Japan Rock

You're asking about the 1988–2000 window when Japanese guitar bands stopped being a subculture and became the mainstream — the era of the tie-up single, where a drama theme or a Shiseido ad could move two million copies.

The sound is a hybrid: Western hard rock and Britpop chassis, Japanese melodic writing on top, a chorus engineered to be sung back by 50,000 people. It's also the hardest era to dig on vinyl, because almost all of it was born on CD.

The ground was cleared in the 80s by Boøwy and by X Japan, whose 1989 Blue Blood turned speed metal and piano ballads into a template and launched visual kei. Then the industry caught up.

4 million with In the Life in 1991. Children in 1992; Atomic Heart arrived September 1994 and became their biggest seller.

From Hakodate came Glay, whose major debut landed on Platinum Records, the PolyGram division Yoshiki of X Japan founded. L'Arc-en-Ciel signed to Sony's Ki/oon in 1994.

By 1999 the scale was absurd: Glay's Expo '99 at Makuhari Messe drew 200,000 people, then the largest single-act ticketed concert ever.

Who: Tak Matsumoto and Koshi Inaba in Osaka; Kazutoshi Sakurai with producer Takeshi Kobayashi; hyde, ken, tetsuya and sakura out of Osaka's live-house circuit; Glay out of Hakodate via Tokyo.

Venues: Nippon Budokan as the graduation ceremony, then Tokyo Dome, then open fields. What: big compressed drums, double-tracked guitars, a key change before the last chorus, vocals mixed hot and forward.

How a record gets in: a tie-up — drama theme, anime opening, commercial — then an album that sells past a million off the back of it. Glay's Review moved over two million in week one.