How Tatsuro Yamashita Became The King of City Pop

Aug 25

How Tatsuro Yamashita Became Known as the King of City Pop

When I first began exploring City Pop in a serious way, I never imagined that something I said on a podcast could ripple out into the wider conversation about the genre. In 2020, I started a City Pop podcast to dig into the music and stories that fascinated me, and one of the early episodes was a talk with my friend Yuki Tasaka about Tatsuro Yamashita. At the time, Yamashita was already a legendary figure in my mind, the kind of artist who carried the weight of an entire era. During our conversation, I called him the “King of City Pop.” It felt true to what I believed, even if I did not know how far that phrase would travel.

That episode was not just casual talk. We spent time going through his first six studio albums, from Circus Town and Spacy all the way to For You. Each of those records holds its own story, and each carries part of the DNA of what we now call City Pop. For me, listening to his music was like walking through a city at night when all the lights are on and everything feels alive. I wanted to put that feeling into words, and “King of City Pop” seemed like the simplest way to honor it.

A year later, in 2021, something unexpected happened. Cat Zhang, a writer for Pitchfork, published a long feature on City Pop. Her article was one of the first major pieces in English to really capture the strange afterlife of Japanese pop music online, from YouTube recommendations to the playlists that carried these songs across the world. When I read it, I was surprised to see my podcast used as a source. She cited the episode I did with Yuki and referenced my use of the phrase “King of City Pop.” That moment felt like confirmation that the conversations we were having in small corners of the internet were beginning to enter the mainstream.

Over the next few years, the title spread in ways I could never have planned. Fans began repeating it, articles picked it up, and slowly the phrase became a part of the larger story surrounding Yamashita. It was not something handed down from record labels or critics back in the 1980s. It was something that grew organically out of the revival, out of the rediscovery of this music by people who felt a personal connection to it.

The Endless Life Cycle of City Pop by Cat Zhang

Now in 2025, if you search for Tatsuro Yamashita on Wikipedia, you will see it there in plain text: “King of City Pop.” The same words I first said into a microphone during that podcast are now part of how he is remembered. To me, this shows how culture evolves in real time. What begins as a personal statement can take on a life of its own once it resonates with others.

I think about this often. City Pop was once dismissed as background music for Japan’s bubble era, yet today it has been reimagined and revalued by a global audience. Yamashita’s songs still carry the same warmth and longing they always did, but now they speak to people far outside Japan. For those who were not alive during the years when these records first came out, the music has become a bridge into a time they never knew. In that sense, giving him the crown of “King” is not just about his skill as a musician, it is about how deeply his work embodies the spirit of City Pop itself.

Looking back, I feel grateful to have been part of that moment. It reminds me why I started the podcast in the first place. City Pop deserves to be remembered not as a fad, but as a serious part of musical history, one that continues to inspire new listeners every day. Calling Tatsuro Yamashita the King of City Pop was my way of honoring that truth. Seeing those words now immortalized feels like a circle completed. - Van Paugam