Season 3, Issue 14: シティ・ポップ

Welcome to the Tatsuro Yamashita Fan Club Newsletter

1. The Week That Was

Konichiwa. This is Shawn (not James!). This past week was a hazy one for me, due to a combination of jet lag and a stomach bug. Maybe I should've asked Dr. James Adam to continue this column, but he was watching Barbie (the movie). I hope he enjoyed himself.

This week the fine people at Good Enough made great progress on the same three projects as last week (we'll tell you more soon!) and we wrote four blog posts:

1. Barry tried to convince us that Facebook isn't all bad,

2. James went deep on Turbo Stream and "You",

3. Lettini nerded out on System Colors, 

4. Barry also learned a thing about disabling password managers in a web form element.

I promise I’ve read at least half of those blog posts.  —JA SL

2. City Pop

I am deep in the throes of a City Pop addiction that I don’t think will ever subside completely. I’ve come back from Japan with the sounds of Plastic Love and Ride on Time on repeat in my head. Shiti poppu is a genre of crunchy eighties pop that swept Japan as the country’s tide rose along with their fortunes on the world’s economic stage. For whatever reason (nostalgia? happy music desires?) this genre is being rediscovered by young people in Japan, and through the power of YouTube it is crossing borders to be discovered for the first time by all sorts of listeners around the world.

Pronto Records in Kyoto

This resurgence has led to glowing articles about the song Plastic Love. Many young Japanese artists have covered the song in YouTube videos, providing their own interpretation of the classic. Finally in 2019 Warner Music Japan released the first ever music video for Plastic Love. I agree with those articles – in my opinion the song is outstanding. The single sold 10,000 copies upon its release in 1985. In 2023, nearly forty years after its release, Plastic Love has now garnered over 100 million views on YouTube. Wow!

This whole City Pop thing is too big for even this award-winning newsletter. If you want to read more of my thoughts, please head on over to my award-winning blog. —BH

3. Would You Tell a Friend?

Our work here at Good Enough will not be successful if we are not able to get our ideas and products into the heads and hands of people around the world. The things we have built so far are on the border of useful, and we haven’t started charging for any of them to determine if they are valuable. We may not take that “value proposition” leap for a while, but getting the word out about what we are doing starts now.

If you find our newsletter interesting, we’d greatly appreciate it if you take a moment to think about your friends/family and consider if perhaps one of them would be curious enough to subscribe to our newsletter. Now that you have a name in mind, please share our newsletter with them. Use this link, or perhaps share a link to a specific newsletter or blog post that you think they would find interesting.

You’re reading A Good Enough Newsletter for a reason. I think that many of you believe there is still an Internet out there that isn’t terribly littered with ads and offers useful tools to help make our lives a little better. We believe that, too! The more people we can share our thoughts with, and who may be able to give us feedback on our experiments, the better. Thank you for considering! —BH

4. Interlude: The White Lotus Season Two Theme Be Like

If you’ve seen The White Lotus Season Two, then you’ll understand. If you haven’t, then… I don’t know, I’m not in a position to judge or anything, but… maybe you should?

(I was originally served this by the infinite machine of Never-Find-Again-ity that is Instagram Explore, but by the sweet grace of The Algorithm, it was just re-delivered to my eyeballs on Youtube, and I take that as a precise and unmistakable sign that I ought to share it here.)  —JA

5. In Conclusion

Now, may I tell you a story about R-15?

My family went to see the movie Oppenheimer while we were in Taipei. At the movie theater, a worker asked if our younger son was over 15 years old, I told the truth (he's not), and the theater guy told us that our son wasn't old enough and he couldn't let us in. Apparently the movie is rated "R-15," and by Taiwanese law they can't let a child under the age of 15 to see an R-15-rated movie, because can you imagine the damage an R-15-rated movie might do to the mind of an innocent child? 

I tried to reason with him. I told him we're his parents and we'll never tell the law authorities. I lied and said that our child was under-developed and he was actually almost 15 (he's 11). I reminded him that we're from America and the American government let us parents ruin their children by letting them see terrible, R-rated movies. I seethed and shook my head. I thought about crying and begging. My wife pulled me aside and said that she didn't want to watch Oppenheimer anyway and told me to take our 14-year-old son in (yes, he's under 15 but large enough that the theatre worker didn't bother questioning his age).

So our older son and I went in to see Oppenheimer (we missed the first 10 minutes because of all the aforementioned action), and we both thought the movie was excellent.

(And it was a good thing that the theater worker didn't let my wife and younger son in, as they would've hated it).

The moral of the story is that, if you're ever in Taiwan, check the movie rating if you plan to bring your children with you (and be prepared to lie about their age).

We hope you have a splendid weekend and we’ll see you again next week. ––SL