Radio Hayama

Radio Hayama sounds like a Sunday morning by the sea. It's not a niche station, and it doesn't pretend to be. The playlist drifts between J-pop, jazz, classic rock, and the kind of soft, melodic Japanese ballads that rarely make it onto streaming playlists. There's a laid-back rhythm to the programming, like someone's actually thinking about what you might want to hear next, not just feeding an algorithm. For a genre-less station, it's remarkably coherent. The presenters speak in that measured, polite Japanese you hear on NHK, but with more warmth. Occasionally they laugh at their own jokes. T…