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<\/a><\/p>\nThe “hip-hop Japanthropology” was c\/o Ian Condry<\/a>, a professor at MIT who wrote Hip-hop Japan<\/a> — one of the texts we’re reading in my “Global Hip-hop” course this semester. The book is really quite good, an ethnography and analysis of, as the subtitle says, “Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization” in Japan. The text’s most important contribution to the global hip-hop literature, in my mind, is that Condry directs the reader away from misleading binaries such as local\/global or imitation\/authentic in order to focus on what seems the more interesting implication of hip-hop as a cultural phenom in Japan: i.e., the way that the use of such a “foreign” cultural resource as hip-hop serves to animate discussions in Japan about Japan — esp, about the alleged homogeneity of Japaneseness. <\/p>\n It’s a well rounded, deeply informed study, and Condry offers some supplements on his website<\/a>, including a link to a subtitled version of King Giddra’s “911<\/a>,” a striking meditation on, as GW would say, September the 11th. For Condry, Giddra’s “911” demonstrates that, despite such close engagement with US culture, Japanese hip-hoppers have a distinct, distanced, nuanced take on American affairs (connecting the event, for example, to the bombing of Hiroshima and criticizing our Manichean media response). <\/p>\n