Just did a podcast with Rocket Brown of "Come Along Radio" an hour or so ago which went quite well, so hopefully that will be up in a goodly amount of time. We also spent some time talking afterwards and the direction went into our own Japanese communities in Los Angeles and Toronto. Of course, LA has the larger Japanese-American population with Little Tokyo but Toronto's Japanese-Canadian population is a fair bit smaller and our J-Town isn't nearly as developed or established.
However, both cities do have potential venues for City Pop dance parties, and in Toronto, there is the Japanese-Canadian Cultural Centre which has a large space for movie viewings, bazaars and dances, if need be. Not sure if there have been any dances held at the newer JCCC facility since it got built several years ago, but wouldn't it be nice if there could be a City Pop party held there someday with either Van Paugam or his Canadian equivalent organizing things?
"Romance for Journey" by Japanese DJ and music producer Daishi Dance, aka Daishi Suzuki（鈴木大士）, is a track on his first album "the P.I.A.N.O. set" released in July 2006. The song isn't a City Pop tune but it does bring in a few other genres such as dance, jazz, a touch of classical and Latin. It's classy and funky at the same time, and intriguingly enough, it makes you want to ponder life outside of the window while shuffling your feet on the dance floor. In a way, this is a song that does have me thinking of Ryuichi Sakamoto（坂本龍一）in his Healing Music phase. It was composed by both Daishi and Tomoharu Moriya.
Daishi Dance makes Hokkaido his home although he has performed in other places such as Shibuya in Tokyo. Up to 2015, he has put up six albums among other releases.
For anyone curious out there the Japanese Canadian culture centre website can be found at the following link: https://jccc.on.ca/ . The Centre host a number of film events as well as a famous film festival, too. The center offers a number of different programes , events, concerts, has a museum and a gift shop too. If you want to learn Japanese they also offer Japanese classes for adults. As far as I can discern they currently only use the "Japanese for busy people" textbook series for their beginning classes. Fortunately someone in management has wisely chosen to use the kana version of the series. I am really surprised that the Japanese for busy is still popular after basically 39 years and 4 revisions. Looks like the popular Genki and Mina no Nihongo series haven't dethroned Japanese for Busy People, yet. Yale Universities Japanese the Spoken language has been around a little longer than Japanese for Busty People series but it's not as popular. Okay, I have gone way off topic! The Ryuichi Sakamoto mention in this post is very timely as He finds himself in the news recently for meeting with BTS, for his battle with cancer, and what people speculate to be his last concert.
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