Fetishized Blackness: Hip Hop and Racial Desire in Contemporary Japan

Abstract

Flipping television channels late one insomniac night in Tokyo in the winter of 1990, I happened upon a Japanese dancing duo performing with darkened faces, singing, outfitted in the trendiest costumes: baseball caps with brims turned to the back, expensive sneakers, and baggy trousers. That same year, a friend who was visiting Japan entered a dance hall which to his surprise appeared to be peopled almost exclusively by youths. Upon closer scrutiny he realized that the young men were Asian: Japanese with darkened faces, some with dreadlocks and some with fades, performing hip hop dance steps and breaking to rap music. The encounter of teenage and young adult Japanese men and women with rap music, hip hop style, and signs of blackness is a multifaceted reconfiguration of these variant signs, bound to global commodity exchange, Japanese racialism, and Japanese national identity. The contemporary pop-culture Japanese rendering of hip hop and rap consists of a fascination with the aural and visual styles (the sounds, movements, body language, and outfits) and an African American symbolic presence signaled by fetishizing skin and hairstyles. This disposition of hip hop requires as its foundation a separation of hip hop and rap from the specifics of American racialism, and a reconstruction bounded by Japanese racialism. The phenomenon of nonblack youth dressing themselves in black style is not unique to Japan. In the United States, white teenagers have also adopted the clothing, mannerisms, hairdos, vernacular, and other markers of hip hop style. In Japan, special salons advertise their expertise in dread-hair (doreddo hea), a process which may cost dearly in time and money; in America, white girls may plait their hair in small braids.' What is strikingly different in Japan is that skin is incorporated as an essential signifier of hip hop style. Japanese youth enamored of hip hop regularly darken their complexions with makeup, especially when they go out dancing. Recent works by John Russell have mapped out a domain of Japanese representations of blacks which he holds to be directly imported from the West. But present-day Japanese black face is usually not determined by the American historical counterpart.2 In the United States, the history of white entertainers in blackface has marked as racist the darkening of the skin in imitation of African Americans. The debacle of Ted Danson at the Nina Cornyetz

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