Mori Michi Ichiba Festival6 Images
Located on the remote shores of Japan’s Aichi prefecture, Mori Michi Ichiba festival starts off as a fairly ordered affair. The scent of yakitori skewers wafts across the beach and attendees seem surprisingly cooperative with the rules prohibiting photographs of the performers. However, as night begins to fall and the opening notes of Ralph’s rap anthem “Get Back” reverberate across the sand, the dynamic changes. New Era snapback caps – modified with towels to stave off the Summer heat – fill the crowd and fists pump in the air. Within a few 140 beats, the no photographing rule became virtually unenforceable. “Show me your ones, show me your twos, trigger fingers du-du-du-du!” Ralph barks, instructing the young crowd on how to fire off their gun fingers in real time. The idyllic beach surroundings transformed into something resembling an illegal rave in the UK. How did this happen?
Whether “Get Back” can be classified as grime (as one Redditor postulated), or drill (as Ralph’s manager and one-half of production duo Double Clapperz, Shintaro Yonezawa, insisted), or something entirely new altogether, it was hard to deny its connection to UK culture – replete with references to Air Force 1s and wheel-ups. Racking up over seven million views on Spotify since its 2023 release, the track has cemented Ralph and featured artists JUMADIBA and Watson at the forefront of Japan’s new wave of rappers. From grime and bassline right through to jersey house and drill, these artists are welcoming a wealth of Western rap influences into the country’s mainstream, and signalling a turning point in the scene as a whole.
Rap music is by no means new to Japan. In fact, thanks to a significant Japanese population living in New York in the 70s and 80s, the country is written into the origin story of hip hop itself. Japanese businessman Hiroshi Fujiwara is said to have brought some of the genre’s first records back to Japan after a trip to New York in 1980 and, more widely, tracks like Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Riot in Lagos“ and Yellow Magic Orchestra’s “Computer Game“ pioneered the digital drum patterns and electro-style synthesisers that later became central to hip hop. One of the genre’s ‘four godfathers’, Afrika Bambaataa, even cited the group as a key influence behind his debut album Planet Rock.
Grime arrived promptly, too. Sitting down with Dazed in a locals’ izakaya bar in Shibuya, Japanese MC Pakin describes how he discovered the foundational grime album Boy in the Corner in 2004 while reading a copy of music magazine Black Music Review, and was immediately drawn to the rebellious, underdog-like character on the cover. Home internet had not yet reached his small hometown in Fukushima prefecture, and so Pakin spent the evenings of his secondary school years using the class computer, trawling early grime forums in an attempt to get a grasp on a culture which was still only finding its feet in East London at the time.
Fast-forward a few years and Pakin is now studying at university in Tokyo. With easy access to the internet, he has been able to download grime instrumentals and start making his own music, and discovers that he isn’t the first person in Japan to fall in love with grime – Ōsakan MCs Dekishi, Duff, and Catarrh Nisin have all beaten him to it. Through performing in nightclubs around the capital, however, he meets British DJ and producer Frankie $ who paves the way for Pakin to achieve a different breakthrough: the first Japanese grime MC to appear in the UK.
Frankie leveraged his contacts in the UK and in early 2013, armed with English learnt almost exclusively from grime freestyles, Pakin made his pilgrimage to the birthplace of the genre. During this trip, he travelled all the way up to Birmingham where he met the Dark Elements grime crew fronted by Devilman who, impressed by his commitment to the genre, made the Japanese MC an honorary member of the collective. On subsequent trips over the next two years, Pakin popped up in surprising corners of the grime scene, filiming an iconic “5 Pound Munch” video for Big Narstie and Lordie’s GrimeReportTV in 2015 and even crashing at Devilman’s house. “It was a really good memory for me,” Pakin says, beaming. “Devilman taught me the difference between ‘wa-er’ and ‘water’ and even made coffee for me in the morning.”
When asked why he felt so powerfully and immediately drawn to grime, Pakin uttered one word: sogai. Translating to ‘alienation’, the concept captures an estrangement from Japan’s immensely ordered and collectivist society, and can begin to explain Pakin’s unlikely resonance with the similarly alienated East London MCs that gave birth to grime. Where Dizzee spoke of being a “boy in the corner”, marginalised and isolated in British society, Pakin felt alienated in Japan, where everything from how you walk in a train station to the suit one wears for a job interview is dictated by rules. A similar rebellion can be found in the music of fellow Tokyo-based rapper Tohji, whose Y2K style and Drain-gang adjacent ‘Mall rap’ stand as a similar rejection of Japan’s rigid social norms.
While Pakin never experienced the degree of mainstream success that Ralph and the others later achieved, there is some degree of irony to be found in the fact that, 20 years after he first discovered Boy in the Corner, elements of grime and UK rave culture have ended up at the apex of Japan’s rap scene. Below, we spotlight five artists leading the charge.
Perhaps no individual act is more responsible for the dominance of grime and drill in Japan than production duo Double Clapperz. “Bass and dance music is at the heart of our sound,” one-half of Double Clapperz, Shintaro Yonezawa, tells Dazed. “We are inspired by subcultures in the UK, Europe and US.”
While the duo have been responsible for hits spanning pop, drill, jersey house and more, it was grime that initially bonded them together. “Grime was everything we like – hardcore rap, an ‘anti’ attitude, reggae and a unique style of fashion. We are still being inspired by grime producers from the early 2010s,” he explains. In 2016, Yonezawa’s counterpart UKD was called upon to perform alongside MC Pakin at UK production duo Elijah & Skilliam’s Japanese Grime event, and, today, their distinct beat tag can be heard across the full spectrum Japan’s new wave of rappers – including Ralph’s first-ever single “Sha Ni Kamaeru”.
Also known by the moniker ‘Assaji’ (referring to an enlightened follower of Gautama Buddha in Buddhist scripture), and with the unlikely choice of Oasis’ Gallagher brothers as his Instagram profile picture, Tokyo-based rapper JUMADIBA particularly highlights this new wave’s mobilisation of international influences within the Japanese cultural milieu.
Early on in his career, JUMADIBA remixed Liverpudlian drill artist Hazey’s breakthrough single “Packs & Potions”, displaying an unorthodox, off-kilter cadence that meshed well with drill’s percussive rhythms. He has since collaborated extensively with Ralph and Double Clapperz, playing a key role in drill and grime’s rise to the forefront of Japanese rap.
“I love UK and US drill, but my lyrics are not influenced by them,” dancer-turned-viral-rapper Maddy Soma tells Dazed. Instead, his breakout single “OKE” has drawn comparisons with the Japanese sutras recited during Buddhist rituals. With sliding 808s and warlike percussion, the song clearly takes influence from the UK’s drill scene, in particular, but is distinguished by its more localised cultural references.
“When I first heard the beat I was instantly reminded of Naruto and Demon Slayer, which made me think of fire,” the Tokyo rapper explains of the influences behind the track. “I chose the name of a ritual called Otakiage, in which fire is used for purification, as the title of the song, which I then shortened to ‘OKE’”.
The final featured artist on “Get Back”, Watson is credited by Double Clapperz as a key player in drill’s ascension to the Japanese mainstream, and the newest artist on this list, debuting in 2022. Born in a remote coastal corner of Tokushima prefecture, the new era wave maker was firmly embroiled in the murky underworld of Ōsaka by the time he surfaced with the hit “New Real feat. Young Zetton”.
Through tracks like “Working Class Anthem feat. eyden”, which also takes inspiration from the melodic storytelling of American trapstars, Watson has emerged as the type of rap anti-hero that may be familiar to Western readers, but relatively unheard of in the East.
With the deep, gravelly voice and an origin story befitting a superhero, there‘s no denying that Ralph is one of Japan’s biggest artists right now. “He’s an icon, honestly,” Pakin tells Dazed. “It used to be KOHH who represented Japan in the 2010s, but from the 2020s it’s Ralph. He represents the new age”.
Raised in Japan’s notorious danchi housing estates just north of Tokyo, and bullied for his mixed Indonesian-Japanese heritage growing up, Ralph has spoken openly about being discriminated against and profiled by police. Much like Pakin’s sogai, it is these experiences that lead to Ralph’s attraction to grime and drill, and their ability to provide a voice for the voiceless. It is also because of these experiences that Ralph’s rise to the forefront of Japanese music is so powerful: he stands as one of few role models for mixed-ethnicity Japanese today. While their influences may be international, the impact that Ralph and all of these artists are making is profoundly, and prolifically, Japanese.
