I would say that BoA and SPEED were my introduction to J-Pop, and the more I learned about SPEED, the more I realized that Japanese Pop Music was full of incredible talent. First, all propers to BoA, a young Korean girl who came to Japan, learned the language, and had some incredible hits in her early teens. She, of course also records her songs in Korean, and those Korean versions are incredible. I will leave more comments in the BoA section.
Now on to SPEED............it is really an incredible story- four young girls from Okinawa , who as members of the Okinawa Actors School, were thrown together as a pop group. Their Sempai, Namie Amuro, had turned out to be a success, so why not draw water from the same well? Hiromasa Ijichi became their producer, and he didn't treat these girls like they were a short term pop confection that would melt after a few hours under the stage lights. He surrounded them with professional musicians, provided them with songs that had meaning and depth, and Hitoe Arakaki, Takakao Uehara, Eriko Imai, and Hiroko Shimabukuro accepted the challenge and delivered. How do you discover 4 little Mozarts all at once? Well maybe as individuals they aren't quite at the Mozart genius level, but as a group, there are very few quartets that achieved as much as these girls have. If not for the barrier that for some reason the Japanese language presents to the outside pop world, these girls would rate very high on the "phenomenal" scale...think Spice Girls,but reach higher.....Jackson Five, Beatles, The Supremes....SPEED really were and thankfully still are a pop miracle.