24 Bars to Kill

Hip Hop, Aspiration, and Japan's Social Margins

Andrew B. Armstrong

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789202687
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The most clearly identifiable and popular form of Japanese hip-hop, "ghetto" or "gangsta" music has much in common with its corresponding American subgenres, including its portrayal of life on the margins, confrontational style, and aspirational "rags-to-riches" narratives. Contrary to depictions of an ethnically and economically homogeneous Japan, gangsta J-hop gives voice to the suffering, deprivation, and social exclusion experienced by many modern Japanese. 24 Bars to Kill offers a fascinating ethnographic account of this music as well as the subculture around it, showing how gangsta hip-hop arises from widespread dissatisfaction and malaise.

Chapter 1

Down in the Ghetto

In this chapter, I depict three urban neighborhoods in the Kansai region that are home to marginalized populations and which are genba, the “actual sites” of cultural production, where ghetto/gangsta hip-hop culture is generated. Mukaijima, in southern Kyoto, is Anarchy’s home, the location of the city’s largest public housing projects, and a place where blue-collar lifeways, youth delinquency, and illegal activities are commonplace. Osaka’s Nishinari ward is Shingo Nishinari’s hometown, Japan’s most conspicuous “ghetto,” and the location of the Kansai region’s central day-laborer neighborhood (yoseba), Kamagasaki.¹ Nishinari is known nationwide as a place of crime and poverty, as a haven for marginalized populations, and as a locus of social and political unrest. Higashikujo, Kyoto’s main ethnic Korean enclave, is famous in part due to the 2005 release of the movie Pacchigi! (Izutsu 2005), which dramatized the ethnic strife between Zainichi and Japanese that took place in Kyoto during the countercultural movement of the 1960s. Well before the release of the movie, Higashikujo was already equated with Zainichi in the public imagination, at least among Kyoto residents. This neighborhood is home to a number of locally well-known musicians, including DJ Kouki and Kurtis Fly, a founder of the Kyoto reggae and dancehall scene. Kouki identified himself to me as Zainichi, whereas Kurtis Fly’s talents were fostered in the margins of ethnic Japanese society.

Hip-hop musicians and other local residents sometimes use the term “ghetto” in reference to these neighborhoods, but what does the word mean in these contexts? Can we even use this term in the Japanese context in the first place? Who is permitted to determine the propriety of this usage, and with what political aims? Promotional videos by Shingo and Anarchy have engendered considerable online debate about whether or not “ghettos” exist in Japan. Commentary on YouTube videos ranging from the insightful to the crudely inflammatory has prompted reconsideration about how well overseas observers understand Japanese society. This may prove to be a positive development, but it is difficult to determine the meaning of a word when its etymology is unknown (Lieberman 2009), and when its meaning has shifted more than once.

The original Jewish “ghetto,” a walled enclosure locked from the outside at night, arose in Venice during the early sixteenth century (Wirth 1960; Hannerz 1969; Duneier 2017). By the mid-seventeenth century, walls encircled Jewish populations in many European cities as a means of segregation. These neighborhoods were often located on land that was considered undesirable, especially lowland areas prone to flooding and the spread of disease. Enforced segregation waned during the nineteenth century, but urban Jews, including those in the United States, tended to remain concentrated in ethnic enclaves long after the walled enclosures had been demolished. Demographic changes in urban America in the aftermath of World War II including white flight, the movement of white Americans from urban centers to the suburbs, resulted in an influx of black residents into neighborhoods that had previously been Jewish neighborhoods, the “ghettos.” The current popular usage, whereby “ghetto” means a low-income urban neighborhood populated primarily by black people, emerged in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Current dictionary definitions include “a part of a city, especially a slum area, occupied by a minority group or groups” and “an isolated or segregated group or area” (Oxford English Dictionary). These definitions do not acknowledge ghettos as the provenance of any specific ethnicity, but the first shift in the meaning of this term implies that the oppression experienced by Jews and black Americans is roughly equivalent in scale and degree.

Sometimes mainstream Japanese are irked by the appropriation of the term “ghetto” in reference to low-income neighborhoods in Japan. Granted, very few contemporary residents of Mukaijima, Nishinari, and Higashikujo have been subjected to genocide, slavery, or everyday hazards of life comparable to those in America’s most dangerous urban neighborhoods. Yet Western observers who express contempt for the MCs’ use of “ghetto” demonstrate a generalized lack of knowledge about Japan and a lack of curiosity about what life is like for people on the margins of Japanese society. Simply said, “ghetto” in the Kansai context refers to stigmatized urban neighborhoods or, in the words of one of my informants who is of Burakumin descent, “discriminated areas [sic].”

Japan’s original ghettos were the buraku, a term meaning “hamlets” or “settlements” that came to be used in a derivative sense in reference to outcast enclaves formed prior to and during the 1600s. According to the “master narrative” (Amos 2011), the residents of these areas were descended directly from two categories of marginalized populations. Those presumed to be descended from eta (filthy ones) were considered impure because their ancestors purportedly engaged in hereditary occupations that were considered to be spiritually polluting—butcher, leather tanner, shoemaker, executioner, and handler of human corpses (Gordon 2003: 16). The ancestors of other Burakumin were presumed to have been hinin (nonpersons), a category that originally encompassed convicted criminals, street performers, and a range of other individuals who were considered to have lost their honor. Both eta and hinin were in common use early in the Edo period (1603–1868) when the social hierarchy became fixed and strictly enforced by sumptuary law (Hane 2003: 141–143). Upward socioeconomic mobility became impossible, and “outcasts” became “outcastes.” The feudal social order was abolished in 1871, leading to the elimination of outcaste status as an officially mandated category, and a new term was appropriated in reference to these stigmatized populations, Burakumin. Timothy Amos (2011: 22) has pointed out flaws in the master narrative, especially that the unitary term Burakumin is misleading in that it “has come to categorize a number of socially distinct populations into one common group.” Reparations resulting in guaranteed access to education, employment, and housing were institutionalized in the years following the passing of the 1969 Buraku Special Measures Laws (Gordon 2003: 262), yet Burakumin still face prejudice in their daily lives and institutional discrimination in employment, education, and marriage (De Vos and Wagatsuma 1967; Fowler 2000; Matsushita 2002; Bondy 2009; Amos 2011).

The contemporary Burakumin experience is shaped by a legacy of institutionalized discrimination resulting from a more than one-thousand-year-old syncretism of the Buddhist precept of extending compassion to all living things with the Shinto emphasis on purity. Of course non-Burakumin Japanese never have objected to consuming buraku products, and the ancestors of Burakumin filled indispensible roles in Japanese society. Phenotypically identical to all other Japanese, even today Burakumin are often treated as if they are somehow unclean or not fully human, and thus not really Japanese. The term yotsu (“four,” implying yotsuashi, meaning “four-legged”), part euphemism and part epithet, is still used today, including by one of my Zainichi informants (see chapter 3 for more on Burakumin–Zainichi relations). Contemporary markers of Burakumin identity include only one’s residential address and, in some cases, family name.² The term Burakumin has been replaced in bureaucratic and administrative language with dōwa, a term meaning “integration” or “assimilation” (of the subjects of discrimination), but the older term remains in common use, including by Burakumin.

Similar to the original buraku, Kansai’s ghettos in the contemporary context may be thought of as unclean places, both literally and symbolically, that contaminate the local population, including non-Burakumin Japanese. Sections of these neighborhoods are strewn with litter, and the odor of stale urine is noticeable on side streets and in the elevators of public housing projects. Apartment interiors in Mukaijima may be dirty or even filthy by Japanese standards. Decorum pertaining to removal of shoes in the entryway before entering the living areas may not be strictly observed, and bath areas are often mildewed due to inadequate ventilation. Yet beyond the physical grime and dirt, ghettos in Japan today are stigmatized partly because of a purported symbolic uncleanliness or moral vacancy associated with the area and its inhabitants. Dirtiness exists on many levels, including the speech register of ghetto residents, which may be offensive to mainstream Japanese, and some ghetto MCs and self-described gangstas refer to their earnings as “dirty money.”

More than one of my informants indicated that ghetto residents are quite aware that members of mainstream society consider them to be unclean. At times these self-proclaimed ghetto boys appropriate the terms of derogation and convert them into expressions of class consciousness. Hiroki’s choice of the stage-name Dirty Kid is a case in point. The two most popular music videos by Kohh, an ascendant MC who grew up in public housing projects in Tokyo, are titled “Poverty Doesn’t Bother Me” (貧乏なんて気にしない) and “Dirt Boys.” Anarchy’s 2013 release DGKA, meaning “Dirty Ghetto King Anarchy,” is partly a nod to DGK (Dirty Ghetto Kids), a skateboard and skate fashion label owned by African American skater Stevie Williams, and also an indicator of Mukaijima youths’ class consciousness. Neither Dirty Kid nor Anarchy are of Burakumin descent, yet they see themselves as subjects of a type of disparagement that is couched in terms similar to those used to express Burakumin discrimination. Carol Wolkowitz (2007: 21) points out that “the performance of dirty work affects the identities (and stigmatizes the bodies) of the workers concerned” in the context of waste handlers and nurses tasked with elder care. Neither Buraku discrimination nor the stigmatization of ghetto youths requires liturgical or ritual rationale, nor can these be legislated out of existence, because the basic premises underlying the stigmatization of dirty work are nearly ubiquitous. Yet the potency of this stigmatization undergirds the street credibility that successful ghetto/gangsta performers derive from their rootedness in marginalized neighborhoods.

The Japanese phrase “hard, dirty, and dangerous” (kitsui, kitanai, kiken) refers to undesirable blue-collar work, especially excavation, waste management, and demolition. Work of this type, called “three-K work” (sankei shokuba), had lost its appeal to Japanese youths by the 1980s, resulting in the government and police forces adopting an informal policy of tolerance toward the presence of unknown numbers of illegal workers from the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and China (Gordon 2003: 329). Ethnic Japanese who are still willing to perform three-K jobs today are overwhelmingly from neighborhoods similar to the three I analyze in this chapter.

Demolition work is one of the most common types of employment among my informants and among the general population of Japan’s ghettos. The kaitai worker’s tasks include manually demolishing wood frame structures with long-handled picks as the primary tool, separating heaps of byproduct into specific categories to be loaded onto trucks for disposal, and acting as an intermediary between the heavy machinery and the finer points of the job. Sometimes the equipment operator will demolish an entire section of a structure in a few minutes, leaving a tangled mess that may include electrical wires, wood, insulation, glass, concrete, and steel. The kaitai worker then has to negotiate rusty nails protruding from wood scraps and the cut ends of steel rebar while sorting the rubble. Minor injuries are a regular occurrence, and major ones always a possibility. At one job site, we were sorting rubble on the third floor of a steel-reinforced concrete structure that had previously housed a bank. We were tasked with hurling demolition byproduct to the ground below from a precipice created by the removal of a section of exterior wall. The heavy equipment operator had created this aperture the previous day, beginning by puncturing the wall with the backhoe bucket from the exterior, while we were at work in this space, without any prior warning. The heavy equipment is kept running almost continuously at kaitai job sites, resulting in poor air quality during the day and a lingering odor of diesel fumes on work clothes in the evening.

Kaitai workers and their counterparts in construction and excavation are often recruited by labor brokers (ninpu dashi), individuals who in some cases are only a few degrees removed from low-ranking Yakuza. The broker makes a few phone calls to satisfy a client’s labor requirements and then skims between US$30.00 and US$50.00 from each worker’s daily wages. In 2009, my coworkers ended up with the equivalent of about US$68.00 for a day’s work. Kaitai laborers typically travel to and from work in vehicles provided by the foreman of the work crew or by their supervisors. It is quite uncommon to see three-K laborers commute by public transportation. Kaitai work is often done at the sub-subcontractor level, thereby insulating the general contractor from responsibility for jobsite accidents and the workers’ immigration status. In the preponderance of ghetto residents who perform what mainstream Japanese perceive as unclean work, we see something similar to the trade monopolies that were historically granted to outcastes, while the residential isolation of stigmatized social classes from mainstream Japanese recalls the segregation of eta and hinin during the premodern period.

Mary Douglas (1966) famously claimed that dirt is “matter out of place,” meaning that it threatens evaluation and categorization of objects and individuals within any given system of classification while blurring the lines between what is considered “clean” and “impure.” Scholars have identified weaknesses in Douglas’s model, including Richard Fardon (1999: 100, note 9, cited in Campkin 2007: 72), who points out that “the formulation is not reversible: all matter out of place is not dirt.” Yet Douglas’s model has attracted considerable attention in part because it is fundamentally sound. Ideas of dirt as matter out of place are evident in the extent to which Japanese people spend considerable time and effort to contain sources of urban uncleanliness and keep them out of interior residential spaces. Shoes must be removed before entering these clearly demarcated areas, while floors are vacuumed fastidiously and tatami mats wiped free of dust and grime. Geographic marginality of ghetto neighborhoods reflects policy decisions made at the municipal, prefectural, or national levels to tolerate low-income areas only in places where they will be as close to invisible as possible from the perspective of elites, ordinary citizens, and tourists. Members of mainstream society avoid these neighborhoods largely because of vague and often unfounded fears. Thus contemporary Japanese society challenges Douglas’s model because dirt, even in its proper place, can still pose a symbolic threat to mainstream society (Campkin 2007: 73).

Residential address functions as the primary marker of stigmatized identity in both the ghetto and the buraku. Of course, neighborhood of origin is a determining factor of socioeconomic status and life outcomes in any society, but this may be especially true in Japan. Few other means of drawing boundaries between social classes exist in what is purportedly a mono-ethnic population. The popular mood of the period of increasing prosperity that began in the 1950s included a sense of participation in widely shared experiences (see Gordon 2003: 245–269); this sense still lingers in popular discourse on Japanese society, even though much has changed since the onset of economic recession in the late 1980s. Economic hardship has become an increasingly widely shared experience at the same time that the gap between rich and poor has broadened (see Tachibanaki 2005; Moriguchi and Saez 2008). Natural and man-made disasters in 1995 and 2011, compounded by damage to utilities and energy infrastructure, have increased the sense that broad sectors of Japan’s population are experiencing hardship. What has not changed is that neighborhood is often used as a proxy for socioeconomic status in public discourse. Distinctions between white-collar and blue-collar, between high-class (jōhin) and low-class (gehin), between genteelness and vulgarity exist in people’s minds and are manifest in the characteristics associated with one’s home neighborhood.

“Ghetto” in the Kansai context refers to a locus of intergenerational poverty. The neighborhoods where I conducted my fieldwork are not walled in as the original European ghettos were, but there are forces that act to keep ghetto dwellers in the neighborhoods where they grew up. At the end of verse two of “Fate,” Anarchy refers to circumstances in Mukaijima being so dire that it is as if residents are being “pulled back by the hair” (Anarchy 2008b). Earlier in verse two of “Fate,” he raps, “On the underside of peace are binding chains.” These “chains” may be literal ones represented by the tattoo handcuffs that adorn the backs of Anarchy’s hands. In another sense, “chains” refers to abstract forces that prevent Mukaijima residents from achieving upward socioeconomic mobility, including alienation from mainstream society, prejudicial treatment in the public school system, the stigma associated with single parentage, gambling debt, and other risks posed by violence, illegal drugs, juvenile delinquency, incarceration, and Yakuza recruitment.

Mukajima and Lowland Marginality in Kyoto’s “Deep City”

Mukaijima was originally an island in a body of water formed by the confluence of the Yamashina and Uji Rivers in southern Kyoto, within view of Momoyama Castle. According to my informants, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the warlord who unified Japan in the sixteenth century and who was headquartered in the castle, referred to the island as mukai no shima (island in front), which was later abbreviated to Mukaijima (向島). Lowland riverside neighborhoods in Japan were historically vulnerable to flooding and, as undesirable land, were occupied by lower socioeconomic classes. Public works projects gradually brought the flow of water under control and expanded Mukaijima’s footprint to include an expanse of reclaimed farmland to the south of the original neighborhood. Even though flooding is no longer a concern, Mukaijima and similar neighborhoods remain home to populations of low socioeconomic status.

In the 1960s, urban development, especially the con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Language
• A Hip-Hop Introduction to Other Japans
• Chapter 1 Down in the Ghetto
• Chapter 2 Hypermasculinity and Ghetto/Gangsta Authenticity
• Chapter 3 Represent JP Koreans! Ethnic Identity in Zainichi Hip Hop
• Chapter 4 Rapping for the Nation
• Afterword
• References
• Index