Theoretically Speaking, S4:E8:

What Makes J-Pop,  J-Pop ?

Well, the “J” stands for “Japanese.”

And “pop” is short for “popular.”

So “J-pop” is: “Japanese Popular Music.“

There. That was easy. I guess we’re done here. Last one out, turn off the lights and lock up.

{…Offstage, we hear a bit of whimpering…}

What’s that, Goodboy? There’s a “minimum word count?” 

Oh. OK. Let’s dive in.

J-pop is quite different from traditional Japanese music.

The country’s folk music was often sung without instrumental accompaniment. Its classical music was only performed for royalty and their ilk.

Whatever the genre, musicians approached it not as entertainment, but as a meditative and strength building experience.

J-pop, on the other hand, is very definitely meant for entertainment and the masses. It’s played on Western instruments in Western styles with a Western tone. It’s Western music as heard by Eastern ears.

This reimagining goes back at least as far as the 1920s when American jazz arrived in Japan, as I mentioned in last week’s article about City Pop. The 1950s saw the rise of Japanese artists performing American country and rock & roll songs, and then came the 1960s popularity of original songs sung in Japanese, like Kyu Sakamoto’s global smash “Ue O Muite Aruko” also known as “Sukiyaki.”

City pop was a mainstay of the late 70’s and 80s, until the Great Recession of the 90s changed everything. J-pop started mid-decade but didn’t get really big until after the economy got back on its feet around 1999.

…So they don’t.

The biggest stars in Japan rarely tour outside the country. They sing in Japanese (until recently; we’ll get to that) and their record companies market only to domestic consumers.

Despite incorporating hip hop, electronica, and other Western influences, J-pop is uniquely Japanese.

It’s meant to appeal to Japanese people and no one else. If other people like it, fine, but changing the style to attract foreign ears might reduce sales at home. Why mess up a good thing?

The appeal of J-pop might be hard for us foreigners to understand. One important concept in J-pop, and Japanese culture in general, is something called “kawaii:”

That’s the Japanese word for “cute.”

A couple years ago, a software developer I’d worked with before asked me to look at a Japanese game called “Tsuki’s Adventure,” so I installed it on my phone. It’s about a rabbit who hates his desk job in the city and quits when he inherits his grandfather’s carrot farm in Mushroom Village.

For centuries, visitors have remarked on the Japanese sense of playfulness.

Here in the States, adults only wear costumes for Halloween and at Comic Con. In Japan, it could be any time of year, just for the fun of it. Wearing a Pokemon or Hello Kitty costume on an ordinary Tuesday night isn’t weird. It’s cute. It’s kawaii.

The stereotype is that Norwegian metal bands stand in snow filled forests and try to look threatening while some Japanese metal bands try to look cute.

Kawaii metal is only one of dozens of J-pop subgenres. What they all have in common are catchy melodies, Japanese lyrics with occasional bits of English thrown in, unstoppable and sometimes forced exuberance, and youth.

Youth and pop go together like bubble and gum. The music industry in most countries markets young performers to young consumers. That’s where the money is.

It’s slightly different in Japan.

First, we have to understand the concept of idols. These aren’t historic figures like cancer researchers or Nobel Peace Prize winners.

They’re teenagers who sing, dance, and exude cheerfulness, innocence, and perfection. They’re to be worshiped.

• Young male idols have young female fans.

• Young female idols have middle-aged male fans.

This strikes us in the west as, well, a little creepy. It’s easy to judge, and maybe we should, but let’s look at this in context.

Loneliness is a huge problem in Japan.

So much so that there are rent-a-family companies. If you’re alone and need a brother to take to a concert, or a grandparent to take to a corporate dinner, or you just want someone’s company, you can rent actors to play those roles.

There’s intense pressure on Japanese men in their 20s to earn enough money to support a family before even beginning to date seriously. Some don’t get there by their 30s and 40s, and remain single.

They pick their favorite, buy all the merchandise, attend all the shows, and pay for handshakes and selfies at meet-and-greets. There is the occasional guy who takes it into stalking and sexual abuse territory, but it seems like most fans genuinely look at the idols as platonic daughter figures.

The Japanese music making machine includes talent agencies that sign teenagers, and younger boys and girls, to contracts and teach them singing, dancing, acting, and being cute. Hundreds of teens and preteens sign up every year for a shot at learning how to achieve charismatic idol-hood.

The biggest talent agency is called Johnny & Associates.

One of their better known acts is the group AKB48.

It might have dozens of members at any one time. They’re like Menudo for Japanese girls. And I do mean girls. Some are as young as 11 and when they hit “an unsuitable age” around 22, they “graduate.” That is, they’re asked to leave.

Remember, image is everything here. The girls may have to wear bikinis and lingerie, but they must always present an image of virginity.

Here’s a sample lyric.:

“I want to protect my purity, until I take off my school uniform.” 

“Seijun Philosophy” – AKB48
Oricon Chart #1, October 2013

AKB48 members can’t date or have boyfriends. It’s in the contract they signed. When paparazzi photographed a 20-year-old idol coming out of her boyfriend’s building early one morning, it was headline news. She shaved her head and tearfully apologized on television. 

In another instance, an idol was sexually assaulted by a fan. She too had to apologize for bringing dishonor on the group. There were no repercussions for the attacker.

The talent agencies prefer younger girls because it gives them longer careers. Fans can get emotionally involved with an idol’s growth as a performer. Idols that master and manipulate these parasocial relationships can go far.

Some idols can’t parlay their audience into a longer music career and turn to working in hostess bars. These are pretty common in east Asia. Lonely male patrons buy overpriced drinks for the hostesses, who earn 50 to 75 percent of the drink prices.

This is where the skills the idols learned at the meet-and-greets, the ability to make fans feel close without getting too close, come in handy. Though yes, there is the occasional exchange of money for sex.

There are, however, plenty of artists who work outside the idol system, or after their time within the system, striving to make great music.

Some even develop fan bases outside Japan. This may be because they use western music as a template. 

There’s been more English lyrics in recent years, too. It might be a few English words sprinkled in, or an artist might put out two versions of every song, one in each language.

Whatever the subgenre, and they’re pretty varied, their music is almost always crisply recorded, highly compressed, and piercingly bright. Their videos are slick and often futuristic.

It would be easy to say Ayumi Hamasaki is the Japanese Taylor Swift or Kenshi Yonezu is the Japanese Ed Sheeran.

But that wouldn’t be fair.

While they may sound western except for the language, these are unique musicians making their own art in a culture very different from ours. With the musical similarities and more English, however, expect to see and hear more of them, in the same way that we’re getting a lot of Korean acts on our airwaves.

Now, what’s the difference between J-Pop and K-Pop?

(Aside from the first letter and country of origin?)

That’s for a future article.

See you here next week.

---

Suggested Listening – Full YouTube Playlist