Japan and Electro-pop?

Recently over the past 5 years americans artists started to use Japanese in their production.
It is now common to have Japanese writing over the merchandise. Language being spoken in the video and so on.

Bellow is an example of The Weeknds digipak. In this video the fan is unboxing his digipak and expresses his thoughts about the product. He mentions that he was confused why the writing was in Japanese as none of his music videos were related to Japan in first place.





This is a music video by Halsey and the whole video was filmed in Japan. This video features Japanese narrator and Japanese protagonist who played Halseys lover. The introduction to the video is about 20 seconds in Japanese. This is a very risky thing to do for the starting artist such as Halsey. However, this video gained over 40.5m views on YouTube. Although she made her music video in Japan she targeted US audience. One of the reasons why this video was successful is because it was filmed in an exotic location for the US audience. It also attracts audience to visit Japan and want to get to know the city and people. The video features a lot of establishing and long shots of the city as well as close ups of the neon writing.


In this video Halsey is introducing her new album Badlands. This video includes some long, closeup shots of Japan. Most of the clips which were featured in this video were used in Ghost music video. In this video Halsey is narrating the video, in that way she is able to interact with the audience better. The video again featured Japanese billboards, signs and city.



Above is a music video created by The Weekend. This video is similar to Halseys Ghost one as it features Japan, people and language although it is targeting US audience. This video is 8 minutes long and 2.20 of it is narration in Japanese, compared to Halseys this video gained only 14.8m views on YouTube. However the reason for this maybe because this video was shared in 2013 when Japan wasn't mainstream. Where as now, and past 3 years Japan became a hot topic with all those unusual products they come up with and share with the world.