Shibuya-kei

Etymology#

Shibuya-kei ( “Shibuya style”) that developed from the Shibuya ward of Tokyo, a center of youth culture, fashion, and nightlife known for its concentration of fashionable restaurants, bars, record shops, and bookshops. A common misconception holds that the name reflected Shibuya’s status as a fashionable neighborhood; according to scholar W. David Marx, young residents had by then moved from Harajuku designer fashion toward a casual style known as shibu-kaji. Scholar Anne McKnight writes that the term described “an atmosphere” delineated from the mainstream kayōkyoku industry and rooted in a 1970s-era “musical infrastructure … underwritten by an urban street culture of design, public space and commerce”. Although Shibuya-kei is usually described as a music genre, most of the leading acts were not formed in Shibuya and Shibuya’s record stores accounted for more than half of their sales. The exact origin of the phrase “Shibuya-kei” is not definitively known; it was first used in promotional materials by stores like HMV and Wave in 1993 and possibly inspired by the 1992 appearance of visual-kei.

Record culture and milieu#

The development of Shibuya as a cultural hub had followed the opening of the Parco department store complex in 1973, which hosted art exhibitions, designer stores, and gathering spaces in the Udagawachō district. The complex also housed an Afternoon Tea store that led to the establishment of similar European-style cafés in the area, and the music programming in Parco’s cafés included jazz, nouvelle vague, and yé-yé, elements of which later formed part of the genre’s foundation. CDJournal editors later compared the scene to a punk movement and 1960s Swinging London.

Musical#

Many Shibuya-kei artists employed a cut-and-paste style inspired by earlier genres that used kitsch, fusion, and artifice. Tokyo Weekender contributor Ed Cunningham writes that while the genre could be reduced to “Japanese indie pop”, a more comprehensive definition encompasses the artistic sensibilities “shared by a select group of artists within a brief time period” whose individual styles were too varied to be retrospectively consolidated into a single coherent style. According to musicologist Mori Yoshitaka, leading Shibuya groups created “eclectically fashionable hybrid music” from global musical resources through quoting, sampling, mixing, and dubbing in a manner “that might be identified as postmodernist”. The movement drew on non-Japanese source material without reference to indigenous Japanese traditions, described by Marx as an “all-inclusive bricolage organized under a rubric of sixties retro-future Internationalism”. In the assessment of musicologist Simon Reynolds, Shibuya-kei was “something like the nineties pop equivalent of the International style in architecture and design” with a “taste map” that leaned into “dainty”, “sprightly”, “blithe”, and near-“anodyne” styles, citing 1960s French pop, Italian film soundtracks, bossa nova, and, especially, sunshine pop acts such as Roger Nichols and the Small Circle of Friends. Red Bull Music Academy contributor Barry Walters described Shibuya-kei as “an omnivorous fusion of vanguard pop, jazz, lounge, bossa nova, yé-yé, Brill Building girl groups, and West Coast harmony acts”; among the 1960s reference points, he specified Spector’s Wall of Sound and girl-group productions, Burt Bacharach’s musical complexity and “cool” image, Brian Wilson’s experimental studio recordings with the Beach Boys, the 5th Dimension’s general aesthetic, Astrud and João Gilberto’s recording of “The Girl from Ipanema”, Serge Gainsbourg’s 1971 album Histoire de Melody Nelson, and Claudine Longet’s “breathy delivery”. Contrasting Shibuya-kei acts with contemporaneous American and British bands, Walters described the latter as “monolithic in their pursuit of a nearly singular mode of expression” and Shibuya-kei acts as “willfully impure and eclectic”. Reynolds identified a parallel “underlying sensibility” in Western acts such as Urge Overkill, Stereolab, and Saint Etienne, while LA Weekly writer Liz Ohanesian extended the comparison to Momus, Thievery Corporation, Bis, and Belle and Sebastian.

Fashion and graphic design#

The movement’s clothing aesthetic drew from British mod culture, which had found an audience in Japan in the early 1980s, partly through the 1979 film Quadrophenia and the popularity of Paul Weller and the Jam in the country. Japanese mods, led by producer Manabu Kuroda, gravitated toward rare groove genres including soul, funk, R&B, yé-yé, jazz, and acid jazz, and Shibuya-kei drew much of its visual identity from their fashion sense. Marx described the defining clothing style as “vaguely French coastal — Saint James border shirts and berets”. Shibuya-kei artists adopted a visual design language that appeared from the mid-1980s on album covers, flyers, posters, and magazine layouts. Designer Mitsuo Shindo and his agency Contemporary Productions (CTPP) led this aesthetic; Shindo, a former mod, drew graphic references from Italian cinema, Op-art, nouvelle vague, American soul, lounge, and retro-futurism. CTPP’s work used European typefaces such as Helvetica and Franklin Gothic, with photographs and illustrations each reduced to a single foregrounded element. Design collective Groovisions later extended the aesthetic, making Helvetica typography and flat color compositions fashionable in Japan through work drawing on Mark Farrow’s sleeve designs for Spiritualized and Damien Hirst’s Spots painting series.

1980s: Formative acts#

Many of the acts that formed the Shibuya-kei scene shared ties to Yellow Magic Orchestra, through whose patronage many artists had developed their careers. In 1987, several Louis Philippe records entered the Japanese import charts simultaneously; he and other él acts, including Would-Be-Goods, also toured Japan that year. Salon Music’s Zin Yoshida helped Lollipop Sonic secure a contract with ; the group subsequently recorded under the name Flipper’s Guitar and were produced by Makimura; they originally had five members before the label reduced it to the duo of Keigo Oyamada and Kenji Ozawa. Their first album, (1989), sold poorly; their second, (1990), brought the duo commercial popularity and popularized the scene to a wider audience. Marketed by Polystar as idols under the billing “Double Knockout Corporation”, Oyamada and Ozawa wrote a column in Takarajima magazine and hosted a weekly FM Yokohama radio programme, Martians Go Home, in which they played Madchester, acid jazz, and guitar pop; their fashion choices, including berets and breton shirts, were widely imitated. Cunningham described the two albums as the scene’s “most consequential early works”; both records advanced a neo-acoustic style later adopted by acts including Nelories, , , and Cymbals; he added that, while early Pizzicato Five albums drew similarly on cross-continental pop, Flipper’s Guitar “were the first to perfect it”.

Early 1990s: Growth#

The scene’s mainstream crossover followed the use of Shibuya-kei songs as themes in television commercials and dramas. Founded within the Noah Shibuya Building as a new wave and post-punk specialty shop, Zest shifted its stock in the early 1990s toward guitar pop, neo-acoustic, twee pop, jangle pop, soul, acid jazz, and Britpop. Its staff during this period included of Bridge, as well as Kenji Takimi, the founder of , and Masashi Naka, the founder of , both of which became prominent Shibuya-kei labels. Inkstick, which opened in the Jingumae district in 1990, hosted the acid jazz and rare groove scene through “Routine”, a weekly party run by the UFO DJ collective of Kei Kobayashi, Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra drummer Tatsuyuki Aoki, and critic Hiroshi Egaitsu. Similar parties took place at the ZOO in nearby Shimokitazawa, where Takimi held residency. Kahimi Karie also featured in these DJ lineups, drawing from French pop acts including France Gall, Françoise Hardy, and Gainsbourg, all of whom had a foothold in Japanese youth culture through the Renoma clothing brand. The 1990 compilation album Fab Gear, co-compiled by Oyamada and él Records founder Mike Alway, collected recordings from early scene acts including Flipper’s Guitar, Bridge, and Fancy Face Groovy Name (a duo of Karie and Takako Minekawa); Martinez described it as “one of the most influential documents of the movement in its early stage”. Flipper’s Guitar disbanded in October 1991 following their third and final album, , which Martinez calls one of the movement’s “most recognized” early records and credited with pushing subsequent Shibuya-kei acts in new directions. After their breakup, Flipper’s Guitar’s influence on the scene grew, stores including HMV and Wave continued shelving contemporaneous releases under “Shibuya Recommendation” sections, and its principal acts began collaborating. Maki Nomiya joined Pizzicato Five as vocalist in this period, replacing ; their 1991 album This Year’s Girl raised the group’s standing as one of the movement’s leading acts. Released within a two-month span, both Doctor Head’s World Tower and This Year’s Girl incorporated sampling and dance elements; each record’s approach fed into distinct strands of Shibuya-kei that emerged through the mid-1990s. In Marx’s description, this “first wave” of musicians introduced “a whole panoply of new sounds to Japanese popular music: UK indie/alternative scenes like anorak pop, neo-acoustic, and Madchester (Flipper’s Guitar), hip hop (Scha Dara Parr), and ’60s softpop and club jazz (Pizzicato Five).” Oyamada adopted the name Cornelius and in 1992 founded Trattoria Records as a Polystar subsidiary, releasing work by Shibuya-kei artists including , Bridge, and Karie, alongside Kaji and Wack Wack Rhythm Band. Trattoria also released Western records previously unavailable in Japan, among them Apples in Stereo and the Free Design, and added Salon Music to its roster. In 1993, he produced Pizzicato Five’s Bossa Nova 2001, which reached the top ten in Japan; Martinez described it as “the blueprint for all Shibuya-kei albums to come”, and Marx wrote that the album “would codify the ‘Shibuya style’ for the next decade”. After launching a solo career, Oyamada became one of the biggest Shibuya-kei successes with a string of top ten hits in Japan. His debut “The Sun Is My Enemy”, released later in 1993, peaked at number 15 on Japanese singles charts; writing in 2013, The Japan Times contributor Ian Martin called it a “key track” that helped define Shibuya-kei, although Trattoria’s roster made it “difficult to this day to say with any clarity what Shibuya-kei really sounded like”, extending further to él Records alumni such as Would-Be-Goods and Philippe, alongside the more genre-distant acts Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her, Violent Onsen Geisha, and Rovo.

1994–1998: International popularity#

Shibuya-kei shed its underground origins through the mid-1990s and became a recognized part of mainstream Japanese pop, and came to be regarded as one of the greatest works of the genre. Cunningham considered it a pinnacle of plunderphonics and independent music more broadly, and, given its Matador release, the Shibuya-kei record most likely to have reached listeners outside Japan. Pizzicato Five’s Yasuharu Konishi founded Readymade Records, releasing work by Fantastic Plastic Machine, Mansfield, and Comoestas Yaegashi; the label also issued compilations of 1960s recordings presented under the Shibuya-kei banner. Together with Towa Tei and Cibo Matto, Fantastic Plastic Machine, the project of Tomoyuki Tanaka, helped project an image of urban glamour associated with Shibuya that persisted through subsequent decades. Cunningham described these acts’ sample-heavy, club-oriented production as significant to their collective legacy, and Pizzicato Five’s Happy End of the World (1998) as the band’s summation of their own “contribution” to the sound.

Late 1990s–2000s: Decline#

After Fantasma, acts adopting the original Shibuya sound were generally perceived as retro Concurrently, Internet-driven electronic and techno styles took hold in Japan as record culture contracted alongside the spread of portable music players.

2000s–2010s: Offshoots, J-pop, and Akishibu-kei#

As the movement dispersed into a range of adjacent styles, record labels such as Second Royal in Kyoto and Niw! Records in Tokyo continued to work in a similarly wide-ranging vein Akishibu-kei, a portmanteau of Shibuya-kei and the Akiba-kei anime and gaming subculture, was coined to describe a musical fusion of the two scenes. The movement was spearheaded by music producer Masao Fukuda of Victor Entertainment’s Flying DOG label, who had commissioned former Shibuya-kei musicians for anime productions and later curated the 2007 compilation AKSB: This is Akishibu-kei!, which collected anime opening and ending themes produced by original Shibuya-kei figures including Keitaro Takanami, Shuntaro Okino (Venus Peter), Naruyoshi Kikuchi, and Yasuharu Konishi—alongside subsequent acts such as Round Table and Rocky Chuck. By the mid-2000s, a form of guitar-led indie pop, also identified by Cunningham as “post-Shibuya-kei”, had emerged and was practiced by Cymbals, Neil & Iraiza, Microstar and Roly Poly Rag Bear, while Lamp, Mayumi Kojima and Qypthone worked more in lounge, jazz-pop and bossa nova styles. Writing in 2017, Rosean argued that, while Shibuya-kei had ceased to function as a living scene and “persists today only in the most fragile sense, with just a few retro acts evoking its sound for nostalgia and simplistic aesthetic ends”, its “postmodern sampling and retro fetishism” continued to influence Japanese art and music.

See also#

• Kitsch
• Art pop
• Remix culture
• Hauntology (music)

External links#

• Keikaku — Independent and little known Japanese Artist profiles, reviews, interviews and articles in English.
• Shibuya-kei on CDJournal.com