Globalization and Japanese Creativity Adaptation of Japanese Language to Rap

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As a musical form without the distraction of a melody but a well-defined beat, rap offers an opportunity to explore the rhythmic and musical aspects of a language. An interesting case study is rap in Japanese, which has completely different syntax, vocabulary, accent patterns, and phonemes from English. Several pioneers of Japanese rap initially thought that rapping in their own language was impossible: while the most striking aural patterns in American rap are the rhymes and stress accents, which punctuate and vary the rhythm, Japanese verbal arts have traditionally not emphasized rhyming, and the language lacks stress accents. Therefore, Japanese rappers had to find ways of exploiting the grammatical and phonological resources of their own language to create flow while upholding a rap aesthetic.

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