The link you clicked on used to lead to a big, white blob with some randomly connected words on it to catalog my collection of CDs from China, Japan, and other countries in Asia for my radio show at KUCI, The Diaoyu-Senkaku Alternative. As an upgrade in 2025, here's a landing page instead, with some more beautiful text.

A Word on Collecting Asian CDs My first Asian CD was probably something similar to someone who grew up in the Midwest in the 90s...probably either a random thrift store find or stumbling upon one of the few Japanese bands to break into the U.S. market in the 20th century. It wasn't until my first trip to China in 2001 that I really considered collecting Asian CDs, and even then my focus was more on their high quality counterfeits of Western music. What a fool I was for misdirecting my efforts in that golden age!

It wasn't until actually living in China for years at a time, such as 2004-6 in the Peace Corps, that my Chinese CDs grew into anything I would call a collection. Similarly, I only discovered Book-Off at the tail end of my stay in NYC in 2010 and again while in grad school in Orange County, CA, in the early 2000s. Amoeba Music helped a lot, too. Now that CDs are a cheap, novelty item, in the 2020s the numbers and quality are at an all time high and likely to keep growing.

Collecting Asian CDs is not easy. Put aside the fact that I can only really read and type in Chinese and barely make out Japanese or Thai. Searching for titles online just to know what a store actually has for sale can be extremely difficult. How does one organize CDs written in languages one does not read? Not very carefully, as it turns out.

These same challenges probably affect the ability of the major streaming platforms to have a lot of Asian music on them. Where would you start streaming Japanese or Chinese music on your preferred platform, and would you be confident that its recommendations would give you all you want, or rather, all that's out there that you would like. I most certainly am not confident, and much of my collection is neither on Apple Music or YouTube, the two I frequent most often. I would expect that music from the PRC may never be fully integrated into Western streaming platforms. Even if they do exist on your favorite streaming platforms, they're unlikely to get streamed enough to add up to a hill of beans, a structural problem many online musician advocates and I have complained about at length. Far better to find a CD or download their digital albums on Bandcamp if you want them to be able to afford to keep making music or have any kind of retirement funds. A not-random survey of my latest haul from Tokyo finds that of the 32 Japanese albums I bought and ripped to my computer in Feb. 2025, 19 were available to stream on Apple Music, a none-too-impressive 61.3%. Presumably most people would get a lot closer to 100% because they like more popular stuff, but I'll bet there's also some gaps for even more popular artists on any Western streaming platform. There's also, of course, a near infinite number of Japanese albums on Apple Music that I will either never find, never know to look for, and will never find at an enticing price. There is, however, a good reason why we do not allow children to own and run candy stores. Imposing a limit on how much I can own or listen to in a given time period is probably better for me in many ways, especially to form a sentimental attachment to the music rather than just moving on whenever I feel like it. That's what it's all about!

The 2025 Updated Catalog of Asian CDs

Many trips to Japan from 2023 to 2025 yielded piles of mostly 100-yen CDs and not a few big ticket discs by bands one might expect a casual fan of contemporary Japanese music to know. In order to make it all fit on a single "page" for easier scrolling, I had to reduce the "fit" in the PDF to 79% on the biggest "paper" in Acrobat's settings, namely the "Super B/A3" size. Is there a better way to display all of this information? There must be, of course. Zooming in enough to read the entries is going to be a pain for the foreseeable future. As you can see, it's organized alphabetically, though inconsistently by surname. There's a column for pinyin or Romanization of the name(s) and then one for the characters/katakana/Hangul/etc. Then there's a column to describe the artist/band briefly. The remaining columns are supposed to be albums I own, followed by a list of tracks I would play on the radio, with those two kinds of columns alternating until the rightmost edge of the spreadsheet. There's now a few bands/artists whose albums I own no longer fit in one full row, and the total number of bands/artists is now over 1,000. I've even printed out a previous version from 2024 and hung it on the wall of my apartment in Changchun, all 24 pages of it! Admittedly, there are an untold number which are digital downloads, so the actual number of CDs or albums will have to remain a beautiful mystery indefinitely.

The Old, Original Catalog

I'm not sure why anyone would want to see the old version, but here's the file: Diaoyu-Senkaku Artist Guide from the early 2010s

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