Rap music in Japan has enjoyed steady popularity since the mid-1980s. Never considered part of "main-stream" popular music, this genre nevertheless has attracted several big-name companies in Japan's recording industry, and its commercial success was confirmed when in 1994-5 original songs by two of the leading "J-Rap" groups, Scha Dara Parr and East End X Yuri, produced million-selling hits.

This paper examines the musical, social, and political properties of "J-Rap." I argue that "J-Rap," by superficially emphasizing certain "exotic" characters which the Japanese associate with hip-hop culture in America, especially in New York, has turned itself into an object of fetishization. While J-Rap has become a symbol of globalism--or rather, a symbol of the consumption of globalism--, pop-oriented J-Rap distances itself from the American counterpart in the de-politicization of the lyrics and the distinct character of the audience. "J-Rap" is never a vehicle for youth social revolution: it has instead become one definition of "cool"--an adjective that may capture the fetish-like obsession with mass-consumer products, such as anime (animated films) and Hello Kitty. Thus, the popularity of "J-Rap" is a phenomenon that is in line with the recent flow of hits in Japanese "ethnic" music (such as Ainu or Amami music), in that "J-Rap" is symptomatic of Japan's tendency for de-politicizing the potentially political.

In this paper, while reference is made to recent studies in topics related to cultural globalism, the focus is placed on discussing how the reception of rap music in Japan has confirmed the innate "Japaneseness" of Japan's society. Visual and aural examples are also cited from Japan's leading rap artists, so as to introduce the conference audience to the country's unique appropriation of this global genre.

Fuyuko Fukunaka earned a BM in Performance (piano) from Kunitachi Conservatory of Music (Tokyo), a MFA in Musical Literature and Performance from Mills College (Oakland, CA), and a MA and Ph. D. (2002) in Historical Musicology from New York University, Graduate School of Arts and Science. Her doctoral dissertation examined the music of Wolfgang Rihm (b. 1952). Dr. Fukunaka has published articles in "Alban Berg und die zwanziger Jahre, Kongreßbericht Salzburg 1998" (Anif-Salzburg: Verlag Ursula Müller-Speiser, 1999), and in "Contemporary Opera at the Millennium" (forthcoming from U. of Illinois Press). She has taught at NYU since 1997.