The end of the year is considered the best time in the music industry, and the ‘Greatest Trade Ever’ of K-pop and J-pop will unfold. While representative K-pop groups are sweeping major local award ceremonies thanks to their popularity in Japan, Japanese mega stars who have built up fandoms through SNS and animation OSTs are holding large-scale solo concerts in Korea one after another.

The ‘Japan Record Award’, which boasts the longest tradition and most authority in Japan, announced this year‘s list of winners on its official website on the 21st, and four K-pop groups were named. New Jeans and Ailit received the Excellence Award and New Artist Award, respectively, for ‘Supernatural’ and ‘Magnetic’. TXT took home the Special Award, and Seraphim took home the Special International Music Award.

The Japan Record Award, which began in 1959, is a music awards ceremony hosted by the Japan Composer’s Association. New Jeans, who won the Excellence Award for two consecutive years following ‘Dito’ last year, will also be aiming for the Grand Prize at the awards ceremony to be broadcast live on TBS on December 30th. Ailit became the first K-pop girl group to win the Rookie of the Year award in 13 years since 2NE1 in 2011.

This ‘K-pop bumper crop’ will continue on Japan‘s year-end special stages. Groups Twice, Seraphim, Ailit, and TXT will appear on NHK’s ‘Kōhaku Uta Gassen’, Japan‘s representative year-end broadcast program. Fuji TV’s ‘2024 FNS Music Festival’, which is considered one of the two major year-end programs along with ‘Kōhaku Uta Gassen’, also has New Jeans, Seraphim, TVXQ, Stray Kids, Espa, Tours, and Treasure on stage on the 4th and 11th.

On the other hand, top J-pop stars such as Yoasobi and Fujii Kaze will all be heading to Korea in December. Yoasobi, who became a ‘representative of J-pop’ through the opening song ‘Idol’ of the Japanese anime ‘My Favorite Child’ that was a hit in Korea, will hold a solo concert as part of her Asia tour at Inspire Arena in Jung-gu, Incheon on December 7-8.

Fujii Kaze, the lead singer of the song ‘Better To Die’ (Shinunoga E-Wa), which gained ‘reverse popularity’ on the SNS platform TikTok, also sold out her concert at Gocheok Sky Dome in Seoul on December 14. Both Yoasobi and Fujii Kaze, who are visiting Korea for the second time, proved their growing popularity of J-pop by entering ‘arena-level’ concert halls that were 5-8 times more crowded than their previous concert venues.


Reporter Yoo Ji-hye yjh0304@donga.com