“Can’t’ Stop, Won’t Stop” – 40 years of Hip-Hop in Japan

Interview witih Hiroshi Egaitsu (aka Egaluzee)

By Tanja Houwerzijl

December 14^th, 2023

Hiroshi Egaitsu (Ega) is a lecturer at Tokyo University. His areas of study include the history, social context and impact of Hip-Hop in Japan. Ega was born and raised in Tokyo. During the 80s and 90s, Ega was a well-known DJ in the underground music scene (aka as Egaluzee). He evolved into being a writer and was eventually tapped on the shoulder by the late Kazue Kobata (art historian and PS1 adjunct curator) to lecture at Tokyo University’s School of Intermedia Art.

Ega cuts a quietly fashionable figure. One of those edgy-elegant Japanese men whose age is impossible to guess from a distance. He gently declines to share his date of birth as this would lead to him being pigeonholed in Japan. He prefers the agelessness of his sub-culture. He proudly describes being hugged by an 18-year-old Belgian kid when they discovered their joint passion for dubstep. However, his stories of his first contact with Hip-Hop make it clear that he must have been born in the mid-1960s. The location of our interview was apt – right in the middle of Shibuya, upstairs from huge vinyl record store and across the street from several clubs, battle dance schools and recording studios. Somewhat incongruously, we met in a so-called kissaten – the century-old Japanese version of a modern coffee shop, serving original pour-over coffee which the world had forgotten about until Brooklyn hipsters rediscovered and appropriated it. Smoking inside is still allowed if not encouraged.

Fertile Ground

1980s Japan was prime Bubble Era. Money sloshed around. Late night venues were packed every single day. Businessmen would entertain relentlessly in Ginza. Japanese tourists travelled the world. People could afford to treat themselves – for instance, music lovers built up vast collections of vinyl records, including Jazz, Blues and R&B.

Disco was thriving. Japanese people love to dance, and every weekend the immense discos in Shinjuku were filled with young (and older) dancers enjoying latest Japanese and US hits. After years of “boogie down”, a core of more independent-minded young adults and teenagers tired of this massive scene which did not seem to speak to their generation anymore. Smaller “clubs” started to pop up in seedy Shibuya, serving drinks and playing lesser-known dance music, including the electronically manipulated British Electro and Jamaican Dub.

Ega describes seeing Talking Heads play live in Tokyo for the first time, on the back of their ground-breaking “Remain in Light” record. He had to sneak out of the house because his strict parents had forbidden him to go to the concert. Once there, he was blown away – “all beat and rhythm with no melody, even the singing was purely percussive” – which led him and his friends into even more experimental music such as the Eno/Byrne collaboration “My life in the Bush of Ghosts”. They were looking for something that spoke to them specifically – made for their generation, by their generation. It was into this fertile ground that Hip-Hop landed in the early 1980s.

“Can’t’ Stop, Won’t Stop” – 40 years of Hip-Hop in Japan

First Contact and Japanese Hip-Hop Experiments

Two kids from the Bronx stood at the cradle of Hip-Hop. DJ Herc scratched and mixed for the first time in 1973 at a party organized by his sister. Similarly, two people are credited with seeding Hip-Hop in Japan. Hiroshi Fujiwara, then a young DJ and now an all-around style master and taste maker, heard Hip-Hop for the first time in New York in 1981 while accompanying his friend Malcolm McLaren around town. He brought back some records to Tokyo and played, and scratched, these during his sets in Shibuya. The audience, as young and experimental as they were, didn’t quite know what to make of it. At the same time Toshio Nakanishi flew to New York to make a video with his band Melon. He visited an Afrika Bambaataa concert and was more taken by the breakdancing than the music. He subsequently cast the Rock-Steady Crew in the Melon video clip. The first Hip-Hop seeds were sown in Japan.

The breakthrough came in 1983 when the movie “Wild Style” was released in Japan on a small scale at Shinjuku’s Milanoza Theatre. Many Japanese Hip-Hop stars credit seeing “Wild Style” with starting their careers. DJ Krush for instance recalls seeing the movie and deciding that he would rather be a Hip-Hop artist than a yakuza gangster. Even more impactful was the accompanying visit to Japan by several of the movie’s starts, including the Rock Steady Crew. There are numerous videos available on the web of Japanese popular TV-shows which feature “Wild Style” and breakdancing by the Rock Steady Crew. Several of the Japanese-guests (always a feature in these shows) try their hand at rapping and breakdancing, to great comic effect. The genie was out of the bottle.

Ega described how the first Hip-Hop hook (so to speak) in Japan was the breakdancing rather than the music. Given Japan’s love for dance, scores of young kids started to imitate the breakdancing they had seen on TV and in movies. Shows and competitions started to pop up around Tokyo. Yoyogi Park became a favorite location, and still features breakdancing crews to this day. Several Hip-Hop musicians started their careers as the DJs at the breakdancing events. The music, melding the beats and rhythms, slowly became more familiar to audiences and musicians, and made its way into clubs via Ego and his friends.

Rap took a longer time to take hold. At first there was the language barrier. Understanding the meaning of the English words and rhymes was hard Several Japanese artists tried rapping in English or mingling the languages – not to great success Some artists wanted to rap in Japanese only which posed its own specific challenges. The structure of Japanese, with oft-repeated verbs placed at the end of sentences, does not lend itself well to the English style of rhyming. Japanese poetry, itself derived from Chinese poetry, tends to create rhyme and rhythm around the number of vowels. The best-known form of Japanese rhyming, the haiku, has a 5-7-5 vowel rhythm. Ega’s generation experimented but only made so much headway (for reference, listen to Tiny Punx, the Hirosawa/Takagi duo). Ega described how the second generation continued to refine the various attempts until out of this network of improvisation a “Japanese formula of rapping” emerged in the late 80s. Ega credits artist K Dub Shine of King Giddra for having in the end drawn all the experiments together into this “final formula”.

Ega explained how graffiti, another integral part of the total-art of Hip-Hop, remained unexplored for the longest. Authorities would just not accept the “destruction of public spaces”. Only in the mid-90s did some more forward-looking wards allow for graffiti to remain once created or even commissioned some specific artworks. However, even today beautiful graffiti art can be ruthlessly painted over because of the decisions by zealous public servants.

As the 80s progressed, groups of friends started to DJ and record together – slowly coalescing into “families”, the Japanese counterpart of a posse. Ega’s group of friends became known as the Uehara family and contained DJs such as Fujiwara, Nigo and Jun Takahashi. DJ Krush was at the center of the Krush Posse. Hip-Hop spread but stayed largely underground and tight knit. Large corporate music groups did not see a long-term future for Hip-Hop in Japan. A few half-hearted attempts to commercialize Hip-Hop failed. The corporatized context just did not fit to the Japanese hip-hop scene (yet). Ian Condry, Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, who wrote one of the best-known books on the early development of Hip-Hop in Japan (“Hip-Hop Japan, rap and the paths of cultural globalization”) credits the underground network of clubs, recording studios, concerts and bars with the early organic development of Hip-Hop in Japan. He calls this network “the genba”, a very Japanese term taken from the manufacturing concept of “the factory floor”.

Underground spawns Party -- Hip-Hop explodes and atomizes

As the 90s progressed, Hip-Hop gained attention and slowly became more mainstream. Many observers point to the Sha Darra Par recording “Kon’ya wa Boogie Back” as an inflection point. The trio itself is often compared to the Beastie Boys for its presence and music style. For the “Boogie Back” recording, the trio teamed with popular boy-singer Kenji Ozawa. That type of tie-up between Hip-Hop and Mainstream had been unheard of but was a huge success: the hit single sold more than half a million copies. Not surprisingly, Sha Darra Par was accused of selling out, but a wave had started. Ega pointed to the late 90s signing of King Giddra by Sony, its first major Hip-Hop act. Artists such as Kick-the-Can-Crew tapped into the mainstream dancing trend and started to appear regularly on popular TV shows. The Underground had spawned its mainstream equivalent, also known as Party Rap.

Much has been made of hostility between the two Hip-Hop streams. Underground artists accused Party of selling out and trivializing Hip-Hop – not unusual once more edgy cultural phenomena go mainstream. Party artists in turn argued that they were genuinely exploring their own (more middle-class and comfortable) lived experiences in their songs, accusing several Underground rappers of downplaying their own privileged backgrounds. This was not entirely unfair. It is an open secret that while several of the more thuggish Underground stars indeed came from less-privileged backgrounds such as DJ Krush and K Dub Shine, several other “tough rappers” come from very rich families.

Ega shied away from such easy divisions and focused more on subject matter of the two streams. Party, true to its name, tended to cover rather light topics and focused on creating easy-to-dance-to Hip Hop. Underground delved deeper into exploring more controversial topics, as Japanese Hip-Hop had tended to do in the early years.

In any case, as Ega pointed out, this simplistic division was rather short-lived as Hip-Hop exploded and atomized from the early 2000s. On the one hand, Hip-Hop became widely commercialized and grew rapidly. Sony Music finally found a way to cooperate with several Hop-Hop stars to create the influential Hip-Hop label Major Force. On the other hand, Hip-Hop started to branch out and differentiate in numerous directions. Regional differences appeared, as major Hip-Hop centers beyond Tokyo began popping up in Osaka, Kyushu, Yokohama, Hokkaido and Okinawa. Regional wordplay and dialects played a role but also local subject matters. For instance, Okinawa Hip-Hop and rap is heavily influenced by the presence of US military bases. Many artists are from mixed backgrounds, and cover topics related to the pervasive presence of US military personnel.

And so, Hip-Hop had “arrived” in Japan by 2010. Starting ten years later than in The Bronx and developing steadily amongst a tight-knit group of friends almost 20 years. But at the twenty-five-year mark, Hip-Hop had become “big in Japan”. But was it Japanese Hip-Hop, and if so, what made it Japanese?

The unspoken and the unspoken-about

Ega told us that he had pondered this question of the Japaneseness of Hip-Hop in Japan very often and at great length. Which, for those who live in Japan, is a cue to expect insights and ideas but no answer – the hard work of formulating “your answer” is left to you.

Ega first turned to the topics covered by Japanese rap. His generation took cues from the early American Hip-Hop artists who rapped about their heroes, challenges and lived experiences. Ega pointed to how 2Pac, KRS and Gangstarr all referenced Malcolm X in various ways. He reminisced about watching Public Enemy rap “Fight the power” in the Spike Lee movie “Do the right thing”. Ega believes that his generation was inspired to similarly tackle societal issues in their work and that this tradition of verbal activism has carried forward to current generation of Japanese Hip-Hop artists. Maybe more so than in other parts of the world.

When Underground and Party diverged in the mid-90s, Undergound took on a role of rapping about unspoken issues in Japanese society. For instance, several artists rapped about hard drugs, their presence and even using them Anyone who has partied in Shibuya or Shinjuku knows that hard drugs are available and used in Japan. However, this is rarely publicly acknowledged or spoken about. Underground artists saw a role for themselves to openly address topics like these.

Lamp Eye – a group formed around Kaminari Kazuko – attacked consumerism in his recording "Shogen". The trio King Giddra took on topics such as the 1980s HIV-tainted-blood scandal. Their recording 911, released one year after 9/11, commemorates the victims of the attack but also chides the US government for its response and, eerily prescient, called out the plight of the Palestinian population.

Ega believes that Hip-Hop in Japan is also a way for “unspoken-about groups” in society to vocalize their situation and issues. The position of Korean-heritage citizens has long been marginalized in Japan. Several rappers of Korean heritage or mixed Korean Japanese descent rap about their experiences. Similarly, the existence of the indigenous populations of Okinawa and Hokkaido has long been ignored and neglected. Current Hip-Hop star Awich hails from Okinawa and openly raps about her indigenous heritage.

Japanese Hip-Hop global exports

Ega spoke next about the international influence of Japanese Hip-Hop. Japanese Hip-Hop artists have not made much impact outside of Japan. The language challenge is obvious. Even a Hip-Hop diehard like Ega admitted that he finds it hard to appreciate Hip-Hop which features rap in a language which he doesn’t understand. The late artist Nujabes (Jun Seba) who created the Lo-Fi sound, is one of the few Japanese Hip-Hop artists who achieved some international fame and impact with his intricate sampling of a seemingly endless collection of beats and music fragments. Then again, most of the tracks on Nujabes’ work and Hyde-Out produced albums that do contain rap, are in English.

Ega, however, returned to a point which he had made a few times. Hip-Hop is not just music, it is total-art and encompasses music, dance, graffiti and streetwear. He pointed out that many from his first-generation Hip-Hop circle became successful streetwear designers whose impact is felt far beyond Japan. Hiroshi Fujiwara has collaborated with brands as diverse as Nike and Bulgari. DJ Nigo founded A Bathing Ape, collaborates with Pharrell Williams (now of LVMH) on Billionaires Boys Club and now leads the Paris fashion house Kenzo. Jun Takahashi went from DJ to fashion designer. His brand Undercover collaborates with the likes of North Face and Givenchy. His recent haute couture show was one of the few truly radical shows on the Paris runway.

In Ega’s mind, the work of Fujiwara, Nigo and Takahashi is firmly rooted in Hip-Hop. The fearless sampling of seemingly random influences is visible in the work of all three designers and their collaborations. The music of Japanese Hip-Hop may not have travelled so well. But the Japanese Hip-Hop streetwear is omni-present.

The future of Japanese Hip-Hop

When we had covered the history and nature of Japanese Hip-Hop, we turned to the last topic. Is there a future for Hip-Hop in Japan now that it is big and widely accepted? Would the next generations not be fickle as usual and turn to the next trend? Would Hip-Hop not lose its edge now that it become so ubiquitous? Ega first turned philosophical and conceptual. He reminded again that Hip-Hop is total-art. It has been and always will be a way for young generations and forgotten parts of society to let themselves be heard and be appreciated, even if only in their own sub-culture. He summarized by saying, almost pleading, “It can’t stop”.

Then he lightened up and told us a personal experience – a true genba view. He had attended a Hip-Hop event in March which featured new artists and acts, many of them still in their teens. The audience was equally young. Ega was one of the few people “over fifty”. The event was attended by over 30.000 kids. He admitted that some of the music was a little raw and had felt “unfinished” to him. But what struck him most were the topics which the rappers tackled. These kids were just as engaged as Ega’s generation. But rather than rapping in general about social issues, this young generation spoke about their own emotional lives. Ega’s generation may have been socially engaged but would have never crossed the line into openly showing personal vulnerability. Star rapper Awich must have shown the way. She has rapped about her husband who was incarcerated and murdered. She raps about the intense desire for revenge that she felt, only to realize that it would serve her and her daughter no purpose. Ega took this new trend of emotional openness as a sign that Hip-Hop is fully alive in Japan, continues to evolve and serves an important purpose for its practitioners and fans. He concluded brightly: “It won’t stop”.

Ageless Hip-Hop in Japan

We walked out into the bright Autumn daylight of Shibuya. As background for the shoot, the photographer had chosen a wall filled with graffiti on the side of a famous Hip-Hop label and record store. Across the street is a shop selling Hip-Hop caps, several streetwear stores are just a little further down. The streets were full of teenagers dressed in fashionable Hip-Hop derived gear. We said our goodbyes and thanked Ega for the interview. I watched him as he walked away, blending into his surroundings. After just a few seconds he became indistinguishable from the teenagers around him. The Hip-Hop artist of the first hour and erstwhile star DJ did not look a bit out of place among his sub-culture. Neither did the teenagers around him. Ageless Hip-Hop in Japan - “Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop”.