The Popular Narrative and Consumer Desire of Japanese City Pop ：Japan in the 1980s and Korea Around 2020

This paper analyzes the characteristics of Japanese city pop in the 1980s and examines the trend of Japanese city pop’s popularity in Korea around 2020. For Japanese city pop, data was extracted through word frequency, N-gram, and topic analysis, while responses from Korean city pop consumers were analyzed via text mining on blogs, focusing on frequency and N-gram extraction. To gain a more detailed understanding of the “Japanese sensibility” derived from this process, additional data was extracted through text mining.The findings reveal that the lyrics of Japanese city pop emphasize individualism and freedom, with themes of spontaneous and playful consumption, while also reflecting a tendency to compensate for a lacking reality with falsehoods, virtuality, or fantasy. In contrast, Korean city pop consumers around 2020 exhibit a stronger inclination toward compensating for their deficient reality through a virtual “artificial ideal” or fantasy, with relatively less response to spontaneous, hedonistic, and playful consumption in relation to reality. This suggests that, for current Korean consumers, “reality” as a tangible existence has been largely erased. Ultimately, for Korean consumers, city pop functions as a tool to fill the void of their reality with an “artificial ideal,” contributing to its popularity.