After my on-and-off again listening affair with city pop and my enjoyment of anime, I've decided to start researching what the world of real-life Japan was like during 1980s (preceding the Lost Decade) for a future TTRPG campaign that I might start running. Does anyone have a good place to enter into this rabbit hole?
To be more specific, I'd like to focus not only on pop culture/fashion trends, but also economical/political factors. I suppose there will inevitably be some crossover with the rest of the world during the 80s, but I would also appreciate it if I could perhaps find interviews from people that lived during that time (ideally translated, but I could brush up on my Japanese if need be).
I'd call all three of these heavily academic, but based on your specific interests I think these might be up your alley:
Princes of the Yen: Japan's Central Bankers and the Transformation of the Economy by Richard Werner (2015)
This one is fairly wonky (ahoy, monetary policy) but is the best rundown I know of on what really happened to the Japanese economy between the boom of the 1980s and bust of 1990s, and the rivalry between the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Japan.
Cool Japan: The Relationships Between the State and the Cultural Industries by Nicolas Garvizu (2017)
This is just someone's PhD thesis published as a book, and reads like it, but I thought the book topic in particular might interest you; there's a lot about anime and manga. Section 6.2.2 is "The institutional links between the anime industry and the state".
Multiethnic Japan by John Lie (2009)
More post-WWII in general, but the 1980s are well-included. About the myth of Japanese monoculture and homogeneity, lots of material about minority groups like the Ainu that can easily get obscured.