Soundtracking a New 'Japaneseness' - Musical Aesthetic and Aspiration in Japan's Economic Bubble

Japanese animation (anime) has become one of Japan’s most popular cultural exports, but the audio component of this audio-visual medium has to date been largely ignored in English-language scholarship. Beginning in the 1980s, buoyed by the socioeconomic backdrop of Japan’s economic bubble, music began to take on a larger role in the emerging ‘media mix’ of associated product (eg. CDs, toys, model kits, VHS) that accompanied the production and consumption of anime. This paper takes as its focus the career of multi-million-selling pop producer Tetsuya Komuro to illustrate how the nature of anime music became increasingly transnational in nature during the years of Japan’s booming economy. Spurred on by his time spent in the UK, where he was influenced by the budding rave culture he found there, Komuro quickly became known for the synthesised, Western-influenced sound of his productions, the soundtrack for a new breed (shinjinrui) of twenty-something consumers living in life’s fast lane. Both generating and reflecting a new image of Japanese affluence and aspiration, this music was consumed at a national level, but crucially, was representative of wider global trends in pop cultural aestheticism. Incorporating a mix of Japanese and English lyrics, Komuro’s music allows us to unpack the question of an ‘auditory Japaneseness’ and its role within the wider socio-cultural backdrop of the time.