I've been a fan of Japanese popular music for 40 years, and have managed to collect a lot of material during that time. So I decided I wanted to talk about Showa Era music with like-minded fans. My particular era is the 70s and 80s (thus the "kayo kyoku"). The plus part includes a number of songs and artists from the last 30 years and also the early kayo. So, let's talk about New Music, aidoru, City Pop and enka.
Credits
I would like to give credit where credit is due. Videos are from YouTube and other sources such as NicoNico while Oricon rankings and other information are translated from the Japanese Wikipedia unless noted.
Always nice to have Kirinji（キリンジ）once more on the board as we approach the end of the year. And this one came out about a month ago as a track on their latest album"Town Beat".
"Suteki na Yoru"(What a Night) starts out with some really tight guitar and keyboards before things get into a fun and funky party jam...kinda reminiscent of Original Love. Written and composed by Takaki Horigome（堀込高樹）, I had assumed that the lyrics would be about a couple having the time of their lives painting the town red, but actually, it centres around some bizarre misunderstandings and misidentifications at a party. Time to lay off the absinthe of malice.
The crazy thing is that there was an original version when Kirinji offered the song to the aidoru group V6 to record as part of their 14th and final album"Step" from September 2021. The arrangement is slightly different but it's still a banger. "Suteki na Yoru" was apparently also used in the "Minna no Uta"（みんなのうた）kids' song show but the only footage I could find was in this cute kid's living room. In any case, V6 ended things well...the album hit No. 1.
From PR Times
Ah, PS here...since we are covering an R&B song, one of the commenters for a recent article mentioned that Disk Union will be releasing a book called "Japanese R&B Disc Guide" on February 10th 2026. This will cover the R&B from the 1990s up to today. Having witnessed the initial big boom at the end of the 20th century firsthand with singers such as Hikaru Utada, m-flo, and Misia, I think it would be interesting picking this one up.
Last night on TV Japan, I was watching TBS'"Matsuko no Shiranai Sekai"（マツコの知らない世界...The Unknown Worlds of Matsuko）hosted by columnist and tarento Matsuko Deluxe（マツコ・デラックス）. I've enjoyed viewing the show on alternating Thursday nights since my family gets to see regular folks and their really deep hobbies with Matsuko showing differing levels of skepticism and excitement. This isn't just about train otakus or manga enthusiasts but also people who have a love for foods like chocolate and events such as ocean cruises (the lady in love with cruising even introduced the huge ship that we sailed on, the Harmony of the Seas back in 2017).
Well, last night's episode which was originally broadcast in early 2018 featured the world of tea, and then after that, Matsuko interviewed a 50-year-old fellow called DJ BOSS who brought back his love of Para Para（パラパラ）dancing. In fact, I was even able to find the first couple of minutes from that segment, and boy, was Matsuko really getting into it. He was quite giddy!
It was quite the interesting feature. DJ BOSS educated us on the three or four great boom periods of Para Para. Ah, for those who may not know the phenomenon, it's a dance which stresses more on the upper body with its precise arm movements and general poses rather than the legs and feet going crazy on the floor. I was there for at least two of those periods in the 90s going into the 2000s, and the first time I became aware of Para Para was through an episode of "SMAP x SMAP" when member Takuya Kimura（木村拓哉）was in some sort of skit as an expert Para Para dancer with a whole bunch of enthusiasts. It's said that this segment in the show may have helped in popularizing one of those boom periods.
Supposedly one of the "churches" for Para Para was the Twin Star nightclub in Kagurazaka, Tokyo. I'd actually gone there with a few of my old students from my days at Asakusa NOVA back in those 90s for a fellow student's wedding reception. Nope, there wasn't any Para Para there and I wouldn't have tried it if it had been performed for all of the food on the buffet table since I do care about sighted people.
Anyways, getting back to the topic at hand, when DJ BOSS was talking about a few of the source songs for one of those boom times, specifically 1993-1995, he mentioned Namie Amuro's（安室奈美恵）"TRY ME" and then "Music For The People" by Johnny's aidoru group V6.
Och, I could have had a V6 (just punning from a slogan for the vegetable drink)! I did say that their "Wa ni Natte Odorou"（WAになっておどろう）was the one song that I remember, but then hearing "Music For The People" sent some of my memory engrams knocking upside my head pretty hard. I was a bit surprised when DJ BOSS mentioned that particular song since I couldn't really make the connection between a Johnny's aidoru tune and the whole Para Para thing with its Eurobeat and Trance. But listening to it and seeing the original music video at Vimeo made it all really quite clear to me.
Plus, I don't think "Music For The People" really needed to be tweaked all that much to become a Para Para paradise for dancers as the above will show you. The song was V6's debut single from November 1995 with lyrics by Yasushi Akimoto（秋元康）and music by Eurobeat master Giancarlo Pasquini who usually goes by his nom de guerre, Dave Rodgers.
V6's inaugural song did quite well. It peaked at No. 3 on Oricon and was the 99th-ranked single for 1995, going Double Platinum. "Music For The People" was used as the image song for the quadrennial FIVB Volleyball Men's World Cup, and has a special status because from that point forward, a Johnny's group has always provided a song for the competition.The song is also on V6's debut album"SINCE 1995 〜 FOREVER", released in August 1996 which went all the way up to No. 1 and became the 65th-ranked album of the year. V6 was able to perform some of "Music For The People" during a medley on the 2015 Kohaku Utagassen, their second of three appearances on the NHK New Year's Eve special.
Rodgers would also provide his own English-language cover of "Music For The People".
To finish off, DJ BOSS admitted that Para Para may have finally receded into a niche hobby, but there are apparently places here and there in the nation where at least some of the 90s kids-turned-10s adults can still continue the dance of their precious memories. Below is another Para Para dancer who the DJ introduced, Yuuchin（ゆうちん）.
In my household, there are a couple of NHK programs that have seen regular viewing. One is the current year's taiga dorama, "Gunji Kanbe"（軍師官兵衛...Strategist Kanbe）, and the other is the daily morning wide show, "Asaichi"（あさイチ...Morning Market）. For those who know both programs very well, they would know the common denominator is that the main actor for one (Junichi Okada...岡田准一) and the co-host for the other (Yoshihiko Inohara...井ノ原快彦) are both members of the Johnny's Entertainment group, V6.
One time on "Asaichi", Inohara...or Inocchi as he's usually called...mentioned half-jokingly that there are folks who are not aware of his connection with the Johnny's boys for which he gave a brief verification that he regularly sang and danced into girls' hearts just like his brethren in SMAP and Arashi. Not being anywhere near a die-hard Johnny's Entertainment fan, I had only been vaguely aware myself that V6 arose during the 90s and had to be reminded that the group of six fellows was a merger between two trios, 20th Century and Coming Century. In fact, I didn't know until writing this article that the 'V' in V6 stood for "versus" as in 20th Century versus Coming Century, although Johnny Kitagawa himself remarked that the 'V' could stand for anything from "vegetable" to "veteran". For me, I thought V6 had something to do with a car motor or a more inexpensive brand of vegetable juice (North American joke perhaps).
I don't think V6 quite achieved the status as a Johnny's group that SMAP or Arashi did but there was one song that I did remember from their playlist. Quite often, the Oricon list got displayed on various TV programs, and during the late 90s I recalled seeing the guys perform "Wa ni Natte Odorou"(Let's Make a Circle and Dance), a song that struck me as being one of those inspiring numbers that exhorted everyone to jump out of their seats and link hands. It was V6's 7th single from July 1997, and their 3rd big hit, going Double Platinum while peaking at No. 2 and ending up as the 61st-ranking song of the year.
V6 did well with "Wa ni Natte Odorou" but I hadn't known that the song was originally released a couple of months earlier in 1997 by the band AGHARTA. Now, for the longest time, I was under the mistaken impression that the song had been written and composed by Koji Tamaki of Anzen Chitai fame (it turned out that he did composed an earlier V6 hit, "Ai Nanda"), but it was actually written and composed by a fellow by the name of Taro Oshambe（長万部太郎）from that band. The name AGHARTA, by the way, was derived from the mythological city that is supposed to exist at the Earth's core, and as for Taro Oshambe, well he's been more well-known under his real name of Toshiki Kadomatsu (角松敏生...yep, the same guy behind all those early Anri hits in the 80s).
The full title of the song is "Wa ni Natte Odorou -- Ile Aiye", the latter part of that title coming from the Yoruba language of the Niger-Congo family of languages in Africa. It literally means "house of the soul". I listened to the AGHARTA original from the video above and now regret not having paid more attention to the song back then. This original version is truly inspiring. Although it only got as high as No. 46 on Oricon, its use as one of the songs for the NHK children's musical vignette series "Minna no Uta"（みんなのうた...Songs for Everybody）from April to May 1997 sparked off overwhelming requests to the network. And as a result, it was brought back for broadcast for August and September, and then further into the fall.
This then gave way to the song's adoption by the official mascots of the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics, The Snowlets, as their theme song. Within a few months it was even used during the Opening Ceremonies.
I was indeed in Japan when those Games were taking place. Unfortunately, I was nursing a badly twisted ankle at home (not from skiing...just falling down the stairs at the former Import-Export Bank of Japan), but fortunately because of my enforced convalescence, I was able to see the Japanese ski team get their gold medal live on TV. Seeing ski team athlete Masahiko Harada totally lose it in front of the cameras was media gold on NHK! And with that, we have come full circle.
