American military radio is why he grew up loving the Beach Boys

When I hear city pop I picture something cartoonish, neon skylines, glossy nostalgia.

Going deeper into Tatsuro Yamashita's Spacy, I found the gloss is actually the point, not a lack of depth.

After the war, American military bases stayed in Japan, and one broadcast a station called the Far East Network straight into Tokyo, the actual reason Yamashita grew up loving the Beach Boys.

Through the late 60s Japan had real student movements and political energy. By the late 70s that energy receded, and attention shifted toward lifestyle and consumption. City pop rose out of that shift.

In 1976, a magazine called POPEYE introduced Japanese youth to American surf and driving culture as something to aspire to, pointing them toward AOR artists like Boz Scaggs. This was the actual soundtrack for driving home through a newly prosperous, neon lit city.

Haruomi Hosono, right beside Yamashita in this scene, later told The Guardian what he was going for: exotica from an oriental perspective. Japanese musicians taking American genres partly built on exoticized ideas of the East, and exoticizing themselves right back.

Yamashita's road wasn't smooth. His first band, Sugar Babe, flopped in 1975 and dissolved when their label went bankrupt. Spacy, from 1977, was him picking himself back up, with Hosono and Ryuichi Sakamoto in the room a full year before Yellow Magic Orchestra existed.

I've known Sakamoto mostly through his later ambient work. Holding this record is what connected those dots for me. It still didn't break Yamashita. Three more records came before Ride on Time finally did, in 1980.

If this pulls you in the way it pulled me, start with Michael K. Bourdaghs' book Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon, then Light in the Attic's Pacific Breeze compilations for the sound itself.

Small side note, this cover was designed by Kenkichi Sato, and it's become one of my favourites in the whole collection.