Mariya Takeuchi “Plastic Love”: Analyzing 500 YouTube Comments with Data

Mariya Takeuchi “Plastic Love”

“Plastic Love” was released in 1984 as part of Mariya Takeuchi’s album VARIETY. She wrote and composed it herself, with arrangement and production by her husband, Tatsuro Yamashita. It was also released as a 12-inch single in 1985, but at the time it only reached No. 86 on the Oricon chart and sold around 10,000 copies.

Then, in July 2017, an unofficial upload of the song on YouTube began spreading rapidly overseas. Fueled by music communities like Reddit, social media, and YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, its audience grew alongside the wider revival of interest in 1980s Japanese city pop and future funk. In 2019, 35 years after its release, Warner Music Japan’s official channel released a new short-version music video in response to this popularity, followed by the full-length version in 2021. The 12-inch vinyl reissue released that same year became the song’s first-ever Oricon Top 10 entry, 36 years after its original release.

This time, we collected and analyzed the comments on that official music video. The comment section is filled with multilingual comments, mostly in English — itself a testament to the song’s status as “a Japanese song rediscovered by the world.”

Watch on YouTube: Mariya Takeuchi – Plastic Love (Official Music Video)

What the Comments Tell Us, By the Numbers

Of the 500 comments, the most common theme (7%) was comments about the song crossing generations and borders — many echoed a popular one that read, roughly, “It’s great this is popular overseas, but I hope Japanese people rediscover how good this song is, too.” Close behind were comments about the City Pop rediscovery and its overseas reappraisal (6%), praise and gratitude for Mariya Takeuchi herself (6%), and 80s nostalgia and personal memories (6%). Together, these top categories were largely comments reflecting on the very structure of the boom itself — why a song from over 40 years ago is being heard today.

“This right here is how you resurrect a lost classic!”
— @SmoothMcGroove (38,863 likes)

“The comment section is chaotically multicultural — finding a Japanese comment is genuinely hard. Twenty years ago, no one could have imagined a Japanese song being loved this much around the world.”
— @k.h7660 (16,135 likes, translated from Japanese)

The Artist’s Intent vs. Fans’ Interpretations

Mariya Takeuchi has said she wanted the song to express “a sense of urban loneliness.” She’s also noted that she actually grew up in the countryside, surrounded by mountains and sea, and never danced the night away at a trendy disco or fell asleep on the highway in the small hours — suggesting the urban woman depicted in the lyrics was born from imagination rather than personal experience. On the production side, she has explained that she wrote this 16-beat dance track, a style she hadn’t worked in much before, with an eye toward how it might sound if her producer, Tatsuro Yamashita, sang it himself. Yamashita himself has recalled that “Plastic Love” was the first song he heard among the batch Takeuchi had written during her break from performing, and that he was struck by how complete it already was.

As for the song’s overseas reappraisal in the late 2010s, Takeuchi has suggested it likely resulted from a combination of factors, including exposure through Korean DJ Night Tempo, fan-made animation videos, and a growing number of covers — but that, ultimately, the enduring universality of the track itself, as arranged and produced by Yamashita, is what resonated with a new, younger generation of listeners. The theme of “urban loneliness” the creators embedded in the song nearly 40 years ago, and the timeless universality so many overseas listeners have picked up on decades later: the fact that the creators themselves see that universality as the core of the song’s rediscovery, rather than dismissing it as mere viral chance, is a genuinely interesting point.

In Closing

The theme of “urban loneliness” that Mariya Takeuchi poured into this song in 1984 was, presumably, meant only for young Japanese listeners of that era. Yet nearly 40 years later, it reached listeners of entirely different countries and generations, through a route nobody could have predicted: YouTube. There’s a Japanese expression, “onko-chishin” — learning something new by reviewing the old — but in this case, it might be closer to the opposite: something old finding new listeners exactly as it was, unchanged.

When did you first discover “Plastic Love”?
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Sources: Mariya Takeuchi Official Website / Warner Music Japan / Billboard JAPAN / Pitchfork / TOWER RECORDS ONLINE / Record no Hi Official Site / Sports Nippon / TOKYO FM+ / Wikipedia “Plastic Love (song)” / Mikiki by TOWER RECORDS