Living Someone Else’s Childhood in Tokyo

Someone left a comment under a City Pop video on YouTube once: City Pop is like living someone else’s childhood. I don’t know who wrote it. I don’t know if they were Japanese, or if they were alive in the eighties, or if they’d ever been to Tokyo. It doesn’t matter. That sentence hasn’t left me.

It started, as these things do, with a detour. I was deep in Vaporwave and Future Funk—マクロスMACROSS 82-99, 97SPECIAL, Night Tempo—that mode of music that takes old Japanese pop, slows it, pitches it down into something that feels like a memory you never had. Drenched in lo-fi hiss and hip-hop drums, these producers were essentially building time machines out of samples, pointing them at a specific decade of Japanese prosperity and setting them to run on a loop.

City Pop is the source material they’re all raiding. What Japan’s corporate class listened to during the bubble years—when Tokyo felt like the center of the world’s optimism—light funk, silky production, lyrics about love and nice weather and the particular ease of being young and solvent in a city that looked like the future. Tatsuro Yamashita, Yumi Matsutoya, Tomoko Aran. Professionally pleasant in a way that shouldn’t work as well as it does, and yet here I am, decades later and thousands of miles away, convinced for four minutes at a time that I know exactly what it felt like to drive a nice car down a Tokyo street in 1983.

The musician Van Paugam has turned this longing into something close to an art form. His YouTube mixes layer classic City Pop over anime GIFs—Sailor Moon, Cowboy Bebop, Dragon Ball—a collage that shouldn’t cohere and somehow completely does. The visuals aren’t decoration. They’re time-stamps for a Japan that probably never existed quite as perfectly as it looks in animation, which is exactly why it works. Nostalgia for the imaginary is the purest form of the genre.

That unreachability is the whole point. You can’t go back. You were never there. But you press play anyway, and for the length of a Matsutoya song, the city opens up—someone else’s Tokyo, someone else’s August, someone else’s specific happiness. The track ends. You queue another one. The nostalgia loop continues, perfectly, forever, for something that never was.