Songfacts®:

• When the British band Japan chose their name, they weren't trying to pander to a Japanese audience, but it did help them grow a big fanbase in that country. It also helped that they had a very androgynous look with makeup and stylish clothes - a glam rock aesthetic that played well there.
  
  Soon after the band released their 1978 debut album, they became big in Japan. When it came time to release a single in 1979, lead singer David Sylvian came up with a lyric set in Tokyo, tying in the band name. The single was released on rising-sun red vinyl to enhance the theme.
• "Life In Tokyo" was produced by the electronic music visionary Giorgio Moroder, who wrote the song with David Sylvian. Japan were signed to a German label called Hansa that arranged for Moroder to work on a song with the band (Moroder took these gigs-for-hire from time to time - "No More Words" by Berlin is another example). Moroder played the band various tracks he had been working on, and they chose one that he had intended for the soundtrack of a movie called Foxes that was released the following year. David Sylvian added the lyric and the song became "Life In Tokyo."
• The song's producer, Giorgio Moroder, was red-hot at the time, known for his hits with Donna Summer, but his production magic didn't work on this one and the song flopped. It did chart at #28 in 1981 when a remix was released. By that time, Japan had been dropped by Hansa Records and picked up by Virgin, but it was Hansa that issued both the original and remix. This happened a few times, with Hansa releasing Japan's singles after they dropped the band. "Quiet Life" is another example.
• Robert Dean, who several years later played on Sinéad O'Connor's debut album The Lion And The Cobra, was Japan's guitarist at the time. In a Songfacts interview with Dean, he explained how the song came together in the studio:
  
  "The song was essentially created almost from scratch in a two-day recording session. It was a very controlled environment crafted towards Giorgio's process. The drum kit was set up to create his standard 'sound,' we used his usual vocalists as our backing singers, and the integral sequencer part was created and played (manually with delay) by his then synth programmer Harold Faltermeyer. For my guitar part, I knew it needed to be something simple, yet catchy, and I thus created a distorted octave riff which is present throughout. We were content with the results, and it was the forerunner of the sound which was to come for the band and resulted in the Quiet Life album.
• In his book I'm Coming to Take You to Lunch, Japan's manager, Simon Napier-Bell, explained why David Sylvian chose this song from those offered by Georgio Moroder:
  
  "We'd flown from Japan to Los Angeles to meet with Georgio Moroder who'd promised to produce the group's next single. We arrived and had a meeting with Giorgio who played us a selection of songs he'd written and asked David to choose one.
  
  To Giorgio's surprise, David chose what was obviously the weakest of the bunch.
  
  'Why, for heaven's sake,' I asked once we were outside.
  
  'Because,' he explained, 'it's such a poor song Giorgio won't mind if I re-write it. Whereas all the others are pretty good, which means I'd have a hard job injecting myself into them.'
  
  David was nothing if not shrewd. And he couldn't have been more right. He re-wrote the song and called it 'Life in Tokyo.' Giorgio didn't even blink."
• The song was released as a standalone single in 1979 but appeared two years later on Japan's compilation album Assemblage.