I'll lead with the claim. Japanese jazz from the 1970s is the most interesting reissue story in vinyl right now, and it's not close.
For a long time the records were a secret. You'd hear about Three Blind Mice from one record store guy in your city, maybe find a beat up copy of Midnight Sugar at a flea market and pay twelve dollars for it. The pressings were Japan only, the musicians were unfamiliar, the titles were in two languages, and it felt like a closed scene.
All of that has changed now, because labels like Mr Bongo, BBE, Wewantsounds, and Tidal Waves Music have been reissuing this stuff on regular schedules for about five years, audiophile reissue programs in Japan keep working through the Three Blind Mice catalog, and Discogs prices on originals have gone up four, five times in some cases. There are YouTube channels that just spin these records all day, and it's a real moment.
It matters because the music is incredible. Japanese players in the 70s were technically excellent and the records were made with care. Engineers in Tokyo at the time were doing the audiophile work that American labels had mostly stopped doing once budgets tightened, including heavy vinyl, gatefold sleeves, direct to disc on some of the TBM titles, and mastering that didn't compress the dynamics. You can hear the room, and you can hear the brushes.
Start with Midnight Sugar, the Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio's 1974 record on Three Blind Mice, with just piano, bass, and drums. The whole album is the title track plus a handful of standards, and Yamamoto plays them like he means it. The bass is recorded so well it almost feels rude, and people talk about this album as an audiophile reference for a reason. Put it on and just let it ride.
Then Blow Up from Isao Suzuki, also TBM, recorded over two days in March 1973, where Suzuki is the bassist and he leads. The opening track is one of those things where you understand immediately why the original pressing goes for hundreds of dollars, because it's the sound of a working band in a great room, recorded perfectly. The full review is on the Japanese jazz page, and Suzuki has his own page too.
For a third stop, go back a few years to All About Dancing Mist by the pianist Masabumi Kikuchi, released on Philips in 1971 with Joe Henderson sitting in. It's moodier than the TBM stuff, slightly more European feeling, and it points at where Japanese jazz was headed for the rest of the decade.
I could keep going on this for a while. Terumasa Hino, the trumpeter, made a stack of records in this era that are all worth your time, including his work with Kikuchi, and Hino is one of those players who picked up Lee Morgan's vocabulary and ran somewhere different with it.
Jiro Inagaki and His Soul Media is the funk side of this. Funky Stuff came out on Nippon Columbia in 1975 and it's a soul jazz record that earns the comparison to the Crusaders or Donald Byrd's mid 70s stuff. Inagaki was a tenor player who built a band around groove and let it cook, and the reissue community is the reason I know that record exists, because I never would have found it on my own.
Kohsuke Mine on East Wind, Sadao Watanabe across pretty much every label, Mabumi Yamaguchi for a more spiritual feel, Toshiko Akiyoshi's big band records that are an entire universe on their own, and the list keeps going from there.
Here's what I'll say about why this is having a moment. A few things lined up.
The reissue labels figured out there's an audience. Once Mr Bongo and BBE proved you could put out an unknown Japanese jazz record from 1974 and sell out the first pressing, every other reissue label paid attention, and there's a real economic engine behind this now.
The DJ scene helped a lot. Rare groove DJs were buying these records in the early 2010s because the breaks were great and nobody knew the source, then they started spinning them on radio, then Spotify playlists picked them up, and the path from obscure original to well known reissue got short.
The audio quality holds up. A lot of 70s American jazz was recorded in a hurry on shrinking budgets, but the Japanese sessions were not. Engineers like Yoshihiko Kannari at TBM were doing audiophile work, and forty years later that work sounds amazing on a real stereo. You don't get the same thrill from every CTI record of the same era.
There's also city pop adjacency, where the same audience that found Tatsuro Yamashita and Mariya Takeuchi through YouTube algorithms started clicking on Casiopea and Inagaki and Mine. Once you're in the rabbit hole, the rabbit hole is deep, and Vinyl Standard has separate review pages for Inagaki, Hino, and Mine for that reason, because the catalog is too big to put on one page.
The records are still affordable in reissue. An original Midnight Sugar runs several hundred dollars, a current reissue runs around forty, and that makes the music actually accessible to someone who wants to listen and not just collect.
If you want to start, here's the short list. Midnight Sugar by the Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio, Blow Up by Isao Suzuki, Funky Stuff by Jiro Inagaki and Soul Media, anything by Terumasa Hino from the mid 70s, and All About Dancing Mist by Masabumi Kikuchi. That's about five hours of music and it'll tell you whether you're in or out.
Most people are in, and this scene keeps growing for the next few years because the catalog is huge and most of it hasn't been reissued yet. Three Blind Mice alone has over a hundred releases, East Wind, Trio Records, and Toshiba each have deep benches, and there's a long tail of independent Japanese labels from the late 70s that almost nobody has touched. The next great Japanese jazz reissue is probably already on someone's queue.
That's the thing about Japanese jazz in the seventies. It was made carefully, preserved on good vinyl, and largely ignored outside Japan for thirty years, and now it's getting its turn. The records sound amazing, the players are excellent, and the reissue labels are doing real work.
Put one on this weekend and see for yourself.