J-pop

It’s hard enough for any performer to hold the attention of an arena crowd for 2½ hours. Imagine doing that without ever showing your face. J-pop artist Ado pulled off this feat at her second live show ever, held on Aug. 11 at the…

Tens of thousands of people descended on Anime Expo in Los Angeles during the first week of July. If you need a visual reminder of just how powerful a cultural force anime has become, the image of eager fans packed…

Many people today who listen to “city pop,” a bubbly take on funk, disco and dance pop that came out during Japan’s economic heyday, can only imagine how dizzying it might have been to see the glitz and excess of the 1980s and…

If the past two years have taught the world anything, it’s the precariousness of predictions. January 2022 has arrived, but with the spread of omicron causing fresh concern, all I can do is stare at my recently purchased calendar…

On the first day of 2022, The First Take, a YouTube channel that gets Japanese musicians to perform their hits in one go, posted a video of J-pop act SixTones performing their track, “Imitation Rain.” It’s an elegant, stripped-down…

“Adam by Eve” isn’t technically a documentary, but it could be. With a general lack of documentaries on the state of J-pop available to non-Japanese speakers, this 59-minute film succeeds in catching up viewers on what is going on…

Nobody came out of 2020 feeling particularly cheery, even the most upbeat of Japan’s pop acts. For Anna Takeuchi, however, all that pandemic-era uncertainty soon turned into artistic clarity. She resolved to make her guitar-based…