The Sakura of Madness: Japan's Nationalist Hip Hop and the Parallax of Globalized Identity Politics

Abstract

Hip hop has been a significant force in Japanese pop culture since the mid‐1990s, and now includes many esthetic and political divergences from its American origins. These include, perhaps most strikingly, a significant subgenre of right‐wing nationalist hip hop. This article examines Japan's right‐wing hip hop as an illustration of the mutability of ideology when it crosses cultural boundaries. It traces the strangeness of Japanese right‐wing hip hop to the “parallax” effect of two incommensurable views of Japan—on the one hand, as a powerful postimperial nation, and on the other, as a perennially oppressed postcolonial nation. The article traces these viewpoints' relationship to African American politics and to Western scholarship, which has significantly misrepresented Japanese hip hop.

Racialized im/possibilities: Intersectional queer-of-color critique on Japaneseness in Netflix’s Queer Eye: We’re in Japan!

“…There are not many popular cultural images of Japanese people emotionally relating to Black/African Americans. When Japanese popular media features Black/African American people and cultures, it often reifies the global commodification of hip-hop working with the logics of cisheterosexism, capitalism, and American exceptionalism (Morris, 2013). Hence, Makoto sobbing on Karamo's chest is quite transgressive.…”