"French Pop": this is how French pop music released at the start of the 60's is labelled in Japan to distinguish it from the traditional "Chanson française".

Very early on, certain French singers didn't waste time in making the most of linguistic and cultural barriers to claim to be huge celebrities (even gods) in the Land of the Rising Sun, statements quickly taken up by a lazy (or complacent?) media.

This is why we wanted to draw a line between myths and realities. We consulted  all the archives we could find on the subject, be they American (Billboard and Cashbox, two giants of the international music industry since 1957) or Japanese, ('Music Life' magazine and 'Oricon' books). We were lucky enough to have the help of Naoki (head of the Olivia Newton-John fan club in Japan) and especially translations from Ayumi, essential in decrypting the documents we found.

Sources 

  Hit-Parades  なつかしの70年代ポップス  Website in Japanese, "All Japan" radio charts from 1968 to 1985 

  Music Life  ミュージック・ライフ誌 Japanese monthly magazine: articles, interviews, western sales charts from the Tokyo agglomeration    Billboard American weekly magazine which publishes a Top 10 (or 20) singles sales in Japan (of which the archives are partly available online). For the period 1962-1967 the charts published by Billboard come from Tokushin (Music reports), for the period from 1968 to september 1970 they came from Original Confidence (Oricon) and from September 1970 from Music Labo. Information on Japan features in a random fashion with at best the top 20 in the charts and more often just the top 10 

  Billboard archives in particular: 19/12/70, 11/12/71, 17/02/73, 01/03/75, 17/04/76, 30/04/77, 27/05/78, 26/05/79, 30/05/81, 22/05/82 and 21/05/83 

  Tokushin Edition レコード特信出版社, one of the first organisations to publish charts in Japan. Since 1962,  Tokushin gives reviews in its newsletter "Tokushin Music Report" (Special record news) 日刊レコード特信 

  Music Labo  ミュージック・ラボ Leading record industry magazine, edited by "The Radio Press" 電波新聞. In 1970 Music Labo signed a partnership with Billboard with the agreement of the Japanese government and became the reference body for all matters concerning record sales figures in Japan. The publication was discontinued at the end of the 90s

  Oricon charts オリコンチャート  since the end of 1967, originally Original  Confidence.  Oricon sells its charts to entertainment industrie professionals. It's a newsletter of statistics from figures collected in a network of partner shops. Currently the Oricon network includes almost 40,000 dealers. In 2008  Oricon published in several volumes their complete archives, the weekly top 100 sales charts from 1968 to 2005. This is the most complete record found in Japan

  Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ)  日本レコード協会 founded in 1942 its activity mainly involves record industry promotion and artist's rights legislation. The RIAJ grants gold and platinum records according to criteria that have evolved over time. For western artists the threshold of a golden record is 50,000 sales for a single and 100,000 for an album

  Wikipedia Page in Japanese (Music Labo Oricon Tokushin RIAJ).

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