Around 2017, the song ‘Plastic Love’ by Mariya Takeuchi became a viral sensation on YouTube.The music played over a photo of a smiling girl in a shirt, bow tie, and suspenders, her hair swaying, with the album title “Plastic Love – Mariya Takeuchi” overlaid.
It soon garnered around 24 million views before being taken down due to copyright infringement. Amassing a cult following, Takeuchi was crowned the proverbial queen of the now-popular City Pop genre, one of the many styles made famous thanks to the internet. This song spawned hundreds of memes and other visual media, becoming a trailblazer for different songs in the genre, with artists such as Takeuchi’s husband, Tatsuro Yamashita (the “King of City Pop”), Miki Matsubara, ANRI, Tomoko Aran, and others experiencing a surge in popularity.
The song’s rise to musical stardom can be attributed to niche online subcultures and the wider internet, which are known for their appreciation of—and obsession with—everything Japanese. Still, this song suggests something else that is behind the mania of an aesthetically cool Japan: the so-called J-Cult.
Not tied to any popular visual media in the West and released by a lesser-known Japanese artist in 1984, the song never occupied a place in Western cultural memory. Yet its recent success prompted Warner Music to release a music video 41 years after its initial release.
The song itself strikes a nostalgic chord. Comments on YouTube often express a sense of Wanderlust, a romantic desire to explore distant times and places. The neologism anemoia, a word that arose within online forums in 2012, perhaps describes this more accurately; a combination of the Greek ánemos and nóos, the word refers to a nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known.
However, the Western craze over City Pop can be seen as widely out of place. City Pop was not an international phenomenon, unlike the Walkman, Karaoke, or Mario. The Japanese lyrics do not allow it to have the same universal reach as English-language-based products. At the same time, a distinct “cultural odour” renders it inseparable from its country of origin.
How can a song incomprehensible to Western audiences inadvertently evoke a sense of nostalgia in its listeners?
It is crucial to point out that there is a disconnect between the lyrics, which describe a woman who follows a superficial and hedonistic lifestyle after losing her love, and the online idealised image of Japan. This suggests a contradiction between the popular trope of the Japanese Dream Factory and the actual substance behind it. Western audiences have constructed a simulacrum based on a superficial understanding of aesthetics rather than examining the whole picture, which reveals much more complex socio-cultural trends and themes. This Western-based cliché is not new at all. Orientalist stereotyping has existed since the West first came into contact with Japan. Yet, the specific motif of a hyper-modern Japan goes all the way back to the post-war era.
Journalists, economists, academics, and others were enamoured by the apparent “miraculous” rise of Japan to first-world status during its late 20th-century Golden Age. Even Susan Sontag in 2000 expressed her keen interest in Japanese culture and a strong sense of connection to Japanese filmmakers such as Akira Kurosawa and the 1953 film Tokyo Story, even going as far as to say that she would like to write a novel set in contemporary Japan.
Japan’s position as the world’s second-largest economy (with a GDP exceeding half that of the United States) is commonly overlooked. After the devastation of the Second World War, Japan quickly became a technological powerhouse, transitioning from basic household appliances, chemicals, and heavy industrial manufacturing in the 1950s to complex consumer electronics, including semiconductors, computing, and telecommunications, in the 1960s and onwards.
Cultural scholar Iwabuchi Kochi describes modern Japanese consumer culture within a mindset of Akogare, or yearning, with the advancement, hybridisation, and indigenisation of mostly Western-originated practices.
The 80s were the era of complete Japanese dominance in consumer electronics from the likes of Nintendo, Sega, Panasonic, Atari, Sony, and Sharp. Such prized products came to symbolise the high point in consumer technology within global capitalist history, ushering in an era seen as the peak of Japanese optimism and opulence. A new ‘leisure class’ emerged from a consumer class. This new lifestyle of luxury goods and travel, as well as the discos and dive bars central to 1970s-80s nightlife, was complemented by a new soundtrack that represented this prosperity: City Pop.
Even by the early 1970s, Japan had become the global model of modernity, disproving the assumption that being “modern” meant being Western, embracing Christian values, and having a predominantly white population. With its stylised brands, world-renowned cinema, neon-laden urban landscape, and industrious work culture, Japan has often been deemed “sleek,” “futuristic,” and, most importantly, “unique”. It is also important to remember that this global diffusion of mass culture was novel in its own right.
Cultural scholar Iwabuchi Kochi describes modern Japanese consumer culture within a mindset of Akogare, or yearning, with the advancement, hybridisation, and indigenisation of mostly Western-originated practices. Globalisation is then more accurately understood as a semi-conscious cyclical process of local creative adaptation, known as Glocalisation or Dochakuka. Taylor Atkins, a historian of Japan, refers to this as the simultaneity of both universalising and particularising tendencies.
Advances in musical and personal consumer technologies – such as stereos and cassette tapes – and a booming economy – one that could support record funding – were crucial in kick-starting City Pop; yet, these material factors obscure the importance of Akogare within the genre’s development. Japanese artists consciously selected many Western cultural motifs as building blocks for their pieces. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, they increasingly experimented with popular Western instrumental styles, art forms, imagery, and new genres, including pop, funk, disco, boogie, and soft rock. The prevalence of loanwords from the English language, such as “plastic” and “love”, provides evidence for this.
It was the appropriation and adaptation of these motifs to fit the Japanese and a more generic Asian consciousness which differentiated it from Western culture and media. Each cultural product was produced and consumed both inside and outside of Japan. This suggests a growing preeminence of interregional cultural flows, rather than the perceived paradigm of American cultural homogenisation.
Even the term ‘City’ refers to the nascent growth of urban Japan’s salaried middle class and lush consumerist society, which was deeply embedded within the transnational urban culture of the mid-century. Modern culture as a whole is neither the direct result of Americanisation nor a capitalist cultural hegemony. The renowned Marxist scholar Frederic Jameson argued in 1998 that although Sony’s acquisition of Columbia Pictures and Matsushita’s buyout of MCA Studios ostensibly demonstrated Japan’s growing weight in the global economy, the country still failed to master the kind of cultural productivity required to secure its own form of cultural globalisation.
Yet this still fails to recognise that the process towards a more ‘Western’ cultural production was not automatic. Many people from diverse cultures did not automatically adopt these Western streams of consumer goods. There was and is no uniform global culture or modernity.
It is important to note that the Western enchantment with Japan was also animated by envy. This issue became politicised in the US through quotas and tariffs on Japanese goods, pressure on Japan to liberalise its markets and the final conclusion of this saga with the Plaza and Louvre Accords of the late 1980s that depreciated the US dollar relative to the Yen. These decisions formed the basis of the asset bubble crash of the 1990s, which led to the Lost Decade, as well as the chronic ills that Japan still faces, including a massive public debt and an ageing population.
Japanic (a portmanteau of “Japan” and “panic”) was a popular expression that captured the sense of fear and anxiety in this period over Japan’s rapidly growing economic and cultural prestige. This was depicted in popular media from films like Blade Runner to books like Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun. William Gibson’s cyberpunk fiction is a poignant example in its depiction of Japan as the “cradle of modern futurity”, the site of hyper-modern technology and cyberculture embodied by neon-lit cities, sleek gadgets and highly stylised urban life.
Some critics argue that his work results from racial panic and a so-called “techno-orientalism”. Yet Gibson comments less on the alien nature of Japanese society and more on its cultural and technological aura. With its cultural capital stemming from entertainment media such as video games, anime, and manga, as well as Japanese cuisine and design, Japan serves as the Postnational Cool: the archetype for a globalised, futuristic, tech-infused aesthetic ideal that transcends traditional national identity.
Following the post-mortem of its 1990s economic stagnation, Gibson evaluated the widespread hagiographies of a lost Japan in 2001 in an article in Time, titled “The Future Perfect“. He observed that, despite a decline in economic prestige, Japan still appears futuristic. For him, Japanese coolness is a result of the country’s extraordinary historical trajectory. Its history is marked by rapid social restructuring following repeated “time shocks” from Meiji-era modernisation to Japan’s defeat in 1945, which paradoxically developed a culture that is both deeply traditional and constantly adaptive.
Gibson, however, pointed out that his image of a hyper-techno Japan is not only nuanced but has its own downside. This refers to alienation: the seductive allure of technology that dehumanises and overwhelms, echoing cyberpunk atomisation. The Postnational Cool perfectly captures this tension. ‘Japan’ is inspiring but distant, culturally enticing but socially complex.
Plastic Love emerged from a period when physical goods were increasingly made of plastic. But peeking behind the metaphorical polystyrene curtain shows this: aesthetics are not all that meets the eye.
Leave a comment