Popular Music Studies in Japan: Reviewing the Journal Popular Music Studies

The scholarly interest in popular music has been growing in Japan for the last thirty years since the beginning of the Japanese Association for the Study of Popular Music (JASPM). To introduce this interest to the readership of IASPM Journal, this present article will review Popyurā ongaku kenkyū (“Popular Music Studies”) – the house journal of JASPM published annually since 1997 – and try to characterise its articles from the following viewpoints: particularism, Japanologism, and sociologism. While the articles under review are important contributions to the field, I will express my hope for the future articles of the journal to have more variety in terms of themes, perspectives, and methods, than they have now.