Yohei Hasegawa’s Tokyo Records 100
Book

ISBN 979-11-982313-0-7 03670
Published by Gimbab Records, Seoul, Korea

Gimbab Records, a record store and performance organization, has recently started publishing. The first volume, Yohei Hasegawa’s Tokyo Record 100, is a compilation of albums from the so-called city pop genre. However, it would be unfair to characterize this book as a mere compendium of a specific musical genre, but rather as a story of the author's experience and sensibility of enjoying the richness of that era at the pinnacle of urban culture.

For the book, I took photographs of the records, with about half coming from my collection and the other half from Yohei's. My goal was to capture the expressions and textures of the stickers, protective vinyl, creases, and stains on the album covers, letting the reader feel as though they are in a used record store or amidst old Showa-era items.

To make the book easily portable, I aimed for a small size that would fit in one’s palm. I didn't want to use a cover design that looks like a mosaic collection of the record covers included in the book. To achieve this, I used a photographic book cover without a title, topped with a half-sized strip of colored paper on which the book title and information are printed. This design will be a template for the rest of the series of guidebooks. Furthermore, in selecting the photographs, I avoided using urban night scenes or palm trees, which have become overly consumed in the city pop genre.

Given the diverse mix of scripts used in the book, including Hangul, Hiragana, Katakana, the Latin alphabet, and numbers, I paid careful attention to font pairing. ST assisted with the illustrations in Practical Japanese for DIGGIN' at the Record Stores in Tokyo, an appendix at the book's end.

Author: Yohei Hasegawa
Editor: JesseYou
Design: Jaemin Lee
Photography: Jaemin Lee
Illustration: ST

Client: Gimbab Records
Year: March 2023