texts originally published between 1977 to 2016 that explicitly deal with City Pop in one way
or another and can largely be subdivided into four textual genres: newspaper articles, music press
articles, genre and artist guide books, and Internet sources such as magazines or blog posts.

These texts can first provide us with some hints to the history and development of the genre’s concept
and its name. The motif of the modern ‘City’, in English and spelled using either katakana or the Latin
alphabet, had already been making an appearance in Japanese pop culture throughout the 1970s.
Catalogue-type fashion magazines like City Road or Popeye (the self-styled magazine for ‘City Boys’)

4
As nostalgic recollections by then younger, teenage listeners from the corpus reveal, City Pop of course also
appealed to people who could not yet afford the equipment, or the cars. For a rare lyrical expression of this
feeling, see the tanka poem Kibun wa CITY POP 気分は CITY POP by Sasa (2015: 73-88).

7
were using it to sell a new kind of Americanized consumerism to a youthful audience. 5 In popular music,
the term was championed by acts specializing in US-style rock and pop, such as the folk-rock band
Happy End はっぴいえんど, whose 1973 best-of album was titled CITY, or by Suzuki Keiichi and his
Moon Riders 鈴木慶一とムーンライダース, who named the A side of their 1976 concept album Hi
no tama boy 火の玉ボーイ its ‘City Boy side.’

The earliest text in the corpus that mentions something close to the musical genre called City Pop
focuses on the above-mentioned band Happy End and is a 1977 article in the music enthusiast
magazine Young Guitar about a supposedly new type of music called ‘City Music’ (shiti myūjikku シテ
ィ・ミュージック). City Music is an exceedingly vague concept, as the author of the article, music
critic Tōno Kiyokazu, admits:

I think that just as with the word New Music itself, City Music is nothing more than a "feeling
word" and doesn't hold any particularly deep meaning. Should I try defining it for you? Maybe
it's something like "New Music that has an urban feeling". As expected: something that looks
like you understand it, but you don't 6

City Music is thus defined in this article as an offshoot of ‘New Music’ (nyū myūjikku ニューミュージ
ッ ク ), a singer/songwriter-based genre that had emerged in the mid- to late 1970s and was
championed by artists like Matsutōya Yumi, but with an “urban feeling.” 7 At the center of City Music,
Tōno sees the former members of Happy End: Ōtaki Eiichi, Suzuki Shigeru 鈴木茂, Matsumoto Takashi
松本隆 and Hosono Haruomi 細野晴臣. Almost all the other artists he mentions, such as Matsutōya
Yumi, Yamashita Tatsurō, Kosaka Chū 小坂忠 or Minami Yoshitaka 南佳孝, have been produced or
otherwise supported by Happy End or their former members. Tōno also singles out Happy End’s
concept album Kazemachi roman 風街ろまん (‘Wind City Romance’, 1971) as the point of origin of
City Music. Tōno sees a connection between the ‘feeling’ this album gives him and the attitude of long-
time urban dwellers that City Music was supposed to embody:

The ones that sowed the seeds for all this were Happy End. Happy End's Kazemachi roman was
the first album that made me feel all the nuances of the city. Going into the 1970s, the city was
already no longer an object of yearning, and Happy End shrewdly expressed the various images
that lay hidden in this city. 8

The ‘City’ in City Music is thus framed as a reference to the ‘Wind City’ or kazemachi, the leitmotif of
the album. Happy End’s kazemachi, however, has few similarities with the glitzy, beach-adjacent
transnational metropolis of 1980s City Pop. Musically, Kazemachi roman offers mostly folk-tinged
American West Coast rock inspired by bands such as Buffalo Springfield or Moby Grape, and surrealistic

5
Cf. Komori 2011 and Iida 2013: 181 for the history and influence of these magazines.
6
Tōno 2006: 58.
7
Cf. Stevens 2012: 46-48 for a concise discussion of the business model and musical style of New Music in English.
For more in-depth discussions of the development and changing definition of the genre, which originally
incorporated more folk-oriented artists as well, see Tomizawa 1979 and Kitanaka 1995: 184-204.
8
Tōno 2006: 59.

8
lyrics that are quite removed from anything that would later be called City Pop. Matsumoto, the band’s
drummer and main lyricist, conceived of the Wind City as a nostalgic and surrealistic re-imagination
the ‘lost’ Tokyo before the building boom set off by the 1964 Olympic games, and contrasted it with
the darker aspects of Japan’s high-growth period (cf. Iida et al. 2004: 208). Specifically, the Wind City
refers to a residential area around Aoyama that city planners had levelled to make room for a large
street, forcing Matsumoto’s family to abandon their home when was still in middle school (cf.
Matsumoto 1985, 2001). Over time, however, Matsumoto’s kazemachi and the big city theme in
general turned into a brand of sorts for Happy End and their associates. While the band’s original sound
was different from that of 1980’s City Pop, the ‘City Music’ they produced was the first in Japanese
music history that was strongly associated with both contemporary American pop and a strong ‘urban’
image (c.f. Hagiwara 1998: 71).

Figure 3: Cover art for albums by 1970s 'City Music' artists. From left to right: Minami Yoshitaka, Matenrō no hiroin 摩天楼
のヒロイン (1973); Matsutōya Yumi 松任谷由実, Cobalt Hour (1975); Kosaka Chū 小坂忠, Horo (1975)

Other than their connection with Happy End, the artists representing City Music in Tōno’s article have
several things in common: their music is American-style and highly polished pop, generally oriented
towards adult listeners rather than teenagers. Some of them, like Kosaka Chū, experiment early on
with R&B sounds that would become more prominent in 1980s City Pop. Some of the artists in 1970’s
City Music also work on collaborations, as producers or lyricists with 1980s City Pop stars, and a few of
them, most famously Yamashita Tatsurō and Ōtaki Eiichi, would directly partake in the early 1980s City
Pop boom with the success of albums like Ōtaki’s A Long Vacation (1981) and Yamashita’s For You
(1982). With some exceptions, record covers by these acts show yet little traces of the visual aesthetic
that would fuel 1980s City Pop.

The earliest occurrence of the actual term ‘City Pop’ in the corpus dates four years later and can be
found in a newspaper article from October 1981, a Yomiuri shinbun review of an album by Matsushita
Makoto 松下誠. The Yomiuri shinbun calls Matsushita’s light jazz album ’First Light’ an example of
‘haisensuna shiti poppu’ ハイセンスなシティポップ, or ‘City Pop with a refined taste.’ It is around
this time that the music industry begins to use the term City Pop to market a young generation of
artists that produce polished, Westernized pop geared towards affluent young adults. Matsushita, a
professional studio guitarist who would later join the rock band A.B’s, had no obvious relation to Happy
End or the 1970s Tokyo rock scene they stemmed from, which had mostly developed out of amateur
bands at elite Tokyo universities (cf. Kimizuka 2016). Rather, he and many other artists and producers

9
of the early 1980s City Pop scene were graduates of the Yamaha music school (Yamaha ongakuin ヤマ
ハ音楽院) (cf. Kō 2011: 182). In the general press sub-corpus, the name City Pop continues to turn up
frequently over the course of the year 1982 in a series of articles on various singers and producers and
reports of concerts that use the term to discuss these new artists. Some of them are still well-known
and frequently mentioned in connection with City Pop today, such as Inagaki Jun’ichi 稲垣潤一,
Nakahara Meiko or Kadomatsu Toshiki 角松敏生. Others however, like Yamamoto Kantarō 山本寛太
郎, Shiratori Junko 白鳥順子 or Sada Reiko 佐田玲子 make barely an appearance in later dated texts
in the corpus, even in highly specialized and otherwise exhaustive publications on City Pop as a genre.
Only in one article from this period are New Music veterans Yamashita Tatsurō, Matsutōya Yumi and
Ōtaki Eiichi mentioned in passing as important figures at the ‘origin’ (genryū 源流) of the genre; the
clear focus of City Pop discourse of this time is on a new generation of artists. City Pop, as these articles
define it, also appears to be a rather short-lived trend: mentions of the genre name or variations such
as City Pops (shiti poppusu シティポップス) are sparse after 1982, and the term completely vanishes
after 1987.

The term City Pop resurfaces in the corpus only in 2002, in the first of a series of specialized
publications for music collectors (‘disc guides’). These publications rediscover both 1970s and 1980s
western-oriented Japanese music as a new kind of retro chic. In this, they can be read as an extension
of a retro boom that had started in the late 1980s, when club DJs and some of the musicians active in
the Shibuya-kei music scene 9 had begun to discover the sampling potential of older Japanese music
that incorporated elements from funk, fusion or otherwise rhythm-oriented styles. These musicians,
otherwise mostly obsessed with European and American vintage beats, now increasingly turned to
songs they called wamono 和モノ (literally, ‘Japanese things’) or sometimes ‘rare grooves’ (rea grūvu
レア・グルーヴ). Japan’s big record companies put out compilation albums of their 1970s and 1980s
music, further fueling the retro boom. The disc guides of the early 2000s, typically written by either
music journalists or creators who are themselves part of the music industry like J-Pop cover designer
Kimura Yutaka 木村ユタカ, begin to use City Pop as an umbrella term for this spectrum of music,
which is an array of even more diverse stylistic influences than 1980s City Pop had been. At the same
time, they all mention Happy End as the ‘forefathers’ (senzo 先祖) or the ‘origin’ (genryū 源流) of City
Pop. In doing so they essentially revive Tōno’s idea of City Music from the late 1970s, but they also
recontextualize and redefine it. The idea of 1970s City Music gets fused with the better-known name
and the better-defined visual image and aesthetics of the City Pop of the 1980s, which is exploited for
the cover art and illustrations that the disc guides use. Whether an artist belongs to the newly
expanded genre of City Pop, however, now depends less on adherence to a specific intermedial
aesthetic code or sharing in a specific media ecology than it does on his or her interpersonal or artistic
relations to other artists, most importantly Happy End. Idol singer Matsuda Seiko 松田聖子 counts as
a City Pop artist in some guide books - not, one suspects, because her music or image are a particularly
good fit for the genre, but rather because of her collaborative work with Ōtaki Eiichi and Matsumoto

9
See Roberts 2013 for a discussion of the typically Western and Latin oriented Shibuya-kei genre as
a ’transnational soundscape’.

10
Takashi. Some texts published during this first City Pop revival create elaborate genealogies that
sometimes go out of their way to establish such connections between Happy End, the 1970s New
Music and City Music scene and 1980s artists. From this time on, it becomes relatively common to use
the term City Pop simply as an ‘alternative name’ for the kind of New Music that Happy End and their
close friends and associates were producing, a type of usage that is still common today. 10 Some guides
use the term as a point of departure for a Happy End-centric reading of Japanese pop history in general.
One text about ‘Proto-City Pop’ even attempts to trace the roots of the genre back to the pre-war
ryūkōka of Saijō Yaso 西條八十 (1892-1970) (cf. Ogawa 2006). Other texts look beyond the Eighties
and try to find influences of City Pop in 1990s music, incorporating Shibuya-kei bands like Pizzicato Five
into their definition of the genre. 11

This canonization of Happy End’s former members as the central figures of a now very vast musical
field served to further heighten their status in Japanese music historiography, which had already been
high by the early 2000s (cf. Wajima 2004). Conversely, the connection to an important and established
band lent a sort of intellectual sheen and historical importance to this genre which had been the
product of a very commercial musical environment and had not survived for very long. Happy End, by
contrast, had originally commercially only been modestly successful, but proved influential in the long
term.12 After disbanding, their former members had gone one to pursue successful solo careers as
composers, producers, studio musicians and performers that would make them important figures in
New Music and City Music. Similarly to Hosono Haruomi, who both founded the commercially
extremely successful Technopop band Yellow Magic Orchestra and produced innovative music in more
arty genres like Exotica or Ambient, Happy End’s other members straddled the line between high
culture and pop and soon acquired a reputation as seminal figures in the history of Japanese popular
music. Their earlier work grew in stature, and today the band is frequently credited for having
pioneered an innovative way to fuse Japanese-language lyrics to the rhythms of rock music. 13
Matsumoto Takashi, the band’s main lyricist, skillfully promoted this metamusical discourse himself.
In several essays and interviews published throughout the early 1970s, he problematized the ‘twisted
mother tongue’ that Japanese singers were forced to adopt in order to accommodate the syncopated
rhythms of rock. While Matsumoto championed American and British rock music and had little regard
for traditional Japanese musical styles, he also distanced himself from musicians who were attempting
a mere ‘imitation of the West’ (seiyō magai 西洋まがい). 14 For himself and Happy End, Matsumoto
carved out a position as innovators who sought to create a new Japanese tradition (atarashii Nihonteki
naru mono 新しい日本的なるもの) 15 and even a new Japanese language tailor-made to fit the
American rock sound, a ‘16-beat Japanese’ (16-bīto no Nihongo 16 ビートの日本語). 16 Moreover,

10
See, for instance, Bourdaghs 2012: 166-67.
11
Shibuya-kei in its early form was also associated with Happy End or more specifically ’the Hosono lineage’
(Marx 2004).
12
In my discussion of the band’s history and influence, I base myself on Wajima (2004) and Kimura (2008)
unless indicated otherwise.
13
See Hagiwara 1998 for a typical discussion of the band’s importance. For discussions of Matsumoto’s early
poetic style, see Bourdaghs 2012: 173-175 and Hosoma 2004, 2015.
14
Matsumoto 1971: 33.
15
Ibid.
16
Cf. Karashima 2015: 30. Some of the other articles and interviews that made up the ‘Japanese rock debate’
(Nihongo rokku ronsō 日本語ロック論争) of the early 1970s have been reprinted in Kimura 2008.

11
Matsumoto’s early lyrics were smart and intellectual in a fashionable way: steeped in irony and
experimenting with surrealistic techniques, they displayed a certain literariness and frequently
referenced the works of Japanese writers and poets like Miyazawa Kenji 宮沢賢治, Abe Kōbō 安部公
房 or Watanabe Takenobu 渡辺武信. As Tōno’s assessment, discussed earlier, of the ‘image of the city’
on Kazemachi roman attests, there already existed a perception in the 1970s that Matsumoto’s lyrical
work contained layers of depth that other rock and pop music seemed to lack. Matsumoto helped this
perception along by publishing his lyrics in book form, along with his poetry, short stories, and some
essays in which he offered helpful interpretations of Happy End’s most cryptic songs. 17 After the break-
up of the band, he would go on to become a highly successful professional lyricist, providing words to
the songs of kayōkyoku, New Music, City Music and City Pop artists throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Even though his commercial lyrics from this period barely show any traces of the avant-garde style and
nostalgic imagery that characterize his early work, his well-established reputation as a ‘literary’ writer
could only serve to elevate the reputation of the music that the disc guides published past 2000 were
now calling City Pop. These guides consequently stress his innovative contribution to the newly
expanded genre, and his historical importance in general.

As the corpus further shows, the small City Pop revival supported by these retro-oriented and Happy
End-focused publications intensifies in the 2010s and combines with a general resurgence in 1980s
nostalgia. General interest magazines and even the newspapers now begin to use the term City Pop
again. Many of these texts, such as a special issue of the nostalgic men’s magazine Shōwa 40-nen otoko
昭和４０年男 from 2014, focus on 1980s City Pop artists and make comparatively little mention of
1970s artists. Others follow the expanded genre definition and include Happy End and many 1970s
City Music/New Music artists in their portrayal of City Pop. City Pop gets more and more frequently
mentioned in the music press again, and several younger artists and bands from the Tokyo indie scene
are being put forward by enthusiast press publications such as Music Magazine as flagbearers of a
‘new City Pop’ (新しいシティ・ポップ); various Internet publications follow suit. These ‘new City
Pop’ artists include acts as musically diverse as funk-popper Junk Fujiyama ジャンクフジヤマ,
polished pop diva Hitomi Toi 一十三十一, various indie rock bands such as Yogee New Waves, genre-
defying ‘exotic rock’ act CERO and EDM artists such as Awesome City Club.

17
Cf. Matsumoto 1985b, 2016. Most interestingly, the purposefully ambiguous Haikara hakuchi はいからはく
ち gets decrypted as an (auto)critical work examining the minds of Japanese rock fans that blindly collect only
Western music (cf. Matsumoto 2016: 158-161).

12
Figure 4: Magazines and books about City Pop from 2006-2015. From left to right: Kimura Yutaka, Japanese City Pop (2006) –
cover art by Suzuki Eijin; Music Magazine, No. 6/2015; Shōwa 45-nen otoko, Vol. 23 (2014)

Some of these newer artists have emphatically embraced 1970s or 1980s City Pop or both, sometimes
covering the songs of their idols from these periods, or even parodying them; but others have not, and
still others have explicitly rejected any relation or direct musical influence. 18 The great musical
variation in this ‘New City Pop’ scene finds a visual reflection in the diversity of the album art. Artists
like Junk Fujiyama have commissioned illustrations from 1980s figures like Nagai Hiroshi, consciously
seeking to link their work to that of earlier City Pop artists. With other albums however, one would be
hard pressed to make a strong aesthetic connection to earlier forms of the genre. It is at this point that
some begin to suspect that City Pop has ceased to be a meaningful genre distinction.

Figure 5: Cover art from the most recent City Pop revival. From left to right: Junk Fujiyama ジャンクフジヤマ, Junk Scape
(2013) – art by Nagai Hiroshi; Hitomi Toi 一十三十, The Memory Hotel (2015); Never Young Beach, Yashinoki House (2015)

Stable genre attributives of City Pop

A diachronic analysis of the corpus, however, reveals not just ruptures, expansions and redefinitions
of City Pop as a genre, but also a certain consistency in the idea of what City Pop is supposed to be
about. Controlling for attributive adjectives (keiyōshi, keiyōdōshi, meishi linked with no or adjectival
phrases) that frequently accompany the term City Pop, it becomes apparent that throughout all sub-
corpora and across the whole time span from 1977 to 2016, several key terms get repeated over and
over again. These terms can be grouped into semantic clusters that form an array of linked similar

18
See Watanabe 2015 for an introduction to the 2010s City Pop revival, which according to him originates with
the release of Cero’s first album World Record.

13
concepts. Prominent among these attributives are terms like daitoshi no 大都市の (‘of the big city’)
or tokaiteki 都 会 的 (‘urban’ or ‘metropolitan’), which in some but not all cases a look at the
concordances reveals to be simple translations of the word ‘City’ in ‘City Pop’ for the convenience of a
Japanese readership. Other clusters reveal that writing about City Pop has consistently stressed the
polishedness (senren 洗練), the refined taste (sensu センス), and the fashionable stylishness (oshare
おしゃれ) that the genre is supposed to embody - and that can reasonably be linked to corresponding
visual and aural signifiers that have been discussed above. It bears note that while non-linguistic
signifiers in the genre have changed greatly over the years and decades, these verbal attributives are
diachronically stable; they appear in early 1980s music reviews just as often as in 2016 blog posts, even
if the music they describe shows great variation.

Frequent attributives (and variations) Meaning

tokaiteki 都会的 urban, metropolitan

tokai no 都会の
tokai kankaku [no aru] 都会感覚[のある]

senren [sareta] 洗練[された] refined, polished

sensu センス (refined, good) taste

haisensu ハイセンス

daitoshi no 大都市の urban

urban dwellers’
toshi no 都市の

toshi seikatsusha no 都市生活者の

oshare おしゃれ stylish, fashionable, smart

shareta しゃれた

Nihon no 日本の Japanese

sofistikēto ソフィスティケート sophisticated

Figure 6: Stable genre attributives in the discursive construction of City Pop (1977-2016)

14
Conclusion: City Pop, genealogical narrative and ontological intermediality
From these findings, we may draw several conclusions that shed some light both on the history of City
Pop and on the discursive nature of popular musical genre construction in the recent Japanese context.

First, textual evidence from the corpus suggests that the vernacular historiography of City Pop can be
subdivided into four distinct periods: the pre-1980s, the 1980s, the 2000s, and the 2010s – the earliest
of which precedes even widespread usage of the genre name itself. As outlined above, City Pop meant
something different in each of these periods, and it sounded and looked different as well. At the same
time, there is a shared emic history of some artists, such as Yamashita Tatsurō or Ōtaki Eiichi, across
some of these periods, and a reservoir of emic aural and visual cues that etic journalistic writing
sometimes convincingly uses to establish links and postulate diachronic coherence. There is also a
remarkable diachronic consistency to the attributives ascribed to the genre in etic writing.

Second, we can look at the discursive construction of City Pop as a genre as another example of the
centrality of what Wajima (2004) has called the ‘Happy End myth’ (Happii endo no shinwa はっぴい
えんどの神話) in Japanese popular music historiography. In his 2004 article on the band’s rise to
prominence, Wajima mainly refers to the examples of Japanese-language rock music and to New Music
to show how Happy End have gained ever more importance for the history of various types of popular
music in the eyes of music journalists, critics and other writers – but we can see that their myth holds
true for City Pop as well. Happy End have been retroactively constructed as the sole forefathers of a
genre that at its first emergence to the general public in the early 1980s was only partially connected
to them. By itself, this does not seem very remarkable; the ‘search for the roots’ of a genre is a common
practice in popular music history writing, as is the focus on single acts and artists in a medium
dominated by star culture. If one is looking for pioneers in American-style, but Japanese-language
‘polished’ urban pop music, Happy End and its former members probably fit the bill better than any
other single act of the 1970s.

However, this insistence on clear genealogies and historical continuity where breaks could just as
readily be established tells us something about the general role that etic writing about music plays in
the construction of genres in popular music in Japan. It highlights the importance of narratives for the
long-term survival of musical genre descriptors. As we have seen, the vitality of the concept of City Pop
extends beyond both the intermedial aesthetic and the musical ecology that first brought the genre to
the forefront in the early 1980s. If City Pop today is more than just a simple case of nostalgia for a
relatively short-lived musical boom, this is largely thanks to the construction of meaning and continuity
in some publications written by a relatively small number of Japanese music journalists who integrated
often disparate and sometimes contradictory artistic productions into a coherent genealogical
narrative.

I argue that we should thus read City Pop not just as an example of intermedial translation, but also of
the principle that media historian Jens Schröter (2011) has termed ‘ontological intermediality’. Put
simply, ontological intermediality is ‘a model suggesting that media always already exist in relation to
other media… is not individual media that are primal and then move towards each other intermedially,
but […] it is intermediality that is primal and […] the clearly separated "monomedia" is the result of
purposeful and institutionally caused blockades, incisions, and mechanisms of exclusion.’ (ibid.). In
other words, new media depend on pre-existing media to define themselves through differentiation
to these pre-existing media. But through this definition process, new media definitions invariably also

15
incorporate ‘traces’ of these existing media into themselves. Thus, the principle of ontological
intermediality also ‘precedes [new media] since the terms for the description of a new medium can
only be borrowed from already existing language or can be composed from existing terms into
neologisms’ (ibid.). This in turn leads to a primacy of language and specifically written language in long-
term diachronic media definition, since written language is the only medium in which such medium-
differentiation and the generation of new meaning out of the same repeating terms (in the sense of
what Derrida has termed différance) can effectively take place. In a primordially intermedial medium
such as pop music, this holds true for genre definitions as well. While the words used to describe a
genre may stay the same, they both acquire and generate new meaning through a process of
establishing and re-establishing intermedial relations with new aural and visual signifiers and
integrating them into a stable narrative. It is this constant recontextualization that can help to keep a
musical genre alive, or even revive it after a long dormant period.

If we were to identify a media hierarchy in the process of the intermedial construction of musical
genres, I would thus argue that writing, specifically: etic writing, should be placed highly in that
hierarchy. A name alone is not enough to hold together a genre. Rather, there is an ontological need
for context and the semblance of a certain diachronic coherence to ensure its long-term survival. At
least this holds true in the case of Japanese City Pop, a genre that originally celebrated the endless
now of summer and looked as averse to intellectualization as anything in popular music history,
Japanese or otherwise.

Coda: Between irony and nostalgia: City Pop in the West

In a parallel movement that appears to have emerged largely separate from the revival of City Pop in
Japan proper, the 2010s have also seen a growing Western appreciation for artists associated with the
genre. 19 Despite the genre’s obsession with all things American and the fact that many City Pop artists
have recorded songs in the USA or collaborated with Western musicians throughout the 1970s and
1980s 20, American audiences had until then largely ignored City Pop. This changed with the advent of
the Internet-based microgenre Vaporwave, an ironic take on earlier retro appropriations of old pop
music. 21 Vaporwave artists extensively sample old music into electronic tracks; but they add alienating
distortion effects that involve slowing down the tempo of a track, fragmenting it into stop-time
patterns, or looping short samples endlessly. Through these effects, sampled passages that sound
optimistic or mellow in their original context typically take on a nightmarish tinge. Vaporwave music
videos use analogous visual effects: crude early Web graphics, moving images distorted to look like
footage on worn VHS tapes or other forms of glitch art. Replete with such ironic refractions, Vaporwave
may be interpreted as an aesthetic critique of the vacuous consumerist exploitation of nostalgia that
plagues pop music under the conditions of late capitalism, or has in any case inspired such critiques. 22
From its early days, Vaporwave has borrowed elements of Japanese pop songs and the City Pop
intermedial aesthetic. On his 2013 album Hit Vibes, Saint Pepsi already samples Yamashita Tatsurō

19
The following discussion focuses on the Anglophone, Internet-centered reception in Western countries. In East
Asian and South East Asian countries other than Japan, a similar trend can be observed that partially overlaps
with the Western reception but seems informed by a generally greater familiarity with Japanese popular culture.
For reasons of space, I will not focus on the particularities of the Asian reception of City Pop.
20
Famously, Happy End recorded their third and final studio album Happy End (1973) in California with Van Dyke
Parks.
21
On Vaporwave and its spread through visual and aural representations on social media, cf. Born 2017. On the
ephemeral nature of such ‘online-only’ genres, cf. Fleetwood 2017.
22
Cf. Grafton 2016, Nowak/Whelan 2018.

16
alongside Michael Jackson. Album covers in the genre frequently make use of 1980s anime artwork,
City Pop-inspired pop art, or the fullwidth latin alphabet characters used by some Japanese computer
systems. Some Vaporwave artists even put kanji into their artist names or into track titles even though
(or maybe because) neither they nor most of their Western audience can read much Japanese. 23 In
this context, the function of Japanese City Pop mainly appears to be that of a Brechtian alienation
device. Similar to yet at the same time visibly and audibly different from Western 80s pop, it serves to
disrupt the nostalgic effect that retro pop usually strives to create.

However ironic the original intention, many Western Vaporwave artists and their audience soon
developed a genuine love for their musical source material and started collecting old Japanese records
and cassette tapes. The emergence of Future Funk in 2015, a more upbeat Vaporwave offshoot,
marked a shift towards an unironic nostalgic appreciation of Japanese music. Future Funk too makes
extensive use of City Pop samples, but aims to adapt these samples to the sound of modern house and
lounge music instead of adding distortion effects. The distancing effect engendered by City Pop’s
Japaneseness apparently can help nostalgia along instead of hindering it, since it makes the music
sound fresh to Western audiences already oversaturated with domestic retro pop. As Van Paugam, a
Chicago-based DJ who has done much to popularize the genre with an American audience, explains it,

City Pop has just enough Western influence to sound like untouched, untainted versions of
what we once had, but without being hyper-commercialized. I think the music's purity is what
draws people in. The fact that they can reminisce about a time and place that aren't their own
and still feel nostalgic is something new for a lot of people. 24

Although both genres address a niche audience, the heavily Internet-focused nature of Vaporwave and
Future Funk allows for a disproportionate representation of this music on online platforms such as
YouTube. Through a quirk in YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, old City Pop songs appreciated by
the Vaporwave and Future Funk community thus gained exposure with Western audiences. Most
prominently, a remix of Takeuchi Mariya’s 竹内まりや disco song Plastic Love (1985) accumulated
over 22 million views on YouTube between the summer of the 2017 and early 2019. 25 By the same
route, even more marginal Japanese productions such as the ambient album Through the Looking
Glass (1983) by Takada Midori 高田みどりhave recently found their way to Western listeners. 26 As of
2019, a mostly Anglophone but quite diverse fan community gathers in in web forums, YouTube
channels and Facebooks groups to discuss a wide variety of Japanese music and increasingly also music
from other Asian countries from the 1970s to the 2010s under the City Pop label. This online
community overlaps to a certain extent with fandoms of other products of Japanese pop culture such
as anime and video games and shows less interest in the genealogy of the genre than is commonly
exhibited in the Japanese music press. Consequently, Happy End and the 1970s artists closely
associated with them are less popular in this context and sometimes take a backseat to 1980s anison
アニソン (anime song) or idol acts that probably would not pass muster as ‘urbane’ or ‘sophisticated’
in Japan. Still, this Internet-fueled City Pop boom has served as an entry-point to the history of
Japanese popular music for many people. It certainly cannot have harmed the sales of the recent

23
As an example for this kind of code-switching, cf. the album 札幌コンテンポラリー (2012) by Vektroid, an
artist based in Portland, Oregon. No transliteration or translation is provided for the Japanese name of the album
(Sapporo kontemporarī or ‘Sapporo Contemporary’), and the artist published it under the pseudonym ‘情報デ
スク Virtual’ (Jōhō desuku Virtual, or ‘Information Desk Virtual’).
24
Quoted from an interview in a local newspaper article (Winkie 2019).
25
Cf. Calkins 2019.
26
Cf. Beta 2018.

17
American release of Hosono Haruomi’s early solo albums on Seattle-based record label Light in the
Attic, which has also put out a compilation that explores 1970s Japanese folk-rock. 27

The Japanese media have also noticed the West’s newfound appreciation for City Pop. This has
triggered yet another round of repackaging and reselling City Pop to a domestic Japanese audience,
this time as the rare kind of Japanese music that appeals to foreigners–which neatly ties into the
genre’s original transnational image. 28 Over the space of just a few months in late 2018 and early 2019,
several Japanese artists produced cover versions of Plastic Love, among them the singer Tanaka Yūri
田中裕梨 and the DJ tofubeats. If City Pop seems set to continue its evolution as a genre even beyond
the Heisei era, it will likely do so as a reimported product.

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Discography
Arai [Matsutōya], Yumi: Cobalt Hour. LP. Express, 1975.

Fujiyama, Junk. Junk Scape. CD. Victor, 2013.

Happii endo. Kazemachi roman. LP. URC, 1971.

———. 1973. Happy End. LP. Bellwood Records.

———. CITY/Happii endo besuto arubamu. LP. Bellwood ⁄ KING (LP:OFL-15), 1973.

Hitomi, Toi. The Memory Hotel. CD. Billboard Records, 2015.

情報デスクVirtual [Jōhō desuku Virtual]. 2012. 札幌コンテンポラリー [Sapporo Kontemporarī].

CDr. Beer on the Rug.

Kadomatsu, Toshiki. Hatsukoi. 7" Single. Air Records (RAS-536), 1985.

———. ON THE CITY SHORE. LP. Air Records (RAL-8805), 1983.

Kosaka, Chū. Horo. LP. Mushroom, 1975.

Matsushita, Makoto. FIRST LIGHT. LP. Air Records (RAL-8506), 1981.

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Minami, Yoshitaka. Matenrō no hiroin. LP. Showboat, 1973.

Nakahara, Meiko. Kon’ya dake DANCE DANCE DANCE. 7" Single. Toshiba/EMI, 1982.

Never Young Beach. Yashinoki House. CD. Roman, 2015.

Ōtaki, Eiichi. A LONG VACATION. LP. NIAGARA⁄CBS/SONY, 1981.

———. Ame no uenzudei. 7" Single. NIAGARA⁄CBS/SONY, 1982.

PIPER. LOVERS LOGIC. LP. Moon Records, 1985.

———. Summer Breeze. LP. Yupiteru Records (YV27-1003), 1983.

Saint Pepsi. 2013. Hit Vibes. Digital release.

Sugiyama, Kiyotaka, and Omega Tribe. Futari no natsu monogatari -NEVER ENDING SUMMER-. 7"
Single. Pappu, 1985.

Suzuki Keiichi to Mūnraidāzu. Hi no tama bōi. LP. Elektra (L-4031E ).

Takada, Midori. 1983. Through the Looking Glass. LP. RCA Red Seal.

Takeuchi, Mariya. 1985. Plastic Love. 12" Single. Moon Records.

V.A. CITY POP ~SONY MUSIC edition. CD. Sony, 2003.

———. Even A Tree Can Shed Tears: Japanese Folk & Rock 1969-1973. CD. Light in the Attic, 2017.

Yamashita, Tatsurō. FOR YOU. LP. AIR ⁄ RVC (RAL-8801), 1982.

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