Hip Hop in Japan

In a lecture of Black & White, I remember that we talked about Hip Hop as an anti-hegemonic culture. People who are marginalized in their real life commercialized their ghetto image by rapping. In a context of world Hip Hop artist such as Arab artist in France, Turkish artist in Germany, Professor Kalmar mentioned about possibilities of Korean artist in Japan since small amount of Koreans stays in Japan and it is often said that they had suffered discriminations historically. As I was curious about this, I researched a little bit. Surprisingly, one of the most popular rapper called ‘VERBAL’ was a third generations of Korea, and his nationality was actually Korean. I am pretty sure that not a lot of people know about this even in Japan, and he never mentioned or used this idea commercially. He rather uses his international experiences as marketing since he had studied in American University. I think it is because Hip Hop itself is just imported to Japan from States and its culture itself is not related to grass rooted culture at all. We are also not expressive about hardship itself. I think its radical commercialized image just did not fit into cultures like Japan.