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Japan is the second largest market for popular music consumption in the world. The proliferation of music has been accelerated throughout the last two decades by globalization and the transnational flow of ideas, people and commodities. The 1980s in Japan was a time of economic growth and was labeled the “decade of internationalization (kokusaika)” . Theories of “Japaneseness” (Nihonjinron) throughout the post-war period have characterized Japan as having the unique ability to soak up and assimilate other cultures while remaining unchanged and distinctly Japanese. This nationalist construction of a superior and unchanging Japanese identity affects the way culture is negotiated across borders. The flow of culture from one locality to another entails negotiation of meanings in the construction of Japanese identities.

What parts of Hip Hop culture are shared and what is redefined, altered or erased? Japan’s domestication and indigenization of Hip Hop culture must be critically examined in terms of what aspects of culture are shifted when they are brought into the Japanese context. This is not to say that an essentialized category of what constitutes “Hip Hop culture”, “American culture” or “Japanese culture” may be clearly defined and then used to analyze how the three relate to one another; But in examining the historical context we may identify different ways parts of that culture are diffused domesticated, assimilated and indigenized, and what this process entails for the construction of Japanese identities relating to class, ethnicity and race.

For example, during the 1990’s Japanese kids began heading to the salon to dread their hair and tan their skin, physically imitating African American hip hoppers:

“a friend who was visiting Japan entered a dance hall which to his surprise appeared to be peopled almost exclusively by black youths. Upon closer scrutiny he realized that the “black” young men were Asian: Japanese with darkened faces, some with dreadlocks and some with fades, performing hip hop dance steps and breaking to rap music” (Cornyetz 1994:113).

This “blackening” of Japanese bodies became so popular that many salons in downtown Tokyo began to specialize in “dreading” straight Japanese hair (doreddo hea) and tanning light Japanese bodies until they were brown. The signs in salons may be even more telling: in Japanese the construction “to tan” can be glossed “to become black” (kuroku naru).

In my view, by physically turning themselves "black", Japanese youths may be creating a new identity for themselves that is not so much trying to imitate African Americans as it is trying to resist the Japanese homogeneous racial identities (Nihonjinron)that the heavy-handed nation-state has forced upon them.

By Juliana Vegh

Labels: blackening, dreading, globalization, hip hop, japan, tanning