The Japan Tokyo song chart

Song chart Japan Tokyo

Japan is the second largest music market in the world, but obtaining reasonable historic chart data is really quite difficult. This is a weekly top 100 chart from 1988 to 2008 for Tokyo (source //www.j-wave.co.jp/original/tokiohot100/ cgi-bin/top100.cgi).

We have to rely on automated translation tools (our Japanese is not good enough), these have some issues with converting artist names and song titles that are not in Latin text. In addition there are inconsistencies between the names of the same songs from one week to the next. We have tried to make the names consistent and map them as best we can, but there are more corrections to be made.

We would be glad to hear from anyone who can tell us where to get validated charts for Japan from before 1989.

Atributes

The attributes we use from this data are:

artist: The artist
name: The name of each song
position: The peak position the song reached in the weekly chart
date: The month in which the song first entered the chart
weeks: The number of weeks the song was in the chart

artist

There are a wide range of ways to assign scores to artists in order to work out which artists are most significant. Here is one listing, of the top five artists of each half decade within this chart. This has been calculated using a score that combines the position and the number of weeks in the charts.

Half Decade	Number 1 Artist	Number 2 Artist	Number 3 Artist	Number 4 Artist	Number 5 Artist
1985 - 1989	Richard Marx	Janet Jackson	Bobby Brown	Phil Collins	Madonna
1990 - 1994	Mariah Carey	Madonna	Janet Jackson	Prince	Wilson Phillips
1995 - 1999	Jamiroquai	Celine Dion	Mariah Carey	Madonna	Eric Clapton
2000 - 2004	M-flo	Misia	Chemistry	Janet Jackson	Madonna
2005 - 2009	Exile	Def Tech	M-flo	Crystal Kay	Bonnie Pink

If we want to compare artists across the whole duration of this chart we need to remove the systematic bias that comes from the different chart dynamics for different eras. We can do that by first ording all the songs by success within a given year and then using this order to define a score (for example assigning 1.0 to the number 1 song, 0.5 to the number 2 and so on).

#	Artist	Entries	Biggest Hit	Year	Year Position
1	Misia	29	Everything	2000	1
2	Janet Jackson	38	Doesn't Really Matter	2000	2
3	Bette Midler	9	From A Distance	1990	1
4	Diana King	7	Shy Guy	1995	1
5	The Beach Boys	4	Kokomo	1988	1
6	Franz Ferdinand	3	Do You Want To?	2005	1
7	Madonna	49	Hung Up	2005	3
8	Enya	15	Anywhere Is	1995	2
9	Bon Jovi	25	Born To Be My Baby	1988	3
10	Def Tech	12	My Way	2005	2
11	Phil Collins	21	Two Hearts	1988	2
12	M-flo	33	Come Again	2000	3
13	Stevie B	3	Because I Love You (The Postman Song)	1990	2
14	Wilson Phillips	10	Hold On	1990	3
15	Eternal	9	Power Of A Woman	1995	3
16	Mariah Carey	37	It's Like That	2005	9
17	Whitney Houston	22	I'm Your Baby Tonight	1990	5
18	Rick Astley	8	She Wants To Dance With Me	1988	4
19	U2	22	Desire	1988	8
20	Speech	10	What's Going On?	1995	4
21	Amerie	6	1 Thing	2005	4
22	The Backstreet Boys	11	Shape Of My Heart	2000	5
23	Sheena Easton	12	The Lover In Me	1988	5
24	Scatman John	6	Scatman (Ski-Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop)	1995	5
25	Oasis	20	Go Let It Out	2000	9
26	Coldplay	5	Speed Of Sound	2005	5
27	The Cardigans	9	Carnival	1995	6
28	Craig David	10	All The Way	2005	7
29	Stevie Wonder	16	For Your Love	1995	8
30	Tahiti 80	11	Heartbeat	2000	7

name

A number of song titles have been hits for more than one artist. Here are the twenty titles that have spent the most weeks in the Tokyo charts.

#	Song Title	Total Weeks	Num Versions
1	Smile	129	15
2	Everything	120	10
3	Heaven	120	12
4	Believe	100	10
5	Crazy	98	11
6	Free	93	11
7	I Want You	93	10
8	Stay	90	9
9	Without You	90	8
10	Music	88	8
11	I'll Be There	85	9
12	Angel	80	9
13	Life	80	7
14	Change The World	74	4
15	I Beg Your Pardon (I Never Promised You a Rose Garden)	73	1
16	One	73	9
17	Kirakuni	72	1
18	I'm Not In Love	70	7
19	Real Love	69	8
20	Runaway	68	6

position

The peak position that songs reached in the Tokyo charts.

date

The month in which a song first entered the Tokyo charts.

weeks

The number of weeks that the average song spends in the Tokyo chart has changed quite dramatically over the years. We have no good idea why this should be.

Back to song chart page

Comments

The comments here are from the the MusicID impact site site. This version is not able to accept comments yet

8 Aug 2022

Oricon annual charts+

Hello would you add annual single/album charts on Oricon from 1945-2019? Butall the songs here were shown in Japanese, such as Hey Jude - Beatles at no.48 in 1968 https://entamedata.web.fc2.com/music/hit_music1968.html

As is mentioned in the text our Japanese is not good enough to translate this data. If there is an English version somewhere we would consider it.