The importance of grasping the “trans” rather than “local” in hip-hop in Japan was poignantly brought home to me through the example of Lafura Jackson (a.k.a. A-Twice), an African-American-Japanese rapper and DJ, whom I saw perform in June 2000 in a small, underground club called Web in Tokyo. He came on at around three a.m., urging the sparse crowd of about twenty people to crowd him in, as he rapped in both English and Japanese. After the show, I asked about his stage name, A-Twice, which he explained was a reference to the Japanese term haafu (half) to describe people who are half-Japanese, half-something else. “I’m not ‘half’ anything,” he said. He was African American and Asian American and the doubling of A’s made him “A-Twice.” He grew up in both the United States and Japan, attending high school in Tokyo and college in Massachusetts and then California before returning to Tokyo to pursue a musical career. What he did not tell me when we met was that the previous fall he had been diagnosed with cancer, and a couple months after his performance, he died in a Tokyo cancer ward at the age of twenty-four. When I met him, I didn’t think there was a place for him in my study of Japanese hip-hop, in part because I tended to look down on American artists who were rapping (selfishly, I thought) in English. But A-Twice made a mark on the scene, prompting a stunning tribute song by DJ Krush and Tha Blue Herb emcee Ill-Bostino called “Candle Chant.” By not choosing “either/or” or simply representing his “Japaneseness,” A-Twice helped me see another “both/and” aspect of hip-hop in Japan. This encounter provides insight into the limits of defining authenticity by primarily looking for a core meaning at the risk of underplaying the performative character of activities in the present. (pg. 46)
Condry, Ian. Hip-hop Japan: Rap and the paths of cultural globalization. Duke University Press, 2006.
