And no I'm not talking Jiffy Pop but Japanese Pop music.

The Japanese industry is worse that the US/UK industry for making marginal talents into this weeks top music star, but for all that they occasionally get some good tunes crafted.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF6N1Bxu6pQ[/youtube]

This is a song by a boy band called Arashi (Storm). One thing about Japanese boy bands are they're expected to be multi-talented - artists, actors, dancers, comedians, commentators - and one of the incestuous parts of Japanese entertainment is if one of your members lands a hot TV gig, the band gets to do the theme song which invariably becomes number 1 on the pop charts.

Beautiful Days is the theme to a J-Drama called "Ryuusei no Kizuna" (Bound by Shooting Stars) a story about three hot, young 20s siblings who become con men in their search to find who murdered of their parents 15 years ago and kill them. If you saw Letters from Iwo Jima you'll recognize the guy playing the oldest son as the Soldier running around the island trying not to get killed. He's the one in the band, too. See how it all circles around? Still, it's a pretty good song. And I even recommend the show (you can find it translated online), it won all sorts of awards in Japan, which isn't much of a surprise as most Japanese dramas and comedies are amazingly bad. Anything that doesn't suck almost automatically would win their version of The Emmy.

Mini-Moni's "Telephone" is the only J-Pop song worth a damn.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz7TD9FpRTw[/youtube]

Old school: The Plastics, a Japanese punk/new wave band. They got a promotional push in the early 80s, but couldn't break through in the US, despite appearing on SCTV:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLl44pj7a70&feature=related[/youtube]

w..t...f

The only J-Pop I listen to are whatever happens to be the OP and ED songs of anime I happen to watch. This was from the anime K-ON last season:
 
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oG0YI4QP2U[/youtube]

I've gotten this stuck in my head for a few days:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK56D9vxGzg[/youtube]

That's another one that's on my current playlist.

Oh, and this one:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XY-VnHPimQ[/youtube]

I was first going to pick some video with nothing more than the album cover, but I figure that cute dancing girls are better

That wasn't the track that got played a lot, though, was it? I remember the Plastics as a band but I can't remember the one song I heard from them a lot, and I know that wasn't it.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAF-tKP9cC8[/youtube]

I have no idea if this is J-Pop or not, and it got horribly overplayed thanks to some online telephone company commercial, but I still like it.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHPA79XQL6s[/youtube]

I think I might also like Cibo Matto. And that's the extent of my knowledge of Japanese music.

This is strange. And kind of hot. And strange.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWrjUti71ps&feature=related[/youtube]

SHONEN KNIFE!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSqGtOj72Q4[/youtube]