It was the sound of a bubble economy that never thought it would burst: glittering, confident, a little melancholy under the chrome. Forty years on, Japanese city pop is having its second life — and this time the whole world is listening.
Plastic love, eternal life
Born in late-1970s and ’80s Tokyo, city pop fused smooth funk, jazz fusion and AOR into a sound built for night drives along the bayfront expressway. Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love” and Tatsuro Yamashita’s sun-drenched grooves defined an aesthetic of urban sophistication that felt impossibly modern.
An algorithm resurrected it, but nostalgia for a Japan that never quite existed is what keeps it alive.
The revival arrived sideways — through a YouTube recommendation engine that began feeding decades-old tracks to listeners who had never set foot in Shinjuku. From there it fed vaporwave, future funk, and a wave of young Japanese artists reclaiming the genre on their own terms.
Crackle and warmth, city lights and longing: city pop is less a genre than a feeling of a city at 2 a.m. And feelings, unlike economies, don’t expire.