Why palm trees, in a genre about shopping centres?

The line runs through Japanese illustration rather than American television. Hiroshi Nagai took a forty-day trip across the United States in 1973 and came home fixed on deep blue skies and palm trees; a swimming-pool-cleaner advertisement in House & Garden supplied the other half of the motif.

That vocabulary landed on Eiichi Ohtaki's A Long Vacation in 1981 and became city pop's visual identity — deserted pools, empty coastal roads, glowing dusk skylines, painted by hand in acrylic and aerosol.

When the 2010s revival dug up city pop for its samples, it dug up the sleeves at the same time. The palm arrives in vaporwave already second-hand: an American holiday, painted in Japan, re-imported by an internet genre that had never been to either.

Which is why the palms read as artificial rather than tropical. They are indoor plants in a mall atrium as often as they are beachfront — leisure permanently out of season.