It’s funny how culture crisscrosses the globe, never stopping at such laughable things as national borders as it flows to any place it can find a home in peoples’ minds. You wouldn’t think that a country as far removed from the West both physically and culturally as Japan is would have its own burgeoning hip hop and reggae music sub-culture, or that what’s playing in clubs in Jamaica is being closely followed from Japan, but the world is an amazing place. Just as Americans and Europeans are interested in the unique ideas and general “otherness” found in anime, manga, JPOP and other forms of contemporary Japanese culture, people in Japan are open to taking in new musical idea from the outside and remixing it into something unique. A quick glance into any fashion magazine shows that Japanese are keen to embrace hip fashion from the West, too, to the point where it might be difficult to identify where one influence ends and another begins.J-List’s Japanese textbook and manga buyer Yasu just happens to be a pretty successful rapper, having pressed a few albums while in Tokyo and Philadelphia. Here’s a recent remix of a song he made in 1999, if you want to see some Japanese hip-hop that’s pretty good.
