Awich, new Japanese hip-hop sensation

(Tokyo) Self-proclaimed queen of Japanese hip-hop, Awich has many stories to tell, from her discovery of American rap as a rebellious teenager in Okinawa to the death of her husband in a shooting in the United States.

While her concerts in Japan now draw crowds, she wants to push her fans to “accept” their own stories “because that’s what gave me the strength to face the world,” she tells the AFP.

The 35-year-old, whose stage name means “Asian wish child”, has been rapping since school and started out in underground clubs in Okinawa, the southernmost department of Japan.

But it really broke through this year with the release of Queendomhis first album released under a major label (Universal Music Japan), photos for the magazine vogue and a concert at the famous Budokan in Tokyo.

The song that gave the title of her new album deals with her departure for Atlanta at 19, the violent death of her husband and the education of their daughter in Japan.

This piece “represents my life, compressed into a few minutes. So it’s an emotional back and forth, like a rollercoaster, every time I perform.”

Inspired by Tupac

Onstage, Awich is brimming with cheerful confidence, her long ponytail swinging behind her back as she touts the “different energy” she brings to the Japanese music scene.

She is also an activist for the Black Lives Matter movement while challenging the stereotype of “kawaii” (cute) young Japanese girls.

Born Akiko Urasaki to a teacher father and a cook mother, she grew up between the deep spirituality of Okinawa — the vast old house of her childhood was surrounded by a cemetery — and American popular culture. imported via the strong military presence of the United States in the island.

His family was hard hit by the Second World War. His grandfather told him how, in the difficult post-war period, he sneaked into American bases to steal cans of soup and share them with the poor inhabitants of the island.

“Yet when you are a child […], you see playing fields on the bases, it’s colorful, it’s big and the people are open and friendly,” Awich recalled. “We have mixed feelings. This is Okinawa. Everything is contradictory”.

A rebellious child, she frequently spends sleepless nights writing “all night long”. At 14, she came across a CD by American rapper Tupac, whose lyrics would deeply inspire her.

Five years later, she moved to Atlanta to study. There, she marries an African-American who goes back and forth to prison. When he dies in a shootout, she finds herself distraught with their then barely 3-year-old daughter, Toyomi.

“Mother and Sexy”

The return to Japan of mother and child is difficult. Awich says she faced “anger and grief” until her father told her that all Okinawans had lost relatives and friends in the war, but life had to go on.

“I felt that as an Okinawan I had to move on, and that’s the power that my father and all my ancestors in Okinawa gave me.”

Toyomi, who is now 14, raps a verse in the song Tsubasa (wings) that Awich released in May to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the handover of Okinawa to Japan after the American occupation.

The rapper wrote it after a US military helicopter window fell into the playground of her daughter’s school. “We want to break free and fly too,” say the lyrics, which describe “shadows above our heads” and “noise that blocks our words.”

Awich also knows that life in a predominantly homogeneous Japanese society “can sometimes become difficult” for people of foreign descent.

“My daughter is mixed-race Japanese and black. She had questions when she was younger, and we tried to answer them together. All the molds in which we were put in the past no longer make sense today”.

Being a woman also means that you “don’t have to be this or that. You can be motherly and sexy, extroverted and intelligent, creative and erotic all at the same time. You can be all of these at the same time”.