Japanese pops replaced kayōkyoku with Beatles DNA
J-pop—Japanese popular music mainstream since the 1990s—grew from 1960s rock bands like Happy End blending Beatles and Beach Boys with native song, through Yellow Magic Orchestra new wave to idol-driven pops known simply as pops in Japan.
Japan's popular song began as ryūkōka, rooted in the Meiji era but only reaching the whole nation in the Taishō period, when violins, harmonicas and guitars accompanied melodies still built on the native pentatonic scale. In the 1930s Ichiro Fujiyama crooned softly into the microphone, and the jazz composer Ryoichi Hattori set out to give Japanese song a blues flavour, writing Farewell Blues for Noriko Awaya. Army pressure halted jazz during the war, but Hattori's postwar hit Tokyo Boogie-Woogie for Shizuko Kasagi earned him the title father of Japanese pops, while local players entertained American troops with boogie-woogie, mambo and country.
A rock-and-roll craze erupted in 1956 after Kosaka Kazuya and the Wagon Masters covered Heartbreak Hotel, and 45,000 fans filled the first Nichigeki Western Carnival during one February week in 1958. Kyu Sakamoto's 1961 Ue wo Muite Arukō, sold abroad as Sukiyaki, became the first Japanese song to reach number one in the United States, holding the spot four weeks in Cash Box and three in Billboard. The Ventures' 1962 visit sparked an electric guitar boom, and the Beatles' 1966 Budokan shows, policed by riot squads, spawned the Group Sounds bands that brought the major second into Japanese melody.
Happy End then fused Anglo-American rock with Japanese lyrics, and late-1970s acts such as Yellow Magic Orchestra and Southern All Stars pushed the fusion further; Southern All Stars singer Keisuke Kuwata even bent vowels toward English, singing karada as kyerada. The label J-pop first attached to Western-leaning acts like Pizzicato Five after the station J-Wave launched, though Mitsuhiro Hidaka of AAA traces it to Eurobeat. In 1990 Tower Records' Japanese arm applied it to every industry-association release except indie music, and by 2008 its shops had added sections such as J-punk, J-anime and Visual kei.
City pop and technopop coloured the 1970s and 1980s, J-Euro and Shibuya-kei the 1990s and 2000s. Rock musicians of the 1980s had sneered at kayōkyoku, the older catch-all for pop from the 1920s onward, yet 1990s bands such as Glay folded it back into their sound, while breakbeats and samplers reshaped rhythm. A newer tag, gacha pop, ties the music to city pop, anime songs, Vocaloids and VTubers.
Source: J-pop
