Motown

I was wondering if there was ever any kind of motown equivalent musical movement in Japan? There might not have been something as big, but do people know of any bands that made it big similar to any of the big ones from Detroit?

As it is so in a lot of countries, the American Motown label itself was and has been very popular among Japanese music fans. But I have to say that Motown definitely belongs to the African Americans of the 60s. If you're asking whether Japanese musicians played something like that, of course, many Japanese R&B bands have covered them, but probably the biggest pop music movement in the 50s-60s was, first, the so-called "Rockabilly Boom" where Japanese musicians like Mickey Curtis ranked among the top three idols, and then there was the "GS Boom" where dozens of "group sounds" like The Spiders played original music along the lines of the Beatles.