Kayōkyoku

Kayōkyoku, literally 'pop tune', is the mainstream Japanese popular song of the Shōwa era and the foundation of modern J-pop. The term came into use in the late 1920s for Western-influenced popular songs and came to cover an exceptionally broad field: ballads, idol songs, Group Sounds rock, folk-influenced singer-songwriter material and television theme songs, unified by professional songwriting teams, Japanese-language lyrics delivered without Anglicised styling, and a blend of Western diatonic harmony with Japanese melodic scales. In its narrower modern usage the category excludes both *enka* and post-1980s J-pop, designating the standard pop of roughly 1927 to 1989.