A Cultural Metamorphosis: How Japanese Musicians Transformed Jazz into City Pop

City Pop, a genre that emerged in Japan in the late 1970s and flourished through the 1980s, demonstrates that new styles of music rarely emerge in isolation. Shaped by post-war Japan's economic boom, urbanization, and the influx of Western cultures, City Pop is an amalgamation of jazz and Japanese musical styles. This paper examines the early reception of jazz in Japan and its gradual development into a unique musical form. In Japan, jazz was embraced as imported entertainment and reinterpreted to fit national narratives and modern aesthetics. This paper traces the evolution of City Pop through the globalization of jazz as musicians brought it back from the United States, sparking cultural exchange and challenging rigid ideas about authenticity. Drawing from three influential books, Ted Gioia's The History of Jazz (2021), E. Taylor Atkins' Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan (2024), and Bruce Johnson's Jazz Diaspora: Music and Globalisation (2019), this study traces jazz's evolution from its diasporic spread to its cultural and musical reinterpretation within Japan, showing how City Pop is in part a Japanese rearticulation of jazz aesthetics, transforming inherited harmonic, rhythmic, and stylistic practices into the soundscape of Japan's urban modernity.