Harry Styles has accomplished a lot this year. The most successful former member of beloved pop group One Direction, his latest solo effort, "Harry’s House," topped charts with some of the strongest first-week sales of 2022. The 28-year-old singer also headlined the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival this past April.

Perhaps less immediate but just as impressive, he has helped cement Haruomi Hosono’s status as the most revered Japanese musician among Western music fans.

"It was named after Hosono, he had an album in the '70s called "Hosono House," Styles told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe in an hour-plus interview about "Harry’s House." "I spent that little chunk in Japan and heard that record, and I was like, 'I love that.'" This was presumably on the same trip where he spent time in Nakameguro reading Haruki Murakami books.

The origin of the album's name became news among Styles' diehards and even more general music fans, with the artist mentioning it several more times, including during a nationally broadcast interview on the American morning show “Today,” which was met with a deflated, “Oh, OK, wow” from host Hoda Kotb.

It’s more than just a fun factoid bound to let down network TV personalities, though. It’s the culmination of a decade-long celebration of Hosono’s output, powered by prominent Western artists and reissues. In a social media age dominated by algorithms and aesthetics, Japanese music just earned its own venerated ambassador to a new generation of listeners.

Hosono, a founding member of pivotal groups Happy End and Yellow Magic Orchestra, isn’t an obscurity. He’s one of the most celebrated Japanese artists of all time at home, with much writing devoted to his song catalog and artistry. He’s even starred in commercials for Lawson, for goodness' sake.

Outside of his home country, Hosono has been well-known to us "music nerds," both for his group and solo efforts. Yet he’s always been less in the limelight than YMO bandmate Ryuichi Sakamoto, while younger acts such as Cornelius and Pizzicato Five earned much more attention in the 1990s and onward. Hosono was important, but obscured.

That changed in the 2010s, a decade in which listeners outside of Japan discovered and flocked to old pop music from the country. Whether via Tumblr, the YouTube algorithm or TikTok challenges, a generation of social media users embraced an era of Japanese music primarily from the 1970s and '80s, best captured by the "city pop" and "ambient" tags.

The throughline between both — and a name appearing in the credits for dozens of suddenly recommended albums and songs? Hosono.

Labels such as Light in the Attic reissued as many Hosono albums as possible, leading to waves of reviews and essays celebrating his eclectic style and genre-hopping tendencies. Artists started shouting him out, too, introducing him to an even wider pool of listeners. Singer-songwriter Mac DeMarco expressed his love for “Hosono House” on multiple occasions, eventually meeting and playing with his hero. Vampire Weekend, meanwhile, sampled Hosono’s 1983 Muji-commissioned track “Watering a Flower” on its last full-length album.

Styles’ recent embrace of Hosono marks the point of greatest visibility yet for the artist’s canonization, though, even if the actual songs on “Harry’s House” don’t really sound Hosono-ish (save for, maybe, the moments of interesting sampling and herky-jerky rhythms). Perhaps, though, that’s the most fitting sign Hosono has reached the global music canon. His name alone now carries with it artistic heft. Soon enough, even the “Today” show could come calling.