About

The Romance no Kamisama Dance (Japanese: ロマンスの神様ダンス) refers to a series of videos on TikTok in which people dance with "Romance no Kamisama" (ロマンスの神様, lit. "The God of Romance")^[1], a 1993 hit song by Japanese singer and songwriter Kohmi Hirose.^[2] In 2022, this TikTok dance trend pushed the song to make a resurgence in popularity for the first time in nearly three decades.

Origin

Hirose released her 3rd single "Romance no Kamisama" (shown below) on December 1st, 1993, and sold over 1.75 million copies in the 1990s thanks to Japanese major sports goods retailer Alpen, which used it for TV commercial movies in the 1993-1994 winter season.

On February 11th^[3] and 12th, 2022^[4], a Japanese TikTok dancer named Taiga (タイガ, @taiga_no_furituke), an influencer who caused another dance trend with another 90's J-pop song in the previous month, posted his original dance for this song and started a dance trend through his followers (shown below). Those videos gained over 7.4 million views in total by November 2022.

Spread

On February 22nd, Hirose responded to this trend on her official TikTok account (shown below). This post had played 5.5 million times within its first five days and led more participants to this dance trend.

The song's surge in popularity on social networking services led it to the top of Billboard Japan's TikTok Weekly chart two times in February and March.^[5][6] News outlets^[7] and TV shows (shown below) reported on the sudden revival hit of the 30-year-old J-Pop song. In July, "Romance no Kamisama" won TikTok's trend award for the first half of 2022^[8] while playing over 1.6 billion times in more than 60,000 videos on the service.^[9] Taiga, the dancer, also succeeded in earning popularity. He continued causing dance trends for old Japanese pop songs and got featured in TV shows.^[10][11][12]