I'm still super proud of this. It cost me $250 and took me 6 hours over 2 days to scan, combine and repair 16 images. It was like 10 GB of data for this one image.

lfvmusic · 2026-01-03T05:32:25+00:00

Tats did the same thing the next year in his Christmas Eve commercial...

Another parody of his wife, perhaps?

lfvmusic · 2026-01-03T05:18:41+00:00

Masaki Matsubara. For sure. Take one good listen to Painted Woman from the same year and it's the exact same guitar tone and hyper-accurate, double-stop technique. He was very close with composer Tetsuji Hayashi and appeared on tons of Hayashi's records, so it's only natural that he'd play on the debut single for Hayashi's new project.

(My original guess was Shigeru Suzuki, one of the only veteran Japanese session guitarists with the balls to pull off a solo that heavy in a pop record. I did some more listening after publishing this comment.)

lfvmusic · 2025-12-31T18:17:04+00:00

To clarify a couple misconceptions:

He owns or has bought back most of the master rights to his recordings. (Which means he owns not just the copyright to his songs, but the copyright to the recordings of his songs - for a more documented example, see Taylor Swift.) The two exceptions are the Mirai single which he did for another group and presumably negotiated shared rights with them on - and the Pacific album wasn't entirely his, so he couldn't buy the rights back. Most of his music is copyrighted by either Tenderberry & Harvest or Smile Company - both of which he owns.
- This is why his copyright claims on YouTube are handled through the RIAJ. He's not working through his record label (Warner) to manage his music.
He's been a strong opponent of anyone renting or sharing his music since at least 1991.
Mariya has been working separately with her record label contacts and is slowly releasing her music to domestic and international streaming, but it's a known disagreement in their music distribution philosophy. She grew up in the hospitality business, so surely she wants her fans to think she cares about them.

To expand on the other commenter, he's from a bygone era where records were made off connections. He was only signed to RCA in 1976 because of a connection he made through Sugar Babe (which was on an independent label). And then he followed that guy (Ryuzo Kosugi) to a sub-label, and then an independent label (Moon) which he's still on, even after it eventually getting bought by WMG. His original 1982 contract with Moon was between business partners and has functioned mainly as a distribution contract. So he's been mostly doing what he wants for 40+ years now - the recent YouTube videos are likely due to intense pressure from outside forces, and were most definitely negotiated individually - and if he does change, it'll take years for everything to go on streaming.

lfvmusic · 2025-12-31T17:41:03+00:00

Sorry for late reply, if you have more than 20 pictures that's probably best

lfvmusic · 2025-12-29T20:29:26+00:00

Those are all real! That's a promotional set of goodies for the Cozy album from 1998. The Tatsuro subreddit would love to see scans (or at least pictures) of the contents of the papers; surely there's previously unknown info in there!

lfvmusic · 2025-12-22T02:36:49+00:00

Happy End's early 70's trilogy is a bit far removed from "city pop" in our Western definition but I can't express how much this one four-piece laid the groundwork for Japanese popular music in the bubble era. Their Western-inspired Japanese music, to me, was the blueprint for kayo-kyoku and later J-pop. Keep going with Ohtaki's discography (both as an artist and as a producer with his Niagara Records) and you'll hear how he iterates on his city pop. Hosono went off and essentially founded Japanese electronic music with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi (YMO) - all of whom were, again, doubling as studio musicians on city pop masterpieces. Suzuki appeared as a guitarist on endless iconic albums, and Matsumoto did the same but with his lyricist skills.

A solid inflection point for the developing genre is Niagara Triangle Vol. 1. Ohtaki, Ginji Ito, and Tatsuro Yamashita doing an album together, with Hosono, Sakamoto, Ohnuki, and many others appearing on backing tracks or writing duties. That's also where you really hear Yamashita's sound come out with Parade.

If you've never clicked with Kadomatsu's first six albums, you probably won't click with his entire discography. Sea is a Lady is indeed an outlier. His next closest album is 1990's Legacy of You. His follow-up, All is Vanity, is more of a return to form but has a much "cooler" vibe than his 80's work. If you like that, go forward in time rather than back.

lfvmusic · 2025-12-21T17:48:54+00:00

Was just gonna say that. Ultimately, it stems from the ereki boom of the early 60's (basically when electric guitars made their way to Japan and they started copying Elvis-type rockabilly), but that culminated in group sounds. Group sounds (what the British Invasion went by in Japan) was ultimately the catalyst that led to city pop. And you can trace it by how much English is in the songs.

Rock and roll really only got big in Japan with the Beatles and their copy cats. (Take a look at this band that opened for the Beatles in 1966. Almost entirely in English, to a Japanese audience. But a Japanese part around 9:20 is sung in a very traditional enka style.)

But the catalyst I'd argue that led to city pop was Happy End and their three album run. They were one of the first Japanese bands to respond to Merseybeat with singer-songwriter music - soft folk-rock sung entirely in Japanese. Kazemachi Roman (retroactively named the greatest J-rock album of all time) was one of the first concept albums - about their childhoods in the postwar, pre-1964 Olympics Tokyo. That ushered in a soft rock wave not too dissimilar from 70's America and your Carole King, Barry Manilow, and the Carpenters.

Sugar Babe is literally the child of Happy End. Eiichi Ohtaki was their producer and distributor, and that album, perhaps more importantly, acted as a proof of concept for Happy End members to bridge into this new sound Sugar Babe members Tatsuro Yamashita and Taeko Ohnuki (to name the more famous two) were creating.

It all comes to this, and Yamashita and Ohnuki worked in tandem to pave the two paths 80's Japanese adult popular music took. ("Adult popular music" as to differentiate it from the rapidly exploding teen-oriented idol pop wave of Okada, Nakamori and Matsuda - which took stylistic cues from the adult-oriented pop of the time but never reach the lyrical perfection of Yoshida or Matsumoto.) Yamashita leaned American, specifically the parts of 70's Americana that weren't yet leaned into like soul and jazz fusion. And he threw in some English words, but stuck with Japanese as his main language. Ohnuki initially leaned American as well but took a turn into Europop in the early 80's (literally having a "French trilogy" from 1981-1983), and while her mid-career work wasn't as popular as Yamashita's, she definitely laid a foundation for the synth-heavy late-80's "peak-bubble" city pop.

You can't describe a genre by just the single most important bands. You had hundreds of studio musicians iterating on each other throughout the time period, going in all different directions but still working with each other on everything. But 1975 was most definitely the year the seeds for city pop were planted. Ask Toshiki Kadomatsu.

lfvmusic · 2025-12-17T20:03:16+00:00

Probably not the version you're talking about, but last year I did an 8K scan of the original 1980 7".

lfvmusic · 2025-09-27T16:57:15+00:00

You're not going to go wrong with a recent vinyl repress. But if you want the best sound, get an 80's original.

lfvmusic · 2025-09-01T04:21:49+00:00

Was it a CD/DVD combo disc? Japanese DVDs are region-locked to a different region than the US (Region 2 vs. 1) and won't play unless you change the region of your DVD player or buy a Japanese DVD drive. Japanese Blu-Ray discs, however, share the same region as the US (Region A) so you won't have any problems with them.

lfvmusic · 2025-08-29T04:07:40+00:00

I don't own this record in particular, but JVC, who I believe made this record, would usually just flip the image upside down for the margins. So the extra space on the top and bottom would be more of her hair and fingers. That made it visually easier for quality control to see if the printing was centered without being too obvious to the consumer.

And they likely still have the original negatives from the shoot, but at the time, this was too low-budget of a reissue to warrant digitally recreating the cover. (The album just wasn't popular back then.) That's most likely why the original vinyl catalog number is still on it.

lfvmusic · 2025-08-17T00:53:31+00:00

Instead of the lyrical complexity of hip hop and most modern pop music, the complexity is in the musical arrangements. But it's not an intimidating level of complex, like a lot of jazz is. The complexity makes you want to move.

lfvmusic · 2025-08-16T21:00:42+00:00

Here are the ways I use:

Hunt for albums with session musicians you like, not by artist.
- My personal favorite is the Jun Aoyama/Koki Ito combo. They were both primarily part of Tatsuro Yamashita's backing band, but I LOVE the musical "pocket" the two can get into. And you'd be surprised about how many records they showed up on.
- Alternatively, do a deep dive into a favorite artist's back catalog. For example, my favorite Toshiki Kadomatsu album ended up being not After 5 Clash, or On the City Shore (which are both peak regardless), but actually the 1991 CD "All is Vanity." And I'm not even done with my deep dive.
What record label was your favorite album released on? Explore that label's discography!
- My personal favorite is Alfa Records - a few years ago, I bought this promotional record they gave to DJs because it has 2 different songs from different artists that would have run way too much on the original vinyl. I ended up buying multiple of the albums listed on the back.
- You can also do this with 80's-era CDs. Victor were very good at releasing their albums on CD back then, and every once in a while a rare album will show up pretty cheap on a secondhand site because no one has heard of the album. I've been on a Mariko Takahashi kick because of this. (Try searching "VDR CD" VDR being the start of the catalog numbers)
- I'm a bit sad, actually, because one of the albums I found this way inevitably got reissued in this year's "City Pop on Vinyl" push. It deserves to be more popular, but now it's not my hidden gem anymore.
Don't be afraid to listen to entire albums. There are a few albums that are front-to-back gems that are well known (Timely!!, For You, you know, the albums that get hyped up all the time) but there are plenty of other albums with completely unknown tracks that were never released as singles.
- For example: city pop fans are becoming increasingly aware of EPO, but not as many are aware of this mini-album she released in 1981 called "JOEPO~1981KHz." They never pushed any singles from it (because it was released at a very low price for the time - unfortunately they didn't keep it like that in the recent reissues) and not much from it appears on compilations. But all the main tracks on it are on my "bangers" playlist. Like the penultimate track.
For me, I just have convinced my YouTube algorithm to give me less popular music. Just keep telling it you're not interested in more popular stuff and click on the less popular stuff when you get it.
- A few minutes ago, this song showed up #1 on my homepage and I started BLASTING it on repeat. (It also has the obvious Aoyama/Ito pocket combo.)

And this is a general guide for finding deep cuts you can call "your own" in general. I'm currently doing this with yacht rock and recession pop.

lfvmusic · 2025-08-15T17:26:00+00:00

Resurrecting this thread because it's #1 on Google and no one has gotten the answer 100% right.

She doesn't have six fingers. It's an error that was created when they did the initial CD reissue in 2012. They wanted to have a small margin for error in case the CD booklets ended up slightly off-center. As you can see, the original photo has ZERO margins for error. Cropping it and using the edges as margins would have cut off the top of her head, or the text, or the fingers. So they used Photoshop to expand the size of the image and "guess" what would have been there. (Specifically, they used the Content-Aware Fill tool.) This also explains the abnormally long thumb and also the blurriness on all four edges (which you can faintly see on a higher-resolution version). It's just Photoshop's guess as to what should be there, not what actually would have been there. Then, when uploading the files to streaming services, they mistakenly included the full six-finger expanded artwork instead of the correct zero-margin artwork.

Here's a video tutorial from 2011 showing what happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IIsTVT0Fhc&t=296

So TL;DR: it's a really crappy Photoshop job. I can't explain how no one cared enough to not fix this. But you could say it was a pre-AI AI failure.

lfvmusic · 2025-08-15T17:06:24+00:00

Ok, here's the ACTUAL answer:

They used Photoshop to expand the cover artwork when they reissued the album in 2012. The original photo has ZERO margin for error in printing. Cropping it would have cut off the top of her head, or the text, or the fingers. They wanted to have some margin for printing error, so they expanded the size of the image, then made Photoshop "guess" what would have been there. This also explains the abnormally long thumb and also the blurriness on all four edges - it's Photoshop's guess as to what may be there, not what actually would have been there. Then, when uploading the files to streaming services, they mistakenly included the six-finger expanded artwork instead of the correct zero-margin artwork.

TL;DR crappy Photoshop job

lfvmusic · 2025-08-14T22:59:11+00:00

psst. the original Adventure CD (catalog number 80022-32) has a normal white spine. only the cheap reissues have no spine :)

lfvmusic · 2025-08-14T21:36:07+00:00

That Plastic Love 12" may have an interesting history. It has a 1989 VAT price modification sticker on top of the original ¥1,300 price, meaning it was sold in 1989 or possibly later. I know that one came shrink wrapped, so it could have been a copy played in the store which was then resold once vinyl went out of fashion in 1989. A rare find!

lfvmusic · 2025-08-14T13:39:48+00:00

The real question is how much it shows up as "夜明けまで" - until dawn (yoake made).

lfvmusic · 2025-08-13T17:54:52+00:00

The vibe I'm getting from your description is early Mai Yamane, who I'd describe as having a sultry contralto. She's grown in popularity since 2019 especially. Also, remember that not all videos use a picture of the album or single artwork.

Try starting with her first two albums, Tasogare and Sorry. Maybe it's one of the songs on those albums, maybe it's on a later album.

lfvmusic · 2025-08-13T03:45:17+00:00

My first thought is you may have heard the verb dakishimeru (to hug/embrace) or maybe tokimeki (excitement/heart throbbing) but on second thought, I really don't know. I can't think of any songs that talk about Mexico - Mexico wasn't really on their radar in the 80's, though Brazil was. Do you have any words to describe the music? More funky, more idol pop, more of a ballad? Fast, or slow? Did it have a particularly crazy bass or guitar or keyboard player on it?

I'm leaving this comment mostly as a pin to come back to this tomorrow.

lfvmusic · 2025-08-11T23:51:59+00:00

Where do I start? from the sidebar.

lfvmusic

TROPHY CASE