A Brief History of Tokyo’s Street Art Scene

The roots of Tokyo’s street-art and graffiti scene are not hard to trace nor do they appear to reach very deep into Japan’s own history. Although elements of traditional Japanese art are present in today’s murals and writing styles, graffiti, or rakugaki, was acquired from America. In 1980s New York City, a battle was taking place on the streets in response to socioeconomic and environmental realities. Graffiti became a method of marking one’s territory, and “bombing” subway cars with the writer’s name and crews became prevalent. Hip-hop culture emerged through dance, music, fashion, and film and began to spread all over the world.

In 1983, the release of the film Wild Style announced the arrival of hip-hop culture in Tokyo. A group of popular musicians, break dancers, and graffiti artists performed in a local shopping mall to promote the film’s debut and shocked their young audience. The success of the film and the popularity of other documentaries paved the way for street culture in Tokyo and eventually for Japanese graffiti and street art. While the “writers” and artists of New York City were fighting a fight for recognition and a place in their society, the youth of Japan were discovering this form of self expression through art and culture for the first time.

As the worldwide fascination with American street culture spread, Tokyo embraced it! Break dancing was the first art form to be adapted by young people in Tokyo. On Sundays, groups of young dancers began to gather in Yoyogi Park to break dance and DJ, a tradition that continues to this day. The oversized, vibrant fashions of rappers and artists in the US quickly caught on and morphed into Japan’s own version of street style. Skateboarding was another form of American life that was introduced and popularized at this time. In the years following the release of Wild Style, Tokyo began to develop and add its own voice to the international hip-hop scene.

By the early 90s, Japanese musicians had invented their own rap styles. Due to the significant linguistic differences between English and Japanese, it took Japanese artists time to develop a rap method that maintained the rhyme and rhythm similar to their Western role models. As a result, Japanese rappers developed a blend of English phrases and Japanese to find a structure that eventually achieved acclaim through J-rap in the mid 90s. Major cultural differences also led Japanese rappers to create a form of hip-hop that rarely references misogyny, guns, or hard drugs. Rather, the individualistic ideals of America seemed to catch on and a resistance to Japanese tradition was cultivated. MC Shiro of Rhymester described contemporary Japanese hip-hop lifestyle as “in defiance of the mainstream Japanese society, a culture of the first person singular.”

Graffiti was the last aspect of hip-hop culture to break through in Japan. In fact, Japanese graffiti is still young and developing its style. Tagging became popular throughout the late 90s but took another decade to fully catch on. This desire for self assertion and stylistic rebellion was not common in traditional Japanese culture, yet the underground scene was growing. In 2004, Japanese writer WANTO travelled to the US and began to work with the internationally famous American crew MSK. In 2008, WANTO created his own crew, 246, distinguishing himself as a leader and trailblazer in the Japanese graffiti world. 246, named after a major traffic way in Tokyo, is now the most well-known crew, with members from the US, Japan, Mexico, and Taiwan. Today you will see the names of writers from all over the world covering shutters and store fronts with their unique and rebellious ingenuity.

In the past two decades, street art seems to have taken over the Western art world and become a socially acceptable, marketable, and mass-produced art form. In Japan, several legal graffiti walls have become popular, from the Yokohama Wall of Fame, the Sakuragicho Station Wall, “The Ghetto” in Shinjuku, and along the Yamanote train line. Japanese artists have begun to incorporate their own styles, including historical influences from Japanese kanji, calligraphy, anime, and manga characters. Although these more elaborate murals and works are now more mainstream, there is still a battle with traditional taggers over walls and territory.

In 2005, a major contemporary art museum presented an exhibit at the Art Tower Mito dedicated to showing Japanese graffiti writers. Entitled X-COLOR Graffiti in Japan, this show was the first of its kind, and called a “beautiful deviation,” by its curator, Kenji Kubota. Writers from all over Japan were invited to tag the walls of the museum and create works throughout the city. The viewer was presented with this groundbreaking idea of “graffiti as art” in this never-before-seen kind of exhibition.

Although Japan’s inner city youth do not suffer from the same social issues as young people in America, they have utilized graffiti, street art, and culture to exorcise their sense of alienation and experience of the urban landscape. Tokyo is famous for its hyper- consumerism, cultural homogeneity, and adherence to tradition. Presently, the young artists of Tokyo are continuing to evolve with this “self-aware and self-affirmative movement.” Street art, although still in its adolescent stages, has become an integral part of Japanese hip-hop culture. Grounded in the streets of New York, this innovative art form has grown into the contemporary culture and visual art of Japanese life.