Japanese music is great! It's also profoundly expensive thanks to Japan's music industry pricing physical media as a luxury product (which ensures artists get paid well). I'll second the Harry Hosono/YMO recommendation, but also add the INCREDIBLE Japanese ambient scene from 1980-90.
One of... the weirdest things about social media these days is a lot of platforms have entrusted a Neural Network AI to come up with video recommendations to keep people on the platform. A few years back Youtube's started to recommend obscure Japanese ambient and jazz albums to people, which has caused a small mini boom for reissue labels like Light in the Attic, and (the label with the greatest name of all time) We Release Whatever The Fuck We Want.
There's even a good primer box set by Light in the Attic called Kankyō Ongaku (Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980 - 1990) (worth noting, the vinyl version has the most tracks, the CD version with the second most tracks, and the streaming version having the least. See note about Japan's music industry).
I'd like to call out in particular:
Hiroshi Yoshimura - Green (or really any of his albums, they're all great)
Inoyamaland - Danzindan-Pojidon
The works of Joe Hisaishi, best known for composing the soundtracks to nearly every Studio Ghibli movie (and there's quite a bit of his music in Atmos on AM)
Kenji Kawai - Ghost in the Shell OST
Osamu Sato (this one's a rabbit hole. Visual/computer artist that branched out into games, making one of the weirdest, and secretly most influentual PS1 games LSD: Dream Emulator. There's like 5-6 albums of material from that game, all worth checking out, and a few other albums that are unrelated. He's kinda a Japanese Aphex Twin)
Ryo Fukui - Scenery
Miharu Koshi & Harry Hosono Jr. as the band "Swing Slow" - s/t (has a new 2022 mix recently released. A bit divisive as it axes one song, and adds 3 others, as well as adding new effects. I like both versions and have paid the princely sum to preorder the vinyl for the 2022 mix)
Outside of the Jazz and ambient scene, I wanna highlight two more artists:
Nujabes, the pseudonym of Jun Seba, who was like the Japanese J Dilla, making mellow Jazz influenced hip hop beats. The similarities don't end there: they were both born on the same day, and both died tragically young.
and Fishmans (not to be confused with Phish or their drummer Jon Fishman), a genre bending dub/rock/ambient/electronic group I discovered through RateYourMusic.com. In a similar situation, Fishmans is no more, as the lead Shinji Sato died about 3 months after their last show in a farewell tour for their drummer. That show, 98.12.28 男達の別れ (98.12.28 Otokotachi no Wakare) [rough translation: A Man's Farewell] is ranked as the 18th best album of all time on RYM. Also great are their studio albums, in which I'd recommend Uchu Nippon Setagaya and the mind blowing Long Season (which they play in full as the last song in that live album)
