The Ventures - Chameleon (1980)

The Ventures —not a Japanese group, but the American surf-rock group. Why am I posting this? Well, because it's an honorary Japanese album.
Fans of Hikashu may already be aware that the song Pike, which is the final track of this album and was written by Hikashu member Yasushi Yamashita, was originally written for this group. You can read more here.
This record was produced by Kazuhiko Katoh, its synthesisers were 'manipulated' by Hideki Matsutake, and it includes songs written by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Haruomi Hosono, Yukihiro Takahashi, Keiichi Suzuki, Yuu Imai (Imitations), Shigeru Umebayashi (EX), Kazuo Takeda (Blues Creation), and various people who aren't Japanese —a cover of John Barry's Gold Finger, a cover of Bob Goldstein's Washington Square, and The Ventures' own Ginza Ska.
The music is a hybrid of instrumental surf-rock and new wave; as one might expect from an album which includes all three members of Yellow Magic Orchestra and their synthesiser programmer Hideki Matsutake, a gratuitous amount of synths are used.
Highly recommended to everyone who wishes to increase the size of their surf-rock or synthpop collection, their Japanese music collection or American music collection, and everyone else.

Listen · D/L

*The album art featured in this blog post is of a much higher quality than the one included in the zip file (I scanned the high-quality image myself whereas the low-quality image was obtained from the internet).