Japan and techno-Orientalism

Much of the world's image of Japanese popular culture revolves around what Eri Izawa has termed ‘the heartless, flat image that many people hold of Japan’ (Izawa Reference Izawa and Craig2000, p. 138). Indeed, many Westerners see Japan as a cold, calculating country populated by soulless workers, consumed by mathematical efficiency and overwhelming bureaucracy while being obsessed with technology. Although such a stereotype has hopefully been mitigated, if not eliminated, in the wake of the human tragedy surrounding the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Japanese society is often still viewed as being stifled under layers of regimented formality while individuality and imagination is discouraged in the service of the greater good of the country or company.Footnote ² At the root of much of the Western image of the Japanese is their ability to produce and refine technology – be it automobiles, computers, televisions, video games, cameras or robotics. Japanese music technology, including the Sony Walkman, Roland and Yamaha musical instruments, has similarly revolutionised musical consumption and production. Since World War II Japan has maintained an image of technological progressiveness and mastery that has outstripped that of other almost any other nation. According to Koichi Iwabuchi, Japanese technological superiority in global contexts was clearly associated with Japan's adaptable ingenuity and indigenising capacity (Iwabuchi Reference Iwabuchi2002, p. 449). In essence, it was the Japanese ability to appropriate pre-existent, predominantly Western technologies and creatively refine them such that they became representative of a uniquely ‘Japanese’ identified product. Such an approach resonates with that of hip hop, which is similarly based in an aesthetic of creative appropriation and adaptation of pre-existent technologies (Rose Reference Rose1994, pp. 85–6).

Against the 1980s and early 1990s rise of Japanese economic and techno-cultural power, however, a relatively condescending and reductive discourse emerged in the West – what David Morley and Kevin Robins have termed ‘techno-Orientalism’. Morley and Robins looked at the impact of media and cultural globalisation on the reconstruction of a European collective identity and the way in which the Orientalist representation of the ‘Other’ has been recast in the process. Writing in 1995 they opine:

According to their argument, Japan became a new technologically dehumanised, Other against which the West could project its own superiority. In the discourse of ‘techno-Orientalism’, the West maintains its cultural and moral supremacy by projecting a dehumanised picture of a technology-soaked Japanese society: ‘Within the political and cultural unconscious of the West, Japan has come to exist as the figure of empty and dehumanised technological power. It represents the alienated and dystopian image of capitalist progress’ (Morley and Robins Reference Morley and Robins1995, p. 170). However, the other side of the Western image of Japanese people as unfeeling people obsessed with technology is Western envy that ‘these [Japanese] mutants are now better adapted to survive in the future’ (Morley and Robins Reference Morley and Robins1995, p. 170).

Western conceptions of a futuristic Japanese techno-Orientalism have been formulated and reinforced by the high profile afforded to influential cultural products, often associated with the cyberpunk genre as was notably manifest in William Gibson's novel Neuromancer (1984) and Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner (1982). Such works, in the words of Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, portray a ‘grim Japanified future, [in which] cyberspace appears to be a Western frontier in which U.S. ingenuity wins over Japanese corporate assimilation’ (Chun Reference Chun2006, p. 187). Such representations of the threat of high-tech Orientalism variously suggest the analogous threat of the exotic Asian Other, and play on Western fears of the hyperconformity promised by the increasing reliance on machines and technology in the future. Such fears are mapped onto similar fears of the loss of individuality to a stereotypical understanding of Japanese social conformity and of analogous Asian industrial and corporate technical expertise. These popular representations of Oriental futurism and techno culture tie into Edward Said's notions that the Orient is not a ‘real’ space but is rather a textual construction of Western authors (Said Reference Said2003, p. 52). Thus the connection between cyberspace, a virtual space, and a traditional construction of the Orient ties into a familiar and powerful trope in the Western imagination.

The rock group Styx's hit song ‘Mr. Roboto’ was perhaps the most well-known manifestation of the techno-Orientalist stereotype in Western popular music. Written by Dennis DeYoung and performed by Styx on their 1983 concept album Kilroy Was Here, ‘Mr. Roboto’ reached number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was one of the band's most popular songs. The chorus is highlighted by the line, sung in Japanese, ‘Dōmo arigatō, Mr. Roboto’ (Thank you very much, Mr. Roboto), which subsequently became a popular catchphrase in the 1980s. The phrase is electronically manipulated with the aid of a vocoder that lent an eerily detached mechanical or robotic quality to the vocals. The song, perhaps intentionally, also prevalently features the use of Oberheim OB-XA and PPG Wave synthesisers, the technological products of an American company.

Notwithstanding the relatively heavy presence of technology in the production of the song, its lyrical content overtly criticises the Western reliance on Japanese technology and their seemingly dehumanising ‘robotic’ society:

Later, the criticism of the dehumanising nature of reliance on technology is openly proclaimed:

The album liner notes further promote the fear of a Japanese-induced techno-future that characterises the song: ‘The present … is a future where Japanese manufactured robots, designed to work cheaply and endlessly, are the caretakers of society. “Mr. Robotos” are everywhere, serving as manual labour in jobs that were once held by humans.’ Although the lyrics and liner notes overtly stereotype the Japanese as the main proponents of this dehumanised techno-Oriental future, the video of the song is even more disturbing. It features a Japanese racial caricature of a threatening robot (with protruding buck teeth and stereotypically squinting eyes) that would not be out of place in American World War II anti-Japanese propaganda.

The type of techno-Orientalist stereotyping in popular music that is manifest in ‘Mr. Roboto’ had even earlier precedents. In the 1970s the German techno-pop band Kraftwerk, for example, used android or machine-like gestures in their live shows (eventually opting for a purely animated stage presence), and they took the gestures of Japanese businessmen in Europe as their model, engaging in robot-like bowing and expressionless laughter (Ueno Reference Ueno1999, p. 98). As in the evil robot imagery associated with Styx's ‘Mr. Roboto’, Japanese people are stereotypically associated with and portrayed as, in the words of Morley and Robins (Reference Morley and Robins1995, p.170), ‘unfeeling aliens … cyborgs and replicants’. As mentioned, these impressions are predicated on the concomitant reinforcement of what appears to be a highly conformist society perhaps most overtly manifest in the mechanically repetitive assembly-line labour associated with the production of Japanese high technology.

Japanese pop music and culture in the West

As exemplified in the continual turnover of relatively non-threatening and homogeneous Japanese pop stars, the image of Japanese popular music in the West has often reinforced a notion of cookie-cutter conformity and machine-like lack of real emotions.Footnote ³ Similarly, despite the presence of a few exceptions, such as the band Hiroshima or James Iha from Smashing Pumpkins, many scholars have noted a distinct absence of Asian and Japanese voices in mainstream popular music in Europe and North America.Footnote ⁴ Indeed, Japanese popular music has largely been marginalised in the West, characterised by a variety of infamous and cartoonish one-hit wonders such as the Vapors' ‘Turning Japanese’ (1980) or Alphaville's ‘Big in Japan’ (1984). Despite the relatively stereotyped profile of Japanese popular music, there is, nonetheless, evidence that Japanese popular culture in general is playing an increasingly influential role in Western popular music.

Current manifestations of Japanese popular culture in Western pop music have been particularly prevalent in the work several high profile artists such as Gwen Stefani and Kanye West. Stefani's association with Japanese popular culture stems largely from her relationship with the Harajuku Girls, four young women who were hired in 2004 as backup dancers for Stefani's album Love. Angel. Music. Baby. The Harajuku Girls have continued to appear alongside Stefani, and are featured in the music videos for ‘What You Waiting For?’, ‘Rich Girl’, ‘Hollaback Girl’, ‘Luxurious’, ‘Crash’, ‘Wind It Up’, ‘The Sweet Escape’ and ‘Now That You Got It’. The girls take their name from the area around Harajuku Station on the Yamanote Line in the Shibuya ward of Tokyo, an area that is frequented by fashion-oriented Japanese youth who are often engaging in cosplay. Stores located in and around Harajuku cater to the youthful and often eclectic fashion taste that is evident in the look of Stefani's Harajuku Girls. Stefani, who has created her own fashion line, has ostensibly associated herself with the current popularity of Japanese youth culture and its often cutting-edge fashion sensibility in order to market her own image and products. As such, she, and her fans, at least to some extent, embody the Western desire to be connected to and identified with Japanese popular culture – the ‘yearning for Japan’, as discussed by Iwabuchi and Okada above.

Western hip hop and Japanese popular music

Nowhere in Western popular music has the influence of Japanese and Asian pop culture been more pronounced than in the world of hip hop. From Wu-Tang Clan and Kanye West to the cult hit Afro-Samurai (2007–) anime series, there have been a number of high-profile examples of a merging African American and Japanese and Asian pop culture. These works typically share a common focus on futurism and high technology, often in service of various liberatory agendas.

Several recent authors have examined the impact of cultural hybridity in Afro-Asian culture. In particular, Bill Mullen's book Afro-Orientalism (2004) and Vijay Prashad's Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connection and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Reference Prashad2002) have explored notions of ‘polyculturalism’ to describe the impetus for many Africans and Asians to seek mutuality. The well-known Chinese American jazz artist and scholar, Fred Ho, for example, has actively identified with the civil rights struggles of African Americans in his efforts to empower Asian Americans.Footnote ⁵

Links between African Americans and the Japanese stretch at least as far back as the Japanese victory over Russia in 1904. Marking the 20th century's first instance of a major victory of a coloured nation over a white-dominated one, the event motivated W.E.B. Du Bois to declare Asia the fraternal twin of Africa (Mullen Reference Mullen2004, p. xii). Oliver Wang has underlined the link between Asian and African American agendas, claiming that ‘The impact of the Asian American Movement, like the Black Power Movement, was not just whatever political changes they wrought, but the cultural impact they had as well’ (Wang Reference Wang2004, p. 449). Ian Condry has pointed out the ‘affinity between African Americans as disenfranchised citizens in the United States and Japanese youth unable to see their concerns adequately addressed in their own political system’ that has characterised some of the popularity of rap music in Japan (Condry Reference Condry2006, p. 206). This popularity was also evident among Asian Americans as, in the words of Wang, ‘Groups like the Seoul Brothers (Seattle), Fists of Fury (San Francisco), and Yellow Peril (New Jersey) formed, adapting Public Enemy's description of rap music as “the Black CNN” and molding it into a soapbox’ (Wang Reference Wang2004, p. 457). Thus the identification with the ideals and practices of African American rap music infused both Japanese and Asian American youth, just as it has in many places around the globe. What is less well known, yet increasingly common, however, is the influence of Japanese and Asian popular culture on African American music.Footnote ⁶

Among the earliest exponents of fusing the two cultures, East Coast hip hop legends Wu-Tang Clan were highly influenced by Asian themes, in particular kung fu movies such as Gordon Liu's Shaolin and Wu Tang (1981), from which they derived their name. Clan member Ghostface Killah (who also took his stage name from a 1979 kung fu movie The Mystery of Chessboxing), for example, relied exclusively on clips from the well-known Speed Racer anime series for the video accompanying his 1996 release ‘Daytona 500’. Similarly, fellow Wu-Tang Clan member RZA has, as a solo artist, scored several Samurai movies, including Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) and Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill series. Many other hip hop artists such as Foxy Brown, Digable Planets and Jeru the Damaga have referenced kung fu movies; even the old-school moniker ‘Grandmaster’ (as in Grandmaster Flash) alludes to martial arts films.

The affinity of many African Americans for kung fu movies, in particular those of Bruce Lee, can be seen to lie in the desire, shared by many minorities, for a creative form of self-defence that exercised and liberated both mind and body. In explaining the popularity of kung fu movies among black American youths in the 1970s, film scholar Stuart Kaminsky claims ‘the fantasy resolution for the ghetto kid is not through the law. The fantasy is of being able to right the wrongs of one's personal frustration through one's own limited ability’ (as quoted in Hewitt Reference Hewitt, Ho and Mullen2008, p. 269). Cultural theorist Kim Hewitt further speculates that the relaxed intensity associated with the ‘aesthetic of cool’ found in African American jazz is also paralleled in martial arts. Quoting Joel Dinerstein, Hewitt opines that:

Later Hewitt connects this aesthetic to the code of the Samurai.

It is perhaps the appeal of the stoic composure of the Samurai warrior ethos that accounts for one of the most overt examples of the merging of hip hop and Japanese popular music, in the cult hit manga and subsequent television anime series Afro Samurai. Originally a manga created by Takashi Okazaki in 1999, the story was inspired by Okazaki's love of soul and hip hop as well as American depictions of Japanese culture. Set in a futuristic yet feudal Japan, it tells the story of the Afro Samurai and his quest to avenge his father's death at the hands of his main rival, the gunslinger named Justice, and thus also re-gain the coveted ‘No. 1 Headband’ which grants its possessor god-like power. In 2007, in collaboration with actor Samuel L. Jackson, the manga was adapted into an anime television series that premiered on the cable channel Spike TV, in which Jackson also voiced the main character. In 2009 a made-for-TV animated movie Afro Samurai Resurrection was released, featuring voice actors Lucy Liu and Mark Hamill in addition to Jackson. The film was nominated for and won two Emmy awards (Art direction and Outstanding Animated Program), becoming the first Japanese anime production to be so honoured. In addition, the Afro Samurai franchise has been responsible for several successful video game releases, art books and a forthcoming live-action feature film.

Produced by RZA, the informal leader of Wu-Tang Clan, the Afro Samurai soundtrack, released in 2007, is a mix of instrumental and unconventional East Coast rap songs. Much like the hybrid Japanese–African storyline, the album features an eclectic mix of MCs, including Talib Kweli, Big Daddy Kane, Q-Tip and RZA himself, with musical styles alternating between hardcore rap and somewhat saccharine R&B numbers. Echoing the connections between the aesthetic of cool and martial arts discussed above, the songs often make romanticised lyrical analogies between the code of the Samurai and that of the contemporary street ‘player’. RZA's ‘Afro theme’, for example, sums up much of the storyline of the series:

Outside the futuristic Japanese setting and storyline and the manga/anime-influenced style of the production, the album is firmly centred on urban African American influences and, apart from the digitally synthesised shakuhachi flute and koto found in the instrumental ‘Empty Seven’ theme, there is little in the way of any Japanese musical references or sounds. In 2009 the soundtrack to the second instalment of the television series Afro Samurai Resurrection was released. Also produced by RZA, it featured additional members of Wu-Tang Clan as well as notable appearances by Reverend William Burke and Sly Stone, and continued in the same stylistic vein as the previous soundtrack album.

To some degree, however, the Afro Samurai premise replicates many of the neocolonialist stereotypes associated with techno-Orientalism. Although it seemingly honours traditional Japanese Samurai values of stoic loyalty and courage in battle, it is ultimately the black American Afro-Samurai who triumphs over his largely Japanese rivals. In much the same manner, African American hip hop performances fundamentally dominate the soundtrack, relegating the few instances of Japanese-inspired sounds to synthetic reproductions of traditional instruments.

Several well-known African American rap artists have been actively involved in the careers of Japanese artists, such as the Teriyaki Boyz. Teriyaki Boyz are a five-member J-hip hop group from Tokyo. Their debut album from Def Jam Recordings and (B)APE Sounds, titled Beef or Chicken? (2006), was produced by many well-known rap and electronica artists, including AD-ROCK (Adam Horovitz) of the Beastie Boys, Cornelius, Daft Punk, DJ Premier, DJ Shadow, Just Blaze, Mark Ronson, and The Neptunes.

In 2007 the single ‘I Still Love H.E.R.’ was released from their second studio album, Serious Japanese. The single was produced by and featured Kanye West. The track references the 1994 single ‘I Used to Love H.E.R.’, a classic rap song by West's label-mate Common, which personified hip hop as a woman and a former love interest. West also appears in the promotional video, which was shot as a YouTube parody. The live-action portion of the music video is intercut with still-frame anime scenes of West's mascot Dropout Bear, along with animated versions of the other group members.

Although the Boyz rap in a mixture of English and Japanese, West offers the following opening verse, of which only the final line is in Japanese:

After announcing his own influence as an African American ‘originator of this style’, West goes on to praise the Teriyaki Boyz in the last line of the verse. ‘Honto E. Rap’ proclaims his love for ‘truth in rap’ or (particularly if in Japanese phonetic pronunciation, meaning ‘honto ii rap’) really good Japanese rap as opposed to American rap that has been corrupted by ‘Big Money’ commercialism.

As indicated by his interest in the Teriyaki Boyz, perhaps the most high profile artist to have been influenced by Japanese popular culture is the hip hop mogul Kanye West. Several of West's recent albums involve direct references to Japanese pop culture, often to techno-Orientalist themes. Unlike Gwen Stefani's preoccupation with Japanese fashion and aesthetic, however, West's association with Japanese popular culture seems more predicated on the social critique of increasing dehumanisation and consumer culture and furthers a complex tradition of Afro-Asian liberatory agendas and associations.

His Grammy award-winning song and video ‘Stronger’ from his critically acclaimed Graduation album, released in 2007, features a prominent sample from the 2001 recording ‘Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger’ by the French house music duo Daft Punk. As part of Daft Punk's album Discovery, the song appears in the anime film Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem (2003) and features Daft Punk's monotone, robotic vocal performance, electronically manipulated by an autotune program. Underlining the link between man and machine, the title phrase also tropes a line from the famous opening sequence of the television series The Six Million Dollar Man (1974–1978), which was based on the futuristic bionic reconstruction of a man: ‘We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability … [to rebuild him]. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.’

The video for ‘Stronger’ was directed by Hype Williams and shot over nine days in Japan, and features prominent scenes of neon-lit Tokyo and digitised pop-up Katakana script that echo West's English lyrics. The video is also highlighted by multiple scenes which pay homage to the 1988 anime film Akira. One of the most influential animated films in history, Akira is a 1988 Japanese animated film co-written and directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, based on his manga of the same name. The film is set in the futuristic post-apocalyptic Tokyo of 2019. For his video version, West borrows lighting effects, motorbike chase sequences and numerous scenes of himself being scanned by machines. As such, West embodies one of Akira's main characters, Tetsuo, who becomes a cyborg-like mesh of human flesh and machinery. In addition, artist Takashi Murakami designed the album art associated with Graduation. It features a Superflat art cartoon version of the ‘Dropout Bear’ previously seen on the cover of West's The College Dropout (2004) and Late Registration (2005) albums, wearing sunglasses similar to those West wears in the video, as well as the robotic-looking heads of the duo Daft Punk. West's fascination with Japanese anime has even extended to playing anime porn during his concerts.

A recurring feature of West's music is his foregrounding of technology. However, paralleling the Japanese refinement of pre-existing technology, it is often a reclamation of older, outdated musical technology or technology that is used in untraditional ways. For many previous rap artists the sound of inner city urban decay took the form of misappropriation of music technology and new and creative sounds associated with the detritus of that post-industrial space. Rap producers often used sound technology in uncharacteristic ways, pushing the limits of what the machines were meant to do. Engineers and producers of rap records often intentionally violate typically prescribed studio procedures, pinning sound meters in the red distortion zone to produce a ‘heavy dark sound’, encouraging bass drum leakage between tracks or creating de-tunings in various tracks in order to achieve slight distortions in the mix. As hip hop journalist Harry Allen claims, ‘hip hop humanizes technology and makes it tactile. In hip hop, you make the technology do stuff that it isn't supposed to do …’ (as quoted in Rose Reference Rose1994, p. 86). In this sense hip hop refutes and highlights the limitations of the common conception of the dehumanising aspect of technology. As such it shares a common aesthetic with much Japanese anime and manga that concerns itself with how technology cannot, ultimately, replace that which is human. As emphasised in the popular manga and anime franchise Ghost in the Shell, for example, machines and technology must always contain some ‘ghost’ of the human conception.Footnote ⁷

The incorporation of Japanese popular culture into West's sonic vision is an extension of encounters with technology or the ‘machine aesthetic’ that some cultural theorists have understood to be an unavoidable force in the African American experience. Joel Dinerstein, for example, recasts African American artistic and aesthetic creativity as American ‘survival technology’ and coins the term ‘techno-dialogic’ to explain how ‘the presence (or ‘voice’) of machinery became integral to the cultural production of African American storytellers, dancers, blues singers, and jazz musicians' (Dinerstein Reference Dinerstein2003, p. 126). Dinerstein evokes Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic theory of language to understand how black musicians through live performances brought the power of machines under artistic control ‘and this modeled the possibility of individual style within a technological society’ (Dinerstein Reference Dinerstein2003, p. 130). Much as with the improvisatory qualities of African American performance in both sports and music, improvisation allowed the formation of a unified community without sacrificing individual expression. According to Dinerstein, the machine aesthetic was particularly powerful in the 1930s, when African American artists integrated the monumentality, drive, precision and rhythmic flow of factory work and modern cities into big band swing. By incorporating such an aesthetic, African American musicians and dancers transferred the dehumanising experience of the machine into a pleasurable experience, thus sonically re-humanising the environment in which they lived.

The integration of Asian techno-futuristic themes into hip hop ties into this tradition of African American encounters with technology. It also, however, references ongoing tropes of utopian and dystopian futures associated with Afro-futurism and the related fascination with outer space and advanced technologies. As coined by cultural critic Mark Dery, the term ‘Afro-futurism’ refers to African American signification that appropriates images of advanced technology and alien and/or prosthetically enhanced (cyborg) futures (Dery Reference Dery1993, p. 736). Although also found in science fiction literature and films, Afro-futurism has been particularly prominent in music, as reflected in the experimental cosmological jazz of Sun Ra. Similarly, George Clinton's futuristic funk stylings on Mothership Connection, the techno-tribalism of Miles Davis's On the Corner, Herbie Hancock's jazz-cyber funk on Future Shock and Bernie Worrell's Blacktronic Science all manifest a fusion of science fiction, techno-futurism and a mystical African heritage. More recently, in addition to West, artists such as OutKast (ATLiens) and Janelle Monáe (‘Many Moons’ and The ArchAndroid) have continued the idea of alien Afro-futurism.Footnote ⁸ As Mark Dery observes, ‘African-Americans are, in a very real sense, the descendants of alien abductees’ (Dery Reference Dery1993, p. 736). The fascination with advanced technologies serves as a powerful marker of the potential for black wealth and power – a future in which, in effect, the previously marginalised African American aliens control the realm of military industrial technology and assume control of the world.

Significantly, in his acclaimed 2008 Grammy award performance of ‘Stronger’, clad in a Tron-like glowing spacesuit, West stepped from a pyramid-shaped spaceship. In this manner West appears to intentionally link himself to previous legendary exponents of Afro-futurism, such as Sun Ra and George Clinton, who relied on pyramid imagery and Egyptian theories of the afterlife to propound an empowered black future. Much as with the Japanese creative adaptation and appropriation of pre-existent technology, West is, in a sense, able to rebuild reclaimed recordings from the past to make them ‘Stronger’. The son of a former Black Panther member, West is well known for his racial activism (famously evident in his criticism of George Bush in the wake of hurricane Katrina in 2005), and thus ‘Stronger’ can be read as a metaphoric anthem of increasing African American socio-economic strength. It is a message that West projects through creative manipulation of technology that tropes, re-imagines and co-opts numerous aspects of European, Asian and (black) North American techno-culture. Much as previous hip hop producers experimented with misusing old or outdated technologies, West builds his sonic world out of older recordings and the technology contained therein. The result, among others, is a powerful depiction of black empowerment on a global and transhistorical plane.

Kanye West's subsequent album, 808s and Heartbreak (2009), continued such Afro-futuristic connections in its obsessive bricolage of pop-cultural references underpinned by a fetishisation of older technology. West's fixation with the boundaries between the human and synthetic is evident even in the album cover, which features a deflated plastic heart. The album prominently features sonically dated music technology from the 1980s and 1990s. West notably employs the 1990s Autotune program that creates unnatural vocal perfection. West previously encountered the device in his sample of Daft Punk for ‘Stronger’. As in ‘Stronger’, instead of sliding from one note to the next, the singer hits them all dead-on, as if playing a series of notes on a keyboard. Often, it sounds as if West himself is just another synthesiser – in essence a robot. In addition, the album title refers to the Roland TR-808, the classic 1980s drum machine whose distinctive programmed sounds sonically brand every track on the album. Drawing inspiration from 1980s synth-pop icons such as Phil Collins and Gary Numan, West felt that the 808, the product of the Japanese-based Roland Corporation, could be used to evoke emotion, and he manipulated its pitch to produce a distorted, electronic sound, an effect he referred to as his own ‘heartbreak’ in the wake of his mother's recent death (Bainbridge Reference Bainbridge2008). The first single from the album, ‘Heartless’, for example, uses the 808 to electronically reproduce the sound of a human heartbeat. Notably, in keeping with West's fascination with humanising the artificial, in the video for the song, West literally becomes digitised, as he appears as a rotoscoped animated character. Thus both his voice and body are digitally processed, merged into the technology he celebrates.

West's constant references to references and samples of samples threaten to submerge his identity into the endlessly refracting pop culture that he celebrates. His technique resembles that of Takashi Murakami, who produced the cover art for West's Graduation album.Footnote ⁹ Murakami's Pop Art-informed concept of ‘Superflat’ involves highlighting the commercial links between art and culture through layering various flattened forms of both traditional Japanese graphic art and anime, manga and other varieties of popular culture. Murakami flattens the distinction between the ‘high art’ of the past and the ‘crass consumerism’ of the present in order to critique stereotypical views of the emptiness of contemporary Japanese consumer culture (Drohojowska-Philp Reference Drohojowska-Philp2001). In Superflat art, like most popular music recorded today, a digital image of the world breaks information down into a binary code, and then re-encodes it to produce a new image (or sound). Because the original code can be re-encoded in any number of ways, there is no stable or unmediated connection between the origin of an image (or sound), and the production of a new image. In this Superflat model of the world, the digitised database replaces the old ideas of memory and history; a database idea of memory or of history still acts as a point of origin, but only an origin of multiple possible identities. Kanye West, in his hyper-referential Afro-futurism, tropes even the multi-layered construct of Superflat. In much the same manner that Superflat critiques the shallowness of Japanese consumerism, West, using a combination of old and cutting-edge technologies, critiques the shallow consumerism of hip hop and the music industry in general.

Although referencing Eastern critiques of popular culture, Kanye West nonetheless still owes much of his approach to African American thought processes, in particular W.E.B. Du Bois's belief that black Americans operate within a condition of double-consciousness that involves:

As such, West's music incorporates both a benign double-consciousness of the ‘warring ideals’ of Black and White America and a more profound double-consciousness ‘that recognizes, paradoxically, the insufficiency of consciousness itself and the concomitant need for radical social transformation’ (Ciccariello-Maher Reference Ciccariello-Maher2009, p. 386). The most prevalent manifestation of this latter double-consciousness in West's music is found in its preoccupation with economic materialism and the recurring attempt to authenticate one's own humanity through conspicuous consumption of and interaction, if not outright merging, in the case of his video representations, with technology.

The exploration of original sounds that arise from African American encounters with music technologies is intimately connected to what Kodwo Eshun calls ‘AfroDiasporic futurism’, a digital diaspora of computer rhythms and machine mythology that routes and reroutes across the Black Atlantic (Eshun Reference Eshun1998, p. 6). From the messianic space funk of George Clinton to the Superflat hip hop futurism of Kanye West, employing strategies of re-deployment, re-conception and re-creation, African American musicians have challenged traditional uses of musical technologies in order to, in essence, sonically re-humanise their often alienated realities. In this manner the African American aesthetic is resonant with Japan's ‘adaptable ingenuity and indigenizing capacity’ manifest in their pop cultural products, as outlined by Koichi Iwabuchi earlier in this paper.

Other recent hip hop works incorporating techno-Asian themes include Far East Movement's ‘Like a G6’ (2010) and ‘If I was You (OMG)’ (2011) and The Black Eyed Peas' video for ‘Just Can't Get Enough’ (2011), filmed in Tokyo just one week before the earthquake and tsunami. Perhaps even more prominently, Nicki Minaj has also been highly influenced by Asian pop culture. She has adopted what she refers to as a ‘Harajuku Barbie’ identity and, as reflected in her 2010 video for the song ‘Your Love’, posed in various stylised hypersexualised anime and geisha costumes. The video for her 2010 hit ‘Check it out’, featuring will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas, was intended by her to be ‘an ode to Japanese culture and Japanese anime’ (MTV 2010). This is contradicted, however, by both the spoken introduction and the words that pop up during the video which are actually in Korean Hangul. Despite the Korean elements and notwithstanding the song's prominent quotation of the Buggles' 1979 hit ‘Video killed the Radio Star’, director Rich Lee stated that the video was intended to have ‘a weird, futuristic Japanese TV show theme’ and indeed the staging does appear to mimic a Japanese pop aesthetic (MTV 2010). Unlike West's overt homage to Japanese pop culture, Minaj seems more intent on tongue-in-cheek parody. Minaj appropriates the same production elements of West's ‘Stronger’ video, such as a similar foregrounding of technology, autotuned vocals, employing a prominent and well-known Euro pop sample and pop-up digitised Asian text. Perhaps ‘yearning’ for Korea's recent rise in pop cultural capital or projecting a monolithic conception of Asian culture, however, she substitutes Korean for Japanese. Indeed the rows of expressionless sunglassed audience members that are highlighted throughout the video appear to knowingly reinforce a stereotype of futuristic techno-Orientalist conformity.

It may be claimed that the use of Japanese popular culture by African American artists merely amounts to another form of cultural appropriation, in effect, hip hop's ‘sampling’ of not just music but culture. Although there has been a significant tradition of collaborative interaction between African American and Asian cultures, the relationship has sometimes been tinged with racial stereotyping and violence. The media preoccupation with the 1991 ‘Black–Korean’ conflict in Brooklyn, in which 15-year-old Latasha Harlins died at the hands of a Korean grocer, and other altercations between Asian small-business owners and African Americans have often painted a bleak picture of disunity between people of colour. In rap music this was particularly underlined in Ice Cube's controversial and racially charged song ‘Black-Korea’ (1991). Indeed, as evidenced by 2 Live Crew's ‘Me So Horny’ (1989) or Foxy Brown's Chyna Doll album (1999), hip hop has often overtly perpetuated neo-Orientalist racial stereotypes. More recently, however, it is increasingly an appropriation, if not re-appropriation, as identification rather than to colonise, silence or other. As such, the adoption of and allusions to Japanese and Asian popular culture by hip hop artists may thus also be interpreted as something of an attempt to bridge the sometimes antagonistic relationship between Asian Americans and African Americans.Footnote ¹⁰

In order to account for the cultural dynamics that hip hop artists are sampling from it is important to understand the recent history and international rise of Japanese popular culture. Throughout the economic prosperity of the 1980s it seemed that Japanese society, with its strength in corporate management, until recently stable single-party politics (Liberal Democratic Party), and advanced technological innovation existed as a ‘utopian alternative’, as the Eastern ‘Other’ to, as film theorist Susan J. Napier writes, ‘what many perceived as the corrupt and decadent societies of the West’ (Napier Reference Napier1998, pp. 27–8). By the mid-1990s, the situation changed dramatically. Japan found itself in the midst of an ‘imploding national economic system, a disintegrating social order, and the virtual absence of ethical and competent leadership’ (Yoda Reference Yoda, Yoda and Harootunian2000, p. 635). This real or perceived state of affairs led to an increasing disenchantment with the values and goals that postwar Japan was built on. The disillusionment was viewed as particularly manifest in Japanese youth culture. The moral panics over youth behaviour, particularly the obsessive preoccupation with manga, anime, costume play and video games and various forms of Japanese alternative popular music which has led to the pejorative label of otaku culture, closely associated an ‘anything goes’ attitude in recent popular culture to the nation's economic troubles (Yoda Reference Yoda, Yoda and Harootunian2000, p. 635).

As the economy went into an extended recession in the 1990s, often known as the lost decade, Japanese youth faced sharp increases in unemployment and the guarantee of a well-paid job after completing their studies grew increasingly hollow. As such opportunities decreased, interest in alternative musical cultures among Japanese youth substantially increased. As Ian Condry has pointed out, by the year 2000 the creative and consumer potential of youth culture, and its associated manifestations of anime, manga, and various popular music subcultures such as J Rock, Visual kei and hip hop, ‘were being heralded as … an engine of growth for Japan's exports’ (Condry Reference Condry2006, p. 212). In this manner the associated commercial spin-offs of various forms of Japanese popular culture and, indeed even of more fetishistic components of otaku culture, represent the triumph of self-fulfilling cultural capital. As such, the ever-increasing capital potential of fandom in Japan, viewed as a central component of Japan's economic recovery is, by extension, though it is by no means a singular image, a central representation of Japanese identity. This is to say that, much as recent African American identity has been promulgated through hip hop culture, recent Japanese identity is in large part constructed through the global projection and reception of various forms of its popular culture.

This projection of cultural identity has resulted in the fact that many Western consumers of Japanese pop culture, particularly in North America, have begun to envy and indeed often actively seek to associate themselves with Japanese identity. In contrast to the hitherto negative connotations of the term otaku in Japanese media representations and Western techno-Orientalist discourse, a leading professor of Japanese contemporary culture, Toshio Okada (Reference Okada1996), gives the term a positive meaning, arguing that the combination of manga, animation and video games gave birth to Japanese otaku culture, which he claims is becoming popular throughout the world. Okada argues that the West has historically dominated most cultural forms such as film, music, fashion and painting. No matter how Japan imitates and cleverly ‘Japanises’ these Western originals, according to Okada, Japan cannot play a central role in these cultural forms. While admitting the American influence on the origin of Japanese comics and animation, Toshio states that:

As described by Iwabuchi, Okada further argues that for the United States ‘the term “otaku” connotes something stunning and attractive … so much so that Japanese animated culture and imagery evoke, to a certain degree, a sense of Western yearning for “Japan”‘ (Iwabuchi Reference Iwabuchi2002, p. 445). It is, perhaps, such a ‘yearning for Japan’ that has informed, consciously or subconsciously, the increased incorporation of Japanese pop cultural references in the music and visual imagery of Western pop musicians such as Gwen Stefani, Kanye West and Nicki Minaj. Indeed we are faced with a somewhat ironic situation in which Japanese artists have appropriated and creatively indigenised Western animation and comic books and, in turn, hip hop artists, whose art form is based on a similarly creative recontextualisation or ‘sampling’ of pre-existent technologies and sounds, have subsequently re-appropriated and creatively indigenised various forms of Japanese pop culture.

While Western cultural products such as Blade Runner or Neuromancer have encouraged a techno-Orientalist Asian stereotype, recent products of Japanese popular culture often employ music to actively contest these stereotypes and, indeed, often invert common Western stereotypes regarding the control of technology. Metropolis is an anime film released in Japan in 2001 and loosely based on the 1949 Metropolis manga created by the early Osamu Tezuka and also a loose adaptation of Fritz Lang's famous 1927 silent film of the same name. The film had an all-star production team including the renowned anime director Rintaro. Metropolis is set in an unnamed city resembling a pastiche of 1920s, 1930s and 1940s New York. The primary antagonist who rules Metropolis is depicted with stereotypical, almost caricaturised, Western features, including blond feathered hair, blue eyes and a large nose. Teema, the female robot he has created in the likeness of his dead daughter, is also blond and blue-eyed though more resembling traditional anime characters in her large eyes. The film's original score composed by Toshiyuki Honda is based on Dixieland jazz, which underlines the colourful architecture and frenetic pace of the city. The jazz-influenced soundtrack is meant to evoke movie representations of the United States in the ‘roaring twenties’. Thus, rather than using an Asian setting to evoke the future, Rintaro does the opposite. He presents the audience with a vision of the future that is shaped by techno-Occidentalism – portraying Metropolis as a Western city that alludes to Hollywood period depictions of US cities. Indeed Osamu Tezuka, who wrote the manga on which the film is based, was influenced not only by the image of the female robot in Fritz Lang's Metropolis but also by Disney and Betty Boop cartoons (Park Reference Park2005, p. 63).Footnote ¹¹

To be sure, the homogeneous picture of Japanese society painted by stereotypes of its collective corporate culture and reinforced in techno-Orientalist cultural products is belied by the diversity of its popular music practices. These practices include J-pop idols, alternative rock, techno, Japanoise, Visual kei and hip hop, among many other styles and subgenres. Although many of these styles are predicated upon Western, often American, models, it is impossible to state that an increasingly internationalised Japanese popular music and culture follow a singular aesthetic ideology, pattern or identity. As Carolyn Stevens has recently claimed ‘… cultural identity in Japanese popular music has flowed in and out of history, filtered by both Asian and Western cultures … Music does not travel in a linear pattern from West to East; it travels from East to West, and back to East again, with a further trip back to the West, a conscious hybridity that spans both categories’ (Stevens Reference Stevens2008, p. 35). Such a ‘conscious hybridity’ is similarly a central feature of hip hop and the recent African American sampling of Japanese culture. In each case it appears to be a strategically indigenising hybridity, constructed of creative re-uses of each other's cultural products – products which were themselves originally heavily hybridised. All music is, at least to some extent, a hybrid accretion of various styles and influences. Nonetheless, despite the borrowing or sampling from and hypertextual references to each other, both Japanese popular culture and African American hip hop maintain their own discreet cultural identities – projecting a form of accessible cultural branding to consumers eager to engage in ‘cool’, though still recognisably foreign, African American and/or Japanese popular culture. While Asian fans might originally have consumed and appropriated the codes of ‘cool’ African American hip hop culture, the reverse is now often the case. Adopting similar strategies of hybridised racial inclusivity, ‘cool’ Asian pop culture is now consumed by African American artists and fans. Reinforcing Paul Gilroy's concept that black identity is ‘unstable’ and thus challenging ideas of cultural uniqueness and authenticity, Asian pop cultural references in African American hip hop speak both to the increasingly isomorphic flow of culture and the increased internationalisation of both Japan and America (Gilroy Reference Gilroy1993).

As discussed above, the concept of ‘hybridity’ is important in understanding the nexus of African American and Asian popular cultures. ‘Hybridity’ as developed in post-colonial studies illuminates the fluidity of national/cultural identity formation (Kraidy Reference Kraidy2005). Countering the exclusivist notions of imagined community and the essentialism of notions surrounding cultural ‘purity’ and ‘authenticity’, hybridity creates a ‘third space’ which, transcending binaries of East and West, Us and Them, enables other positions to emerge (Bhabha Reference Bhabha and Rutherford1990, p. 211). Koichi Iwabuchi has persuasively argued that a ‘process of … strategic hybridism’ is a ‘key feature of Japanese national identity’ (Iwabuchi Reference Iwabuchi2002, p. 53). As manifest in the work of Kanye West and other artists influenced by Asian cultures it appears to be an equally effective strategy in delineating African American identities. Furthermore, the combination of techno-Orientalism mixed with Afro-futurism evident in the works of Kanye West, Wu-Tang Clan and RZA evinces a clear connection based on notions of Afro-Asian liberation. The common element of utopian empowerment, achieved in part through technological mastery and appropriation, represents a powerful and recurring trope in hip hop and, generally, in popular culture. Providing an alternative understanding to the postcolonial, the nexus of techno-Orientalism and African American musical styles evinces a new and increasingly cogent globally hybridised experience of identity formation in the 21st century.