Sunshower — Taeko Ohnuki (1977)
A record that arrived before its own genre existed — and waited forty years for the world to catch up.
By Rafi Mercer
There's a particular kind of record that turns up behind the counter in Shibuya's second-hand shops — sleeve worn soft, price climbing every year, wanted by people who weren't born when it was pressed. Most records age into the past. A few age into the present. Sunshower is one of those.
It was released on 25 July 1977, recorded over three weeks that spring at Sound City and Crown Studio in Tokyo — Taeko Ohnuki's second album since the breakup of Sugar Babe, the short-lived band she'd founded with Tatsuro Yamashita that sold almost nothing and influenced almost everything that followed. She was still in her early twenties. The album barely sold. Her label era ended with it. On paper, a quiet failure.
Then you look at who was in the room. Every song arranged by Ryuichi Sakamoto, years before Yellow Magic Orchestra. Haruomi Hosono on bass. Yamashita on backing vocals. Kenji Omura on guitar, Tsugutoshi Goto holding the low end elsewhere, and the American session drummer Chris Parker giving the whole thing its unmistakable pocket. Half of the next decade of Japanese music, assembled around one singer's songs, playing a hybrid of jazz, soul, and pop that had no name yet.
The name came later. City pop. But here's what makes Sunshower more interesting than the genre it's filed under: it predates the glamorous, metropolitan style the label now conjures, and it doesn't share the sentiment either. Listen to Tokai — the emotional centre of the record — and you find a mellow, sombre melody carrying lyrics that are quietly suspicious of the city itself. The album everyone shelves under Tokyo's most cosmopolitan genre is, underneath, ambivalent about the metropolis. A sunshower, after all, is two sounds at once.
That doubleness is the record's essential quality. Bright surfaces, melancholy underneath. Sophistication that never announces itself. Sakamoto's arrangements move like weather systems — a Steinway here, a Rhodes there, strings that arrive and withdraw without ceremony — and Ohnuki's voice sits inside them with a composure that feels almost unnervingly modern. Nothing on this record is straining to be understood. It assumes you'll get there.
Which is precisely why it belongs in a listening room. This is not a record that survives shuffle. Its logic is sequential, atmospheric, cumulative — the kind of construction the jazz kissa existed to honour: albums played front to back, the room bending around the music. Drop into a dark, narrow bar like Bar Martha in Ebisu and you understand the setting this record was unknowingly built for — even though, in 1977, almost nobody in those rooms was playing it.
Because almost nobody was playing it anywhere. That's the afterlife. Sunshower sank, then sat — through the CD era, through the collapse of the industry that ignored it — until the great rediscovery arrived by the strangest route imaginable: recommendation algorithms. YouTube surfaced Japanese city pop to a generation born after the record flopped, and Sunshower rose with the tide, then above it. Original pressings became grails. Reissues followed. A record that failed in the world's most demanding music market now gets pilgrimage treatment from diggers who fly into Tokyo with want-lists it sits at the top of.
There's a lineage here worth tracing. Fifteen years before Ohnuki entered Sound City, Horace Silver came home from a Japanese tour and cut The Tokyo Blues — an American hearing Japan and turning it into jazz. Sunshower is the current flowing back: Japanese musicians absorbing American soul and jazz-funk so completely that they made something America would spend decades trying to find again.
Good things endure. So they are rediscovered. Sunshower waited forty years without changing a note. It was the sounds around it that changed.
Quick Questions
Is Sunshower a city pop album?
It's filed there, but it predates the glamorous metropolitan style the genre name suggests — and its lyrics, especially on Tokai, are quietly ambivalent about city life. It's closer to a jazz-soul crossover record that city pop later grew out of.
Who played on Sunshower?
Ryuichi Sakamoto arranged every track and plays keys, with Haruomi Hosono on bass, Tatsuro Yamashita on backing vocals, Kenji Omura on guitar and American drummer Chris Parker — an extraordinary pre-YMO gathering of musicians who would define the next decade of Japanese music.
Why did Sunshower become popular decades after release?
It sold poorly in 1977, but the global city pop revival — driven largely by streaming and YouTube recommendation algorithms from the mid-2010s — brought it to an international audience. Original vinyl pressings are now serious collector items, with multiple reissues following.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or click here to read more.
