is a Japanese music subculture and microgenre that originated in Tokyo in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It began as an indie scene encompassing pop musicians who incorporated disparate Western influences, drawing especially from 1960s pop, indie pop, and rare grooves. The term mainly refers to the shared artistic sensibilities between these musicians, who were typically dissimilar in sound, employed quotation and sampling extensively, and were inspired by earlier genres that used kitsch, fusion, and artifice.
Coinciding with the Japanese asset price bubble and emergence of J-pop, the term was originally applied around 1993 to acts whose record sales were largely driven by affluent youth in Tokyo's Shibuya ward, which hosted shops with an exceptional stock of out-of-print imports from the West. Led by Flipper's Guitar and Pizzicato Five, acts frequently collaborated within the scene and, in their music videos and record artwork, adopted fashion and graphics that drew on British mod, Italian cinema, op-art, French new wave, and retro-futurism. Shibuya-kei reached its critical and commercial peak in the mid- to late 1990s, a period in which it crossed over with indie rock, noise pop, downtempo, electronic dance music, and reggae, among other genres. It popularized many Western music styles in Japan, including sunshine pop, yé-yé, hip hop, and Madchester, and contributed to the development of modern J-pop.
Record sales and interest within the scene waned after its general aesthetic was absorbed into the Japanese mainstream, the original artists and groups pursued different styles or disbanded, and its cultural prominence was displaced by idol groups and the Akiba-kei gaming and anime subculture. After the 1990s, it was followed by artists categorized as post-Shibuya-kei, which comprised acts who had been outsider contemporaries of the original scene, neo-Shibuya-kei, a movement led by Capsule, and pico-pico, an electropop variant named from the Japanese onomatopoeia for chiptune. The 2000s saw numerous anime soundtracks adopting the Shibuya sound, a trend later dubbed Akishibu-kei.
Etymology
Shibuya-kei ( "Shibuya style") that developed from the Shibuya ward of Tokyo, a center of youth culture, fashion, and nightlife known for its concentration of fashionable restaurants, bars, record shops, and bookshops. A common misconception holds that the name reflected Shibuya's status as a fashionable neighborhood; according to scholar W. David Marx, young residents had by then moved from Harajuku designer fashion toward a casual style known as shibu-kaji. Scholar Anne McKnight writes that the term described "an atmosphere" delineated from the mainstream kayōkyoku industry and rooted in a 1970s-era "musical infrastructure ... underwritten by an urban street culture of design, public space and commerce".
Although Shibuya-kei is usually described as a music genre, most of the leading acts were not formed in Shibuya and Shibuya's record stores accounted for more than half of their sales.
The exact origin of the phrase "Shibuya-kei" is not definitively known; it was first used in promotional materials by stores like HMV and Wave in 1993 and possibly inspired by the 1992 appearance of visual-kei. whereas A.V. Club contributor Joshua Alston called the label "a prime example of the hysteria born of music journalists' gold-fever approach to discovering emerging movements."
Record culture and milieu
thumb|Shibuya's [[Parco (retailer)|Parco department store complex in 2007|left]]
The development of Shibuya as a cultural hub had followed the opening of the Parco department store complex in 1973, which hosted art exhibitions, designer stores, and gathering spaces in the Udagawachō district. The complex also housed an Afternoon Tea store that led to the establishment of similar European-style cafés in the area, and the music programming in Parco's cafés included jazz, nouvelle vague, and yé-yé, elements of which later formed part of the genre's foundation. HMV Shibuya opened in 1990, in the ONE-OH-NINE building, before relocating to Center-gai in 1998. Tower Records sold discounted imports of mainstream acts; Zest and Maximum Joy were favored for harder-to-find releases. CDJournal editors later compared the scene to a punk movement and 1960s Swinging London.
Characteristics and influences
Musical
Many Shibuya-kei artists employed a cut-and-paste style inspired by earlier genres that used kitsch, fusion, and artifice. Tokyo Weekender contributor Ed Cunningham writes that while the genre could be reduced to "Japanese indie pop", a more comprehensive definition encompasses the artistic sensibilities "shared by a select group of artists within a brief time period" whose individual styles were too varied to be retrospectively consolidated into a single coherent style. According to musicologist Mori Yoshitaka, leading Shibuya groups created "eclectically fashionable hybrid music" from global musical resources through quoting, sampling, mixing, and dubbing in a manner "that might be identified as postmodernist".
thumb|left|upright|[[Sunshine pop acts of the 1960s were among central influences on many musicians associated with Shibuya-kei (pictured: the 5th Dimension)]]
The movement drew on non-Japanese source material without reference to indigenous Japanese traditions, described by Marx as an "all-inclusive bricolage [organized] under a rubric of sixties retro-future Internationalism".
In 1997, Oyamada's album Fantasma received praise from American music critics and came to be regarded as one of the greatest works of the genre. Cunningham considered it a pinnacle of plunderphonics and independent music more broadly, and, given its Matador release, the Shibuya-kei record most likely to have reached listeners outside Japan. Concurrently, Internet-driven electronic and techno styles took hold in Japan as record culture contracted alongside the spread of portable music players.
2000s–2010s: Offshoots, J-pop, and Akishibu-kei
thumb|left|Neo-Shibuya-kei groups such as [[Capsule (band)|Capsule (performing in 2011) were largely rejected by the original scene.]]
As the movement dispersed into a range of adjacent styles, record labels such as Second Royal in Kyoto and Niw! Records in Tokyo continued to work in a similarly wide-ranging vein
thumb|[[Akihabara in 2007, the center of an anime and gaming subculture whose fusion with the Shibuya sound, Akishibu-kei, was spearheaded by producer Masao Fukuda.]]
Akishibu-kei, a portmanteau of Shibuya-kei and the Akiba-kei anime and gaming subculture, was coined to describe a musical fusion of the two scenes. The movement was spearheaded by music producer Masao Fukuda of Victor Entertainment's Flying DOG label, who had commissioned former Shibuya-kei musicians for anime productions and later curated the 2007 compilation AKSB: This is Akishibu-kei!, which collected anime opening and ending themes produced by original Shibuya-kei figures including Keitaro Takanami, Shuntaro Okino (Venus Peter), Naruyoshi Kikuchi, and Yasuharu Konishi—alongside subsequent acts such as Round Table and Rocky Chuck.
By the mid-2000s, a form of guitar-led indie pop, also identified by Cunningham as "post-Shibuya-kei", had emerged and was practiced by Cymbals, Neil & Iraiza, Microstar and Roly Poly Rag Bear, while Lamp, Mayumi Kojima and Qypthone worked more in lounge, jazz-pop and bossa nova styles. Writing in 2017, Rosean argued that, while Shibuya-kei had ceased to function as a living scene and "persists today only in the most fragile sense, with just a few retro acts evoking its sound for nostalgia and simplistic aesthetic ends", its "postmodern sampling and retro fetishism" continued to influence Japanese art and music.