On this day, two decades ago, Miki Matsubara died quietly in Osaka, far from the lights that once shimmered off her stage-ready smile. She was only forty-four, but her voice was already immortal. The woman who had given Japan one of its most enduring pop elegies — Mayonaka no Door (Stay With Me) — was gone, leaving behind an anthem that felt like a conversation between a nation at the height of its optimism and the generations born into its aftermath.
In the years since her death, Matsubara has become something of a ghostly emissary for an entire sound: Citypop, the gleaming, metropolitan dreamscape of late-70s and 80s Japan. Now revived through internet nostalgia, her song has become the entry point for millions who know nothing of the economic miracle it scored, nor the melancholia of the disillusionment that followed.
(For full immersion, I’d suggest reading the rest of this piece while spinning Stay With Me. It’s the closest you’ll get to stepping into the glossy, late-night cosmos that Matsubara and Citypop dreamed up decades ago. Side effects may include wistful sighs, sudden nostalgia, and tears you didn’t know were waiting)
The future sound of the past
To understand Citypop is to understand the brief and blinding promise of the Japanese bubble years. The 1980s were a time of vertigo — Japan had remade itself into an economic superpower and its cities were pulsing with fluorescent excess. The middle class was swelling, the yen was strong, and an entire generation found itself equipped with disposable income and imported dreams. The thriving metropolises of Yokohama, Osaka and Tokyo had evolved into prosperous statements of arrival.
The soundscape of that ethos followed suit. The transistor, the Walkman and the high-fidelity stereo — all these inventions gave sound a new intimacy, a way to carry the city in your pocket. Citypop thrived on that intimacy. It was sophisticated, smooth and cosmopolitan music made by city people, for city people, in an attempt to emulate the Western idea of the ‘good life’. It borrowed from American funk, AOR, disco, and jazz fusion, yet what emerged was refined, melodically lush, emotionally ambivalent and distinctly Japanese. But most importantly, it captured a feeling of suspended euphoria — the feeling that the night, and perhaps history itself, would never end.
Birth of a moment
The genre’s origins trace back to an unsuccessful folk-rock band with little influence at the time, Happy End, and their 1971 album Kazamachi Roman. By singing rock in Japanese, they broke the “language barrier” that had divided authenticity from aspiration. Music could now be proudly domestic while still looking outward. Their members — Haruomi Hosono, Eiichi Ohtaki, Shigeru Suzuki, Takashi Matsumoto — would go on to shape the entire sonic blueprint of modern Japanese pop.
From this lineage came the glittery sophistication of Sugar Babe’s Songs (1975), where a young Tatsuro Yamashita began experimenting with harmonies borrowed from Steely Dan and the Beach Boys. Yamashita would later perfect the form in the early 80s with the seminal Ride on Time and For You, whose brass flourishes, chorused guitars, and breezy optimism became shorthand for the bubble decade.
Alongside him rose formative artists like Mariya Takeuchi, whose Plastic Love (1984) captured the seductive loneliness of Tokyo’s nightlife, and Taeko Ohnuki, who collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto on the lush, diaphanous Sunshower (1977). Anri had polished the breezy vocals of 1983’s Timely!! into a blueprint for the modern urban romance that radiated confidence even if she couldn’t stop the loneliness. The same year Tomoko Aran’s Fuyu no Mirage brought a cool, nocturnal sophistication, with evocative layered synths and subtle disco inflections that The Weeknd reproduced in 2022’s Out of Time. Junko Ohashi’s Magical (1979) soon leaned into soft rock and orchestral pop, that lent the genre a cinematic sweep. Meanwhile, the likes of Toshiki Kadomatsu had become architects of Citypop’s groovy elegance; albums like 1982’s Sea Breeze fused jazz, funk, and R&B into an aural, high-rise soundtrack for ambition and contemplation.
But it was Miki Matsubara’s genre-defining Shōwa retro nostalgia piece that drew a more subtle bridge between youthful exuberance and urban melancholy. Stay With Me is deceptively bright, but its syncopated grooves betray tremors of longing and an ache for permanence in a city that never sleeps long enough to remember your name.
Music for a nation on the brink
By the late 80s, the optimism had reached its crescendo. Tokyo’s skyline bloomed with cranes, and champagne flowed through karaoke bars and glass-walled penthouses. The bouyant production and immaculate arrangements of Citypop, with songs about driving, loving and leaving; mirrored that lifestyle. And then, almost overnight, it was gone.
When Japan’s economic bubble burst in 1992, the neon glare waned and the country entered its “Lost Decade.” Youth unemployment rose, land values collapsed, and the language of ambition began to sound absurd. That once soundtrack of prosperity had suddenly begun to feel tone-deaf.
Some artists adapted, moving toward R&B or electronic music, but most faded into obscurity. Matsubara, who had already begun retreating from public life, stopped recording altogether by the late 90s. Her final years were spent in limbo, as the music she helped define drifted into the background of convenience stores and retro compilations.
The afterlife
Today, Citypop has found its second life in the digital century. Since the late 2010s, listeners around the world began stumbling upon the genre through online serendipity. A thumbnail of a neon skyline or a summery beach, a looping animation of a girl in headphones, or even a YouTube playlist titled Citypop-core: the aesthetic curiosities of this wistful decade bloomed into a global phenomenon.
Matsubara was barely twenty when she sang her song about a love that refused to fade with the dawn, and now decades later, that simple refrain has become the accidental epitaph for an entire genre. Stay With Me crossed millions of streams overnight and Plastic Love had spurred a renaissance for that lost moment in time. The sound of a country dreaming itself modern has become the balm for a generation disillusioned with the modern world. For listeners scrolling through late-night feeds, these songs promised an elegia of imagined stability. The music of a vanished optimism had become the refuge for those who never knew it, and that once dismissed “music for salarymen,” now circulates as the polished ancestor for vaporwave, sampled and re-contextualised into digital melancholia.
Citypop never truly died. It’s been waiting in dormancy for the world to feel again what Japan felt at the end of its bubble, with the vertigo of decline and the ache of deferred futures. Perhaps that is why it resonates so much now, in this new era of evaporated certainties and algorithmic detachment. We too, live in a society obsessed with images of happiness it can no longer afford. So maybe it wasn’t Japan’s lost decade we’ve been mourning after all, but the lost conviction that history was headed somewhere worth arriving.
Citypop’s tragedy was its perfection. It captured a moment when Japan was utterly convinced the future would be smooth and radiant, and that illusion was too beautiful to last. Its longing optimism was fragile and its sadness is often disguised in groove, but we keep listening because we too are looking for ways to stay with the night a little longer.
Published – October 07, 2025 04:30 pm IST
