Tatsuro Yamashita and Mariya Takeuchi, the city pop couple

A photograph taken around 1980 shows a young woman with shoulder-length hair, camera in hand, against a clear sky. It served as the thumbnail for an audio file uploaded to YouTube in 2017 by an anonymous account. Seven minutes of music recorded in 1984, an English title, no promotion: the video passed tens of millions of plays before being pulled on copyright grounds. Neither the singer nor her producer, who is also her husband, had asked for any of it.

City pop was rediscovered by a generation that had not been born when it was recorded. Two names concentrate the phenomenon: Tatsuro Yamashita, the architect of the sound, and Mariya Takeuchi, writer and performer of what became the genre's accidental anthem. Their shared story explains how a piece of 1970s studio craft turned, forty years later, into a global object.

Sugar Babe, the founding failure#

It starts with a record that did not sell. In 1975, Sugar Babe, built around Tatsuro Yamashita and singer Taeko Ōnuki, released SONGS, its only album, on Eiichi Ōtaki's Niagara label. The record tried to naturalise American vocal harmony, the Beach Boys and studio soul into Japanese. It went unnoticed, and the band broke up in 1976.

What failed commercially nonetheless set a grammar: extended chords, stacked countermelodies, dry drums, a refusal of pathos. SONGS is now treated as the birth certificate of Japanese urban pop and is reissued for successive anniversaries.

Yamashita, born in Tokyo in 1953, carried on alone. Circus Town (1976) was recorded in the United States with American session players; Spacy (1977) and Go Ahead! (1978) refined the blend of funk and chamber pop. Sales stayed modest. He lived off sessions and advertising jingles, a discipline that taught him to make an idea land in fifteen seconds.

RIDE ON TIME, the day advertising changed everything#

The turning point has a date: 1980. RIDE ON TIME was chosen as the music for a television campaign for Maxell audio cassettes, in which Yamashita also appeared. The album of the same name became his first number one and moved him from respected studio musician to front-rank artist.

Two years later, For You (1982) fixed the imagery of the genre as much as its sound. Its sleeve, by illustrator Eizin Suzuki, shows a stylised beach in saturated flat colour: forty years on, that illustration style would become the default visual vocabulary of the whole revival.

The third act was an accident of scheduling. Christmas Eve, released in 1983 on the album Melodies, only broke through at the end of the decade, when the railway company JR Tōkai used it for a series of Christmas commercials. The song has returned to the Japanese charts every December since, a seasonal longevity recorded by Guinness World Records as a run of consecutive appearances with no equivalent.

Yamashita sings his own backing vocals, track after track, until he obtains a wall of voices in which only one voice, multiplied, can be heard.

Mariya Takeuchi, from shop window to workshop#

Mariya Takeuchi was born in 1955 in Izumo, Shimane prefecture, into a family that runs a traditional inn near the great shrine. She debuted in 1978 as a conventional pop singer, with songs written for her by the professionals of the day.

Meeting Yamashita, who arranged and produced her sessions, shifted the balance. They married in 1982. She then stepped away from a stage career she has practically never resumed, a rare situation in the Japanese industry: since the 1980s her concerts can be counted on one hand, while her albums remain major sellers.

Above all she became a writer for others. Kenka wo Yamete was written for Naoko Kawai in 1982, Iro, White Blend for Akina Nakamori in 1986. The song Eki, written for Nakamori, had a singular fate: Takeuchi recorded her own version on the album Request (1987), with a different arrangement and reading, an episode still famous in Japan as a disagreement over interpretation between author and performer.

Variety, the album that contained Plastic Love#

Variety, released in April 1984, is the first album for which Takeuchi wrote every lyric and every melody. Yamashita produced and arranged it with the musicians of his touring band. The album sold well in Japan, reached number one, and nobody saw in it anything more than a well made pop record.

It contains Plastic Love, issued the following year in an extended version on a twelve inch single. The lyric describes a woman who moves through unattached affairs after a breakup and warns her partner not to take seriously what she is playing at. The music does the exact opposite of the words: warm, danceable, bright. That gap between owned melancholy and dazzling groove is what would carry the song forty years later.

How a platform revived a catalogue#

The revival came from an algorithm rather than a reissue. From 2017, YouTube's automatic recommendation started pushing 1980s Japanese tracks, uploaded by enthusiasts, towards Western listeners. Plastic Love became the entry point, with its photographic thumbnail and a comment thread in dozens of languages. The original video was removed in 2019 for copyright infringement; Warner Music Japan released an official video the same year, shot for the occasion, thirty-five years after the recording.

The phenomenon was not limited to that song. Mayonaka no Door / Stay With Me, recorded in 1979 by Miki Matsubara, reached number one on Spotify's Global Viral chart in December 2020 and held there for weeks, driven by TikTok and by a cover from the Indonesian singer Rainych. Matsubara had died in 2004: the success arrived sixteen years after her.

Around these songs a scene of producers formed, chopping, slowing and resampling the Japanese catalogue. Future funk made it their raw material, and the Korean producer Night Tempo notably secured official licences from Japanese rights holders to release his readings of a Shōwa-era catalogue.

A craftsman against the current#

Yamashita's stance towards this exposure is worth noting, because it explains part of the catalogue's online scarcity. A studio musician first, he has refused television appearances for decades, has hosted the weekly radio show Sunday Song Book since 1992, where he plays and comments on records from his own collection, and publicly defends the album as a finished object meant to be heard in its intended order.

His relationship with subscription platforms was long one of stated reluctance, expressed in interviews and in sleeve notes alike. The paradox is complete: the Japanese musician whose sound has been most re-broadcast, remixed and chopped up by the internet is also the one who took longest to settle there of his own accord.

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What the couple actually invented#

Reducing Yamashita and Takeuchi to nostalgia misses their technical contribution. Three elements make up their signature. First, vocal layering, with Yamashita stacking his own harmonies instead of hiring backing singers. Second, the bass writing, round and melodic, borrowed from American soul but set over the jazz-inflected chords of light music. Third, the finish: a clear, wide mix made possible by Japanese studios that by the early 1980s held equipment on a par with Los Angeles.

What the revival recognised, then, is not a period: it is a level of craft. Listeners in 2017 did not recover the bubble-era Japan they never knew, but a sound nobody had the means or the patience to make any more. A song written in 1984 by a woman who never takes the stage, produced by a man who refuses television, went global without either of them lifting a finger.

FAQ#

Who wrote Plastic Love? Mariya Takeuchi wrote both the words and the music. The song appears on her album Variety (April 1984), produced and arranged by her husband Tatsuro Yamashita, and was released the following year in an extended version on a twelve inch single.

Why did Plastic Love go viral? Through YouTube's automatic recommendation from 2017 onwards, on a file uploaded by a private individual with a portrait of the singer as its thumbnail. The video was removed in 2019 on copyright grounds, and an official video was released the same year by the label.

Does Mariya Takeuchi perform live? Almost never. After marrying in 1982 she stopped touring regularly to concentrate on writing and recording, while continuing to release successful albums. Her stage appearances are exceptional and years apart.

What is RIDE ON TIME? A 1980 Tatsuro Yamashita song used as the music for a Maxell cassette advertising campaign. The album of the same name became his first number one and marked his move to the front rank.

Where should I start with their discography? Three records cover the essentials: Sugar Babe's SONGS (1975) for the origin, Yamashita's For You (1982) for the peak of the genre, and Takeuchi's Variety (1984) for the songwriting and for the track that restarted everything.

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Photo credits: the images in this article come from Wikimedia Commons and are under a free license.