How J-Pop Keeps Score

Countdown TV, the long-running TBS chart show, has been taking the temperature of Japanese pop music for decades—a weekly rundown that functions less like a ranking and more like a cross-section of whatever collective obsession is running through the country at any given moment. Watching it without speaking Japanese is its own strange experience: the production aesthetics, the performance choreography, the very specific emotional register that J-pop operates in. Half the time I have no idea what’s happening. I watch it anyway.