Japanese Reggae?

(via The New York Times)

The Japanese have been making reggae almost as long as Jamaicans have been exporting it. This phenomenon could have started as early as the mid-’70s, when the film “The Harder They Come” grafted the crime drama to Kingston’s reggae scene and became an international cult classic. Or, more likely, it began sometime around 1979, when Bob Marley landed for the first time in the Land of the Rising Sun. Since then, the reggae scene in Japan has cycled through several styles and sub-subcultures, but only in recent years has one crucial aspect of its identity fully emerged: Finally, Japanese reggae stars are singing in Japanese.

Yes, the performers still punctuate their lyrics with Jamaican patois and channel dancehall reggae’s tinny, digital riddims. And Kingston remains a crucial pilgrimage destination. But in Japan, whose appetite for foreign forms and fashions is insatiable, Japanese reggae has passed the point where critics — like the author of a 2002 Vibe article who described Japanese dancehall enthusiasts as wannabes — can dismiss it as another cultural curiosity. “Japanese dancehall is becoming more and more Japanese,” says Marvin D. Sterling, an Indiana University anthropologist whose book “Babylon East: Perfoming Dancehall, Roots Reggae, and Rastafari in Japan” (Duke University Press, $23.95) came out last month.

As for the music? Much of it — while sonically similar to its Jamaican antecedents — is not bad, says Sterling. “They’re trying to do something different from what’s been given to them,” he says. “I see a lot of creativity in their music.” Sterling mentions bands like U-Dou & Platy in Okinawa, which incorporates the banjolike sanshin into their songs, and singers like Nanjaman, whose social concerns Sterling admires — if not the nationalism and homophobia that he inherited from some Jamaican musicians. Japanese practitioners, he says, often identify with reggae out of a shared sense of “blackness” — some channel anxieties over Western monoculturalism; others are of Korean descent and identify with the nationalist, anticolonial message of the genre. Still others are drawn to reggae’s messianic themes.

These days, the Japanese reggae scene is more rude boy — or even rapper — than rasta. A vibrant roots reggae scene flourished in beginning in the mid-’80s, but ebbed about a decade later. And there’s still a population of spiritual, ganja-smoking disciples of the Rastafari religion; they live mostly in Japan’s rural communities. But the scene is now dominated by dancehall — the pulsing, sweaty variant of the genre that centers on the D.J. clusters known as “sound systems.”

The current dancehall boom aligns with the success of Japanese performers abroad. Yokohama’s Mighty Crown won a 1999 sound system competition — a “sound clash” — in New York; the group now plays to tens of thousands in Jamaica, New York and hubs of the Jamaican diaspora in Canada and Germany. And in 2002, the Japanese reggae dancer Junko Kudo became the first non-Jamaican to win the Dancehall Queen contest in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Now, the largest contingent of international contestants there is Japanese. Kudo’s uniform has become something of a blueprint for Japanese reggae dancers: gold dreads, “Daisy Duke” cutoff shorts, knee-high socks.

Still, at spaces like Buenos and Harlem in Tokyo’s fashion-incubating Shibuya district, Club 24 in Yokohama and Metro in Kyoto, you won’t see too many dreadlocks. Sterling says dancehall fashions are urban but amorphous — kids will incorporate signifiers like the reggae colors of red, green and gold into boutique-bought outfits. Men wear athletic apparel, women aim mostly for tight-fitting but unrevealing, as most forms of reggae contain a conservative streak. “The ideal is anything goes,” says Sterling. “Within reason, anything goes.”