At Japan Top 10, we are constantly innovating new ways to engage our listeners to fulfill our mission statement to educate, entertain and enhance the Japanese music culture onto our podcast. And from our most recent survey, we asked our listeners if they would be willing to hear a more commentary focused type of episode, highlighting Japanese music culture and most people stated that they be interested in hearing this from our hosts.

So we went ahead and initiated our first Japan Top 10 Cultures episode, discussing about Kawaii culture and how the company, Sanrio furthered the development of Kawaii culture in Japan.

The main difference between these episodes will be what our listeners hear. Most of our episodes have a bigger focus on music rather than commentary and we wanted to try something new; produce episodes that highlight more commentary from our hosts rather than play a lot of music.

Why did we make such a decision? Podcasting has always been traditionally focused on talk rather than music for a variety of reasons, but the one reason that really resonated with our team is that while you can find music in plenty of places, whether it be Spotify (J-Pop has a growing catalog on there) or on YouTube, podcasting is the only place (or traditional radio) that highlights audio discussions between unique individuals in our society. We originally created JTop 10 to bridge some of those disparities because J-Pop music was very hard to find around platforms like Spotify, but over the years and since Spotify and Apple Music began operations into Japan, it has been a lot easier to hear and listen to popular Japanese music. Thus, we didn’t want to just continue our traditional approach with playing music. Over the years, our commentary has become more of the backbone of our show and eventually, we began exploring ways we can highlight more of our commentary onto our show. This is where our first Cultures episode becomes developed.

So now that we released the first Cultures episode and we need your feedback! Please send us a message through Patreon, or email us at info@jtop10.jp or get in touch with us through social media to let us know your thoughts! Should we continue to do these episodes or should we take a different approach? You tell us!

Here are the list of songs we featured on our first Cultures episode:

1) シナモエンジェルス [CINNAMOANGELS] — Chu-Chu-Chu  (2006)

2) Hello Kitty and Dear Daniel — 恋しちゃいなタウン [Koishichai na Town/Koi Shi Chinatown] (2002)

3) きりみの歌〜おいしく食べてね〜 [Kirimi no Uta ~ Oishiku Tabete ne (Please Eat Deliciously)~] (2014)

4) まるもふびより — モップダンス [Marumofubiyori — Moppudansu (Mop Dance)] (2017)

 

-Japan Top 10 Team November 30, 2018