1.Prologue
The rapper Kanye West is a known lover of anime, especially Otomo Katsuhiro’s era-defining classic Akira. He’s tweeted about his love for the film many times in the past, even going so far as to say that every stage show and video that he has worked on was in some way influenced by the futuristic tale of a gifted teen struggling to come to terms with his abilities.
This influence is most clearly seen on Kanye’s music video for “Stronger". The video features footage of motorcycles zooming around neon-infused Tokyo streets and Kanye breaking out of a medical facility a la the film’s secondary protagonist/antagonist Tetsuo.
The song “Stronger” heavily features samples the song song “Harder, Better, Faster” by the robot helmet-wearing French dance music duo Daft Punk. “Harder, Better, Faster” is a track on their album Discovery, which was accompanied by music videos directed by Japanese anime director Matsumoto Leiji. Throughout the 90s and 2000s, a network of bridges have been built between anime and hip hop, and the latter is increasingly being influenced by so-called otaku culture.
Until Kanye arrived on the scene, hip hop in America was the domain of gangsters and hypermasculine performers. Street culture was seen as edgy and even a little dangerous. As Kanye made a name for himself, the definition of a B-boy expanded, and figures were increasingly celebrated for being themselves and letting their freak flags fly. In essence, they made the hip hop world safe for nerds and geeks. Now you have rappers that go by names like Lord Frieza, and performers like Drake and Frank Ocean who are unabashed about their nerd cred.
Another hip hop nerd that I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention is Pharrell Williams, who calls Tokyo his second home. Williams is part of the producer duo The Neptunes and the hip hop band N.E.R.D. He is also close friends with NIGO®, a hip hop DJ and one of the central figures behind the Harajuku street fashion culture scene since the mid 90s. NIGO® himself is an unabashed Star Wars lover and a bona fide otaku.
These are just a few examples of how manga/anime culture and hip hop culture influenced one another between the mid-90s and early 2000s. In this article I’ll be going over some of the artists and manga/anime works that incorporated American street culture and fostered a generation of young Japanese who aspired to hip hop life.
2.Matsumoto Taiyo and Tekkon Kinkreet
If Otomo Katsuhiro was the visionary who re-shaped the manga landscape in the 80s, it was Matsumoto Taiyo who inspired countless imitators in the 90s with his distinctive style.
Matsumoto first became interested in manga when his mother introduced him to the works of Otomo Katsuhiro when he was in high school. He was especially impressed by Doumu, which would lay the groundwork for Akira several years later. Matsumoto attended Wako University’s arts department, and joined the manga club after some encouragement from his cousin Inoue Santa. He won the Shiki prize in 1987 for his debut work Straight, and believing himself to be a manga genius, Matsumoto dropped out of school, and quit his part-time job. He subsequently started working on a series for Kodansha’s manga anthology Morning. When the series was unable to grow a following, it was canceled, and Matsumoto spent about a year adrift.
He was then recruited by Shogakukan, where he made his breakthrough with a string of sports-related series that were published in the manga anthology Big Comic Spirits: the boxing manga Zero (1990), the baseball manga Hana-Otoko (1991), and the table tennis manga Ping Pong (1997). Matsumoto was a soccer enthusiast from a young age, and sports have always been a central theme of his work. His stories are different from traditional sports tales; Hana-Otoko is about a baseball-obsessed father and his less enthusiastic son, Zero is about a gifted boxer’s loneliness, and Ping Pong is completely centered on a low-profile sport. The distinctive works would win him legions of fans.
Matsumoto’s breakthrough was his 1993 manga Tekkonkinkreet, which is the tale of two orphans living on the streets of the fictional Takaramachi and their battles with the “grown up" world: yakuza gangsters, hitmen, and an urban development project that threatens to change the face of their town. The manga was adapted into a feature-length anime in 2006, and submitted to the Berlin International Film Festival. Despite receiving an R-rating in the U.S., it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Film. The film was the directorial debut of Michael Arias, whose depiction of Takaramachi as a pan-Asian city mixing elements of Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai was highly praised.
Matsumoto’s manga Ping Pong was adapted into a live-action film starring actor Kubozuka Yousuke in 2002. The film collected a number of Japan Academy Film Prizes and praise for translating Matsumoto’s bold visual style along to a soundtrack featuring the pumping sounds of electronic music artists Ishino Takkyu and Boom Boom Satellites. Tatsunoko Production produced a well-reviewed TV anime adaptation in 2014.
Matsumoto’s style has evolved from project to project, but he has generally been praised for evoking street art and pop art. The bold black and white contrast of his illustrations for Tekkonkinkreet drew comparisons with Frank Miller and other American graphic novels. He is also known for employing a super-wide angle fisheye lens-like perspective to bring his environments to life.
●Matsumoto Taiyo Picks
3.Inoue Santa and Tokyo Tribe
Inoue Santa is the cousin of Matsumoto Taiyo and another leading figure in bringing the rawness of the streets to Japanese manga and anime in the 90s and 2000s. He was born in France and raised in Paris until age 9. He became interested in manga during periodic visits back to Japan, and he would become interested in pursuing it as a career. Matsumoto has said in interviews that he would tease Inoue for his broken Japanese when they were children, but that they grew close in their late teens, encouraging one another in a healthy rivalry to become manga artists.
Inoue’s experience as an outsider when he first moved to Japan would greatly inform his later work; his 1994 psychological horror manga The Neighbor No. Thirteen is the story of a scarred man getting his revenge on his tormentors. When the manga anthology that was publishing the story shut down, Inoue resolved to continue publishing the work online, where it grew a sizable fanbase. In 2005, the manga was adapted into a live-action film starring Oguri Shun and (Ping Pong star) Nakamura Shidou. Word on the street is there is a Hollywood remake currently in production.
Inoue’s best-known manga—he’s called it his life’s work—is the Tokyo Tribe series. The first run vibrantly depicts the battles and exploits of street gangs Shibuya Saru and Shinjuku Hands against the backdrop of a fictionalized Tokyo. (Saru is the Japanese word for monkey. Side note, NIGO® is known for his fashion brand A Bathing Ape). The sequel Tokyo Tribes (known in Japan as Tokyo Tribe 2) was serialized in the fashion magazine Boon between 1997 and 2005, and incorporates even more hip hop and R&B references. The manga’s depiction of Tokyo “streets"—inspired by real-life locations like Kichijoji and Suginami Ward—spoke to a generation of manga readers. The sequel was adapted into a TV anime by production studio Madhouse, and the over-the-top violence garnered the series notoriety on the internet.
In 2014, director Sono Sion adapted Tokyo Tribe into a live-action film that was billed as the world’s first “battle rap musical". The colorful locations, which include the Robot Restaurant in Shinjuku and Warehouse Kawasaki—a dystopian arcade based on the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong that closed down at the end of 2019—make the film a pseudo-documentary of Tokyo nightlife, especially recommended to any non-Japanese readers who loved that one episode of the late Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown. As for the rapping...there is so much attention paid to the filmmaking that you can see the actors are trying way too hard to deliver their rhymes.
Inoue is also known for his activities outside of manga. He has designed artwork for CD albums and been active on the scene as a DJ; he has also put out a few CDs compiling his favorite R&B and New Jack Swing tracks. Between 2002 and 2017, he ran a flagship store for his streetwear brand Santastic!. In 2017, he moved his base of operations to L.A., hoping to spread the word about the real Shibuya. His efforts to establish himself as a businessman and a brand are clearly inspired by hip hop moguls in the U.S.
●Inoue Santa Picks
4.Other Anime Influenced By Street Culture and Hip Hop
There are several other series throughout the late 90s and 2000s that fused Japanese culture and hip hop culture and helped endear American audiences to anime.
The first series that has to be mentioned is Cowboy Bebop, directed by Watanabe Shinichiro. The anything goes blend of sci-fi, western, and noir influences set to a soundtrack mostly comprised of jazz proved to be a popular entry point into anime for many millennials.
Watanabe’s other genre-defying anime is Samurai Champloo (2004), which blends samurai culture with hip hop. (Champloo is an Okinawan word that means “mixed up” or “stirred together”.) The series brings American cultural symbols like baseball, hip hop MCs, breakdancing, and graffiti art into an Edo period setting.
Another notable series is Afro Samurai, which is based on a self-published manga series by Nozaki Takashi. The series is a historical epic with hip hop and soul elements—at once a parody of the exotic cultural mishmash that foreigners tend to ascribe to Japan and proof that only serves to reinforce the stereotype. While the manga received mixed reviews, the 2007 anime adaptation was a big international hit, featuring the voice of Samuel L. Jackson and music by Wu-Tang Clan leader RZA. The feature-length sequel, Afro Samurai: Resurrection was equally well received and won its art director, Ikeda Shigemi, a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation.
And who can forget the 1996 Playstation hit video game, PaRappa the Rapper. The rap-based gameplay paved the way for rhythm games like Taiko no Tatsujin and Guitar Hero.
5.Epilogue
Why do anime and street culture go so well together, and why has there been a kinship between otaku and B-boys?
The biggest commonality between manga/anime culture and hip hop culture is that both started out as subcultures. Today hip hop has been co-opted by everything from mainstream American music to K-pop, but until the 90s it was an alternative music mostly relegated to the Billboard R&B/Hip-hop charts. Street fashion was another subculture, worn by hip hop artists, skateboarders, surfers, and graffiti artists.
Street culture and anime have also long been the domain of outsiders and rebels, nerds and geeks. Both Kanye West and Pharrell Williams are both mavericks, and both Matsumoto Taiyo and Inoue Santa had to deal with feelings of inferiority. Matsumoto believed himself to be a genius, and only came to realize after he made his professional debut that he had a lot of work to do to reach the level of his peers. Whether its Tekkonkinkreet or Ping Pong, his manga often feature characters that embody the genius and the hard worker, or the hot-headed trouble-seeker and the weakling. Then there’s Inoue, who must have had a difficult time fitting into Japanese society after spending his formative years in France.
It’s also interesting to note that hip hop/rap is often colloquially referred to as a “game". Breakdancing and battle rap both developed as an alternative to gang violence, and involve blowing away your opponent with your moves or destroying them with your rhymes. The history of hip hop can be told through its feuds—many of them deadly—and albums and diss tracks can be the equivalent of throwing down the gauntlet, or to put it in video game terms, a special attack or finishing move. Dancers and rappers start from the bottom, play the game and “level up", and rise from obscurity to immense wealth.
Over the years American hip hop artists have come to embrace—or perhaps it’d be more accurate to say legitimize—elements of Japanese street culture (mostly its fashion). At the same time, anime has infiltrated mainstream American pop culture. Meanwhile, Japanese hip hop remains a minor curiosity, now completely overshadowed by K-pop’s popularity around the world. The other day, it was announced that the Shibuya hip hop hub Vuenos will be shutting down at the end of May due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As Shibuya undergoes major redevelopment, it’s difficult to imagine a path forward for the neighborhood’s subcultures.
It strikes me as very telling that the new Abema building recently opened up directly across the street from Manhattan Records—a symbol of post-millennial otaku culture towering over a remnant of the Tokyo hip hop scene of the 80s and 90s.
