Kouichi Aoki

Ryūkōka is an early form of Japanese popular music that, in today’s usage, refers to the mainstream and semi-classical "pop" songs recorded and broadcast from the late 1920s through the early 1960s. While the word once broadly meant "fashionable/popular song" (a sinic reading related to hayariuta) with roots stretching back to premodern popular genres, the modern sense denotes a Showa-era repertoire that blends Japanese melodic sensibilities with Western classical harmony, dance rhythms (waltz, foxtrot, tango), and jazz-era orchestrations. Vocals in archetypal ryūkōka favor a smooth legato line rather than the wide, sobbing kobushi ornaments that later came to typify enka. Ryūkōka’s studio and radio-driven idiom provided the foundation from which postwar Japanese popular music diverged: one current moving toward enka and another toward poppusu/kayōkyoku, setting the stage for later J‑pop.