Just a humble observation from me, but perhaps one of the Western songs that Japanese songwriters may have been looking up to for a few decades is Elbow Bones and the Racketeers' "A Night in New York" from 1984. It's one of my happy memories from 1980s music and I recall comparing microstar's "Yuugure Girl"（夕暮れガール）from 2011 to it.
The thing is that one singer probably beat microstar to the punch by twenty years. Mayo Nagata（永田真代）, a singer that I discovered relatively recently as a City Pop chanteuse for songs such as "Twilight in the Memories" from 1990, actually tried her hand at some swing jazz and pop with the first track from her October 1991 album "Sexism". "Gambler" is arguably even more similar to "A Night in New York", mainly through the underlying rhythm, so I gather that folks in the music industry in Japan must like swing while painting the town red. Kenzo Saeki（サエキけんぞう）came up with the lyrics while Kazuhiko Kato（加藤和彦）provided the melody to throw that couple of dice in a Las Vegas casino.
"Gambler" was also the coupling song to Nagata's 4th single "Seikimatsu no Rap Zoku"（世紀末RAP族...The Rap Tribe at Century's End） which was released on the same day as "Sexism".
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