My Top 100 Popular Japanese Songs From the 1990s (Reupload)

This is a reupload from a bit ago, as the original had to undergo a lot of mutes after uploading due to copyright blocks. Throughout the past few years of being into J-Pop and anime songs, I’ve found myself looking at what’s popular in Japan on charts like Spotify and iTunes for recommendations, so my pallet of J-Pop/J-Rock is a bit rooted in the mainstream, but I got curious as to how much popular stuff I really like, so I made it a goal to go through different decades of J-Pop’s history by selecting the biggest hits of each year and ranking them, starting with the 2010s (a few videos ago) as it would get me started with pretty familiar ground. I tried to select at most less than 20 songs per year, but closer to 13-15 songs narrowed down by Oricon rankings, RIAJ status, YouTube views and Spotify streams. Now this one was really interesting. Unlike the 2010s and 2000s rankings, there are much fewer songs that I really have a prior attachment to from the 90s along with not being as familiar with the artists, so honestly I thought this was going to be the worst of the bunch. Come to find out that after just listening to songs from 1992-1999, there were so many pleasant surprises. I think I have more of an attachment to my favs from the 2010s and 2000s as the style of stuff put out in those decades is more my bread and butter, but the consistency of how much good stuff there is here is insane. 1991 and 1990 had some sleepers again but even those years had some unexpected bangers as well. I used to not really mess with B’z like that, and I still wouldn’t say they’re my favorite band or anything, but hearing their prime (along with a few songs in the 2000s list), I definitely see how many gravitated towards them at the time. Same thing for Every Little Thing, and this ranking continued from the 2000s ranking to solidify myself as a Southern All Stars fan lmao. Along with that, I was not expecting Love Story was Totsuzenni to be such a vibe (which I unfortunately had to cut short for copyright), Yumemiru Shoujo ja Irarenai was one of the most hype songs I’ve heard in a minute, Kuchibiru Kara Biyaku also was unexpectedly hype, Hitomi Sorasanaide was more prime DEEN vibes that I love, and Timing easily was the biggest grower for me on this list. Just so much great stuff. Tho I will say a lot of songs kinda feel like they’re going for that ZARD vibe (I get it from FIELD OF VIEW, DEEN, Every Little Thing, and a few others) and some artists execute it better than others (hence why some are higher than others) but I think it’s all the more reason why Hikaru Utada became such a big artist around the end of the decade. Her style in comparison to a lot of things on the list kinda reminds me of when Fujii Kaze came onto the scene in the past few years with HELP EVER HURT NEVER and showcased a style with western and Japanese elements that was pretty different from anything popular in J-Pop until that point. I will say unfortunately copyright hit this ranking harder than both the 2010s and the 2000s videos so it took quite a few reuploads, but I was able to make it work with a lot of shortening. Another thing I found out is that (while I’m not a big channel or anything) apparently there’s a good chunk of viewers that are in Japan, and it’s unfortunate because the 2000s ranking has a lot of stuff that blocked that video specifically in Japan, but I tried with this ranking to make it available in Japan as well, and the 2010s ranking happened to not be blocked in Japan either. I may do a separate upload of the 2000s ranking for Japanese viewers as I think it could be a cool nostalgic thing for people to go back to generations of J-Pop that they may have grown up with.