An investigation of raciolinguistic ideologies in Japanese rap battles

Morgan Reynolds
Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:57:50 PDT

This thesis interrogates what are normally implicit linguistic ideologies surrounding who is a legitimate speaker of Japanese and how it implicates a relationship between ethnicity, nationality, culture, and language. Using a corpus of recorded rap battles from YouTube in which one of the rappers is known to be of non-Japanese or partially non-Japanese heritage, discourse analysis demonstrates how race, foreignness and otherness are made relevant in disses of opponents’ rap skill. The history and characteristics of Japanese rap are outlined with an eye toward how the conventions of the musical genre reflect preoccupations with creating a distinctly Japanese form of an international musical style. Rap battles, as an improvisational, live competition, are a performative genre of verbal art—all participants offer their words up for evaluation by an audience. Drawing from Bauman’s theory of verbal art as performance, it is argued that rap battles are a place where Japanese social actors evaluate not only poetic form but also appeal to implicitly shared cultural values. The generic conventions of battles allow them to be a site where confrontation and identity work can be much more overt than in everyday and more formal types of social interaction. Analysis centers on rappers who are recognized as competent if not highly skilled and whose Japanese is indistinguishable from people who fit cultural ideals of Japaneseness, yet are known to be “Other”. It is demonstrated that disses make overt a cultural ideology in which Japanese identity is the result of an alignment between “native” linguistic fluency, nationality, ethnicity, and cultural competence. In this decidedly “Japanese” form of verbal art, rappers are able to draw upon and make explicit this logic to diss or negatively evaluate their opponent by drawing relationships between any of these dimensions of the model and rap performance.