Japan

J-pop is Japan's mainstream popular music genre and has been since the late 1990s, when Utada Hikaru's debut album First Love kicked off the modern era. The current J-pop wave is led by Kenshi Yonezu, YOASOBI, and Ado, all of whom regularly top the domestic charts and increasingly the global anime-soundtrack circuits.

Enka is Japan's postwar sentimental ballad form, built on a pentatonic scale and the kobushi vocal vibrato, with lyrics about lost love, hometowns, and northern stations. J-pop is the modern Japanese mainstream pop tradition that succeeded the older kayōkyoku format in the 1990s, drawing on Western R&B, dance, and rock production. The two genres coexist: enka still draws huge television audiences for veteran singers like Ishikawa Sayuri.

City pop is the sophisticated, urban Japanese pop of the late 1970s and 1980s, blending West Coast AOR, soft funk, Latin rhythms, and the gloss of brand-new digital production. Largely forgotten in Japan after the 1990s, the genre was rediscovered globally in 2018 when YouTube's recommendation algorithm pushed Mariya Takeuchi's 1984 song Plastic Love to millions of listeners, sparking a worldwide vinyl-reissue boom.

Misora Hibari is the singer most Japanese describe as the country's voice of the twentieth century. Her 1989 ballad Kawa no Nagare no Yō ni was voted the greatest Japanese song of all time in a 2007 nationwide poll. In commercial terms, the duo B'z have sold more records (over eighty million) than any other Japanese act, and Utada Hikaru's First Love is the country's best-selling album.

Yes and no. Okinawan music is the distinct musical tradition of the Ryukyu Islands, built around the sanshin three-string lute and a unique pentatonic scale. The shima uta form carries the memory of Okinawan kingdoms and wartime suffering. Since the 1990s, mainland Japanese bands like The Boom and Okinawan groups like BEGIN have crossed Okinawan idioms into the Japanese pop mainstream, with Shima Uta and Nada Sōsō becoming national standards.