Every revival has an origin myth. City pop’s is a YouTube thumbnail: a smiling woman in a striped top, photographed in 1980, attached to a song almost nobody bought.
It was not a hit
“Plastic Love” was released as a 12-inch single on 25 March 1985, after appearing on Variety, the album Mariya Takeuchi wrote entirely herself. The album topped the Oricon chart. The single peaked at No. 86 and sold fewer than 10,000 copies, though it held on as a karaoke staple.[1] For thirty years that was the whole story.
The upload
In 2017 an account called Plastic Lover posted an eight-minute fan edit that looped sections of the song. Its exact origins are unclear; Plastic Lover has said it was a re-upload of a video that had already been taken down.[1] Between 2017 and 2019 YouTube’s recommendation system pushed it relentlessly — to people watching vaporwave, anime, lo-fi mixes, anything adjacent. It passed 22 million views by 2019 and 55 million by February 2021.[1]
What the algorithm was recommending was not quite a Mariya Takeuchi record. It was a fan edit, with a thumbnail she did not choose, in a running order she did not approve, discovered by listeners who mostly could not read the title. Thomas Calkins, writing at Vassar, argued that fans’ attachment to that specific upload — not to the song in the abstract — showed that a digital copy can acquire something like an aura of its own.[1]
The photograph
That thumbnail turned out to matter legally as well as aesthetically. The image was taken by photographer Alan Levenson for Takeuchi’s 1980 single “Sweetest Music”, and was used without his permission. Levenson filed a copyright strike that briefly removed the video; according to Plastic Lover he received abusive messages from fans and was at first unwilling to negotiate, and lifted the strike once he was credited.[1] The most-watched artefact of the city pop revival existed, for years, on terms none of its creators had agreed to.
The industry catches up
Warner Music Japan released an official video on 18 May 2019 — thirty-five years after the song appeared — covering the first 1:49, directed by Kyoutaro Hayashi, with Takeuchi herself absent from it. A full version followed in 2021.[1][2] That November, a 12-inch reissue for Record Day used the Levenson photograph, debuted at No. 5 on the Oricon singles chart on 14,000 first-week analogue sales, and was named the year’s best-selling analogue single by SoundScan Japan.[1] Warner reported that the single had entered Japan’s top ten sales chart for the first time in its life.[2]
A song that failed in 1985 became a hit in 2021, in the same country, by the same artist, in the same format.
What it actually proves
It is tempting to read this as a story about machine learning discovering good taste. The more useful reading is about supply. City pop had almost no Western distribution, no streaming presence and no press for decades; when a recommendation engine finally surfaced one track, it met an audience with nothing else to click. The same mechanism later delivered Miki Matsubara’s “Mayonaka no Door (Stay with Me)”, which topped Spotify’s global viral chart in December 2020 and passed 500 million streams in 2026.[3]
Two songs became the front door to forty years of records. That is lucky for Takeuchi and Matsubara, and less lucky for everyone standing behind them — which is roughly why this wiki exists. If “Plastic Love” is where you came in, try the fifteen albums behind it.