The literature on the circulation of African diasporic musical cultures in Japan has explored this process in a complex and mutually informed set of terms. Its authors, for example, have situated these musical cultures in relation to Japan's socioeconomic and political history and to issues of identity such as race, class, regional differences, and gender. 24 Bars to Kill: Hip Hop, Aspiration, and Japan's Social Margins, by anthropologist Andrew B. Armstrong, explores recent developments and new points of focus on hip-hop in Japan. Armstrong considers the lives and music of Kansai-based gangsta rap artists Anarchy and Shingo Nishinari, who come from low-income neighborhoods in Kyoto and Osaka, respectively, in the context of the “second modernity” of recessionary Japan.

Armstrong begins, in “A Hip-Hop Introduction to Other Japans,” with matters of definition. He characterizes Kansai “ghettos”—a term that many do not associate with urban Japan—as spaces inhabited by people on the social margins. They include “the unemployed and the underemployed, the homeless, members of single-parent families, latch-key children, juvenile delinquents (yankii, bōsōzoku), ex-convicts, drug dealers, amphetamine addicts, day laborers, habitual gamblers, ethnic Koreans (Zainichi), gangsters (Yakuza), and descendants of hereditary outcastes (Burakumin)” (p. 2). Armstrong retools genba—the “actual sites” of cultural production as articulated by Ian Condry in his seminal work on hip-hop in Japan—to refer to struggling communities such as Mukaijima in Kyoto, where nationally acclaimed artist Anarchy grew up; Osaka's Nishinari ward, “Japan's quintessential ghetto” (p. 17) and home to rapper-activist Shingo Nishinari (who incorporates the name of the ward into his stage name); and other genba throughout the region that represent sources of authenticity for these artists.

In chapter 1, “Down in the Ghetto,” Armstrong focuses on Nishinari and Mukaijima as well as Higashikujo, the site of Kyoto's largest Korean community, where a number of practitioners of the subgenre originate. He fleshes out his understanding of these communities as ghettos through a history of outcaste Burakumin marginalization and discrimination; describes the development of Mukaijima and Nishinari, Anarchy's and Shingo's hard upbringings there, and their representation of this experience in their music; and offers evocative ethnographic renderings of both neighborhoods in the present day. Armstrong discusses the history of Kyoto's Higashikujo to situate in contemporary context the experience of Zainichi in the Kansai region. He closes with a reflection on communities like these as exemplary of Japan as “an ordinary postindustrial nation” (p. 63), as challenging national and international imaginings of a Japanese exceptionalism that helps render these communities, and their residents, invisible.

Viewed specifically in light of this careful stage setting of Mukaijima, Nishinari, and Higashikujo in chapter 1, and the impressive evidence of Armstrong's nearly two decades of research, little follows in the way of ethnographic narrative of quotidian life lived and aesthetic labor exerted in those spaces. In his focus on content analysis of the artists’ music, lyrics, and videos, genba is the source of an already acquired subcultural capital. Still, Armstrong's book here is engaging and instructive, especially where supplemented by observations from his fieldwork experience.

In chapter 2, “Hypermasculinity and Ghetto/Gangster Authenticity,” Armstrong discusses the significant number of hip-hop artists in Kansai and elsewhere who are known or believed to be involved with Yakuza. He discusses the lyrics and music of Anarchy, Shingo, and others for the ways in which the theme of hypermasculinity emerges. Armstrong characterizes this posturing as being, in a way, in keeping with the times, in which the model of sarariiman masculinity, in this period of socioeconomic uncertainty, feels less viable than in times past. Sarariiman cede the stage to gangstas, shadowy operators better suited, so to speak, to this new environment. The Kansai-based artists who may identify with them, or as them, are potential symbols of aspiration for low-income youth, and charismatic class-based others for more socioeconomically privileged fans. Women make only a limited appearance in the chapter, and in the book, no doubt given the male dominance of gangsta rap. Still, given Armstrong's concerns with gender, readers might wonder about the involvement, however circumscribed, of women in this culture.

In chapter 3, “Represent JP Koreans! Ethnic Identity in Zainichi Hip Hop,” Armstrong characterizes the music of artists who may identify as Zainichi (resident Korean) as reflecting a complex relationship between Japanese and Korean identities. He profiles the work of a number of artists who suggest identification or explicitly identify as Zainichi. He queries why “Burakumin hip hop is nearly non-existent,” raising the possibility that the benefits that came with the 1969 Buraku Special Measures Law have attenuated Burakumin impulses toward activist music (p. 116). With Zainichi hip-hop, the recent resurgence of right-wing ideology has made it especially difficult and indeed dangerous to sound out such a politics.

The fourth chapter, “Rapping for the Nation,” addresses the cultural nationalist rhetoric in much of Kansai's ghetto/gangsta rap. The artists Armstrong discusses exhort their audiences to be responsible citizens, to shake off the apathy the artists view as afflicting Japanese society. Armstrong addresses a range of strategies through which they authenticate gangsta rap as Japanese, including through the incorporation of hōgaku (traditional Japanese musical) genres, instrumentation, and phrasing, and through the adoption of the enigmatic and menacing persona of rōnin (masterless samurai). He discusses a number of artists who engage in different degrees of sincerity and directness with right-wing rhetoric, noting the elements of opportunism that may motivate this engagement. Much of the nationalism in gangsta rap is directed against the perceived complacencies of peacetime (heiwa boke) and against political corruption.

Early in the book, Armstrong discusses race more or less as a point of departure for his primary focus on class in gangsta rap in Kansai. Elsewhere, he discusses the accusations of cultural appropriation leveled against Shingo as he performed onstage in New York, as well as how other Japanese artists chafe against Western assumptions of their inauthenticity (in both cases without mentioning race specifically). In the afterword, Armstrong discusses, among other issues, the possibility of Shingo's and Anarchy's career success in the United States. He notes that language is a critical barrier. While he discusses race elsewhere in this closing chapter, he does not do so at this point in the text. But one naturally wonders whether the racial heritage of Japanese hip-hop artists might be seen as a “barrier” to Shingo's and Anarchy's success, given the few prominent artists of East Asian ancestry on the national stage.

These notes aside, Armstrong's book is important and fascinating reading. His writing is precise and accessible, but also sophisticated and insightful. It embraces theory in complex ways without being burdened by it, productively inflecting the existing literature. 24 Bars to Kill is a welcome addition to the scholarship on African diasporic musical cultures in Japan and beyond. It gestures toward and explicates the sustained and thus increasingly nuanced terms of hip-hop's situations within what Armstrong describes as “the other Japans.”