Media Industries 10.2 (2023) Article
Roots Routes: Japan, Jamaica, and the Global
Flows of Vintage Reggae Vinyl
John Vilanova
LEHIGH UNIVERSITY
jjv319 [AT] lehigh.edu
Abstract
This article excavates the historical, cultural, and music industrial signicance of
the buying and selling of Jamaican vinyl records in Japan. It reveals an unexpected
connection between alternative distribution ows and the persistence of material
music in the digital era. The Japanese market for Jamaican records exposes an
under-theorized distribution relationship between two island nations on opposite
sides of the globe. The durability of this market—launched by amateurs in the
1980s and nurtured into a productive and ongoing discourse—suggests that the
materiality of Jamaican vinyl has particular meanings in Japanese culture and
that Japan has played an important role in the preservation of Jamaican vinyl.
Research consists of interviews with Japanese reggae fans, record store owners,
and artists, conducted at reggae record stores throughout Tokyo, Japan. Studying
these connections is important because it reorients our approach to ows of
music and requires an engagement with the materiality of music-industrial
products despite digital distribution’s growing hegemony.
Keywords: reggae music, music industry, material culture, Japan, Jamaica,
cultural preservation, collector culture, digital music
Introduction
This article explores how the buying and selling of Jamaican vinyl records in Japan reveals
an unexpected and signicant countercurrent to the ways the popular music industry is
conceptualized, particularly with regard to the growing hegemony of digital distribution in
the contemporary moment and the long-standing centrality of the Atlantic and global North
in the industry’s ows. The Japanese market for vintage Jamaican reggae records highlights
an under-theorized relationship between two island nations on opposite sides of the globe
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that is based on material subcultural goods. These goods—records from the so-called golden
age of Jamaican reggae music—have symbolic signicance for Japanese consumers as well
as a particular cultural legibility as a result of the nations’ ongoing relations and large-scale
Japanese music consumption patterns. This signicance complicates over-easy ways of con-
ceptualizing the music industry spatially and technologically.
The durability and discourse of this market—launched by amateur collectors and fans in the
1980s and nurtured into a productive and ongoing discourse today—reveal that the material-
ity of Jamaican vinyl has particular meanings in Japanese culture and that Japanese engage-
ment with reggae has been benecial to the music’s preservation and cultural life. This article
discusses the historical and cultural factors that have contributed to Jamaican vinyl’s par-
ticular status among Japanese collectors, music industry workers, and reggae fans, as well
as the on-the-ground goings-on in Tokyo’s vintage reggae vinyl stores. I approach reggae
records as both specic cultural texts and music-industrial commodities. This provides a
way to grasp the “social life” of Jamaican vinyl.
1
The article rst offers an overview of material music in Japan and Jamaica and then his-
toricizes the international relationship between the two nations through a combination of
primary source archival research and interview data from major gures in the birth and
life of Japan’s relationship to reggae music. It then draws conclusions about the contempo-
rary scene from twenty-six interviews conducted throughout the city. The researchers vis-
ited the various reggae stores throughout the city (many located in the commercial centers
of Shibuya and Shinjuku) in the summer of 2016, conducting semi-structured, English-
language interviews with staff and customers within the businesses. These ranged from a
few minutes with store patrons to multi-hour discussions with industry workers. This strat-
egy led to a snowball sample, where many connections came from store owners, who tele-
phoned friends and colleagues to aid the researchers in setting up follow-up interviews.
Overall, the sample included fteen reggae fans, two scholars, and nine store proprietors
and employees at reggae shops. The latter category offered the most critical analysis and
consisted of many major gures in the history of reggae’s growth in Japan as well as its
contemporary day-to-day business. This included Naoki Ienaga, the founder of Dub Store
Records, the preeminent distributor, wholesaler, and manufacturer of vintage and reissue
reggae music; Shizuo Ishii, the founder of Overheat Music and Riddim magazine; Jey Inoue,
the founder of Oasis Records; Yumi Uehara, the only female reggae record store owner in the
city; and major Japanese reggae (J-Reggae) artist Rankin’ Taxi. All interviewees were given
the option to have their identities anonymized; none chose to do so.
Together, these reveal a set of productive insights into (1) the fertile, under-examined trade and
tourism relations between the two nations centered around reggae over the past sixty years,
(2) Japanese-contextual reasons for material music’s persistence and reggae vinyl’s attractive-
ness, particularly in terms of signaling “authentic” cultural connection, and (3) a template for
musical respect and cultural exchange outside of traditional frameworks, epitomized through
the preservation of material music. These conclusions are ostensibly of use for scholars of the
creative industries in non-Western contexts as well as industry workers who nd—reasonably—
that the popular music industry as historically constituted is, in effect, a colonial enterprise.
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At the center of the so-called Western world is the Atlantic, the crucible by which Black
people and Black music were “conscripted”
2
into Eurocentric modernity and Black
music-making and texts were constructed as a counterculture of modernity.
3
The global
popular music industry—headlined by the three remaining (and highly consolidated)
major record labels—is headquartered in the sites of ongoing neocoloniality that should
be understood, following the work of Anibal Quijaño, to dene modern capitalism, labor,
and culture.
4
This article argues that listening mediums are at the crux of intersections
and contradictions in digital-industrial debates about modernity. Recording a song in
one of Kingston’s studios only to have it manufactured and distributed by industry work-
ers in London—Jamaica’s colonial overlord until 1962—was a process by which Black music
traversed the Atlantic in the problematic wake of hundreds of years of horrifying triangu-
lar trade. Bob Marley—the global South’s most popular musician—lampooned what he saw
as a “Babylon System,” a vampiric set of institutions that sucked the blood of the Rasta-
fari “sufferahs.” Today, the popular contemporary means of digital distribution in the West-
ern world—subscription-based applications such as Spotify and Apple Music—epitomize
the estrangement of music-as-human-experience to a passive commodity, absorbed through
headphones before an algorithm jumps to the next, calculatedly chosen song. Artists receive
a pittance; consumers shufe passively without signicant engagement. The musical text
has been devalued in the current model.
Marvin Sterling argues that Jamaican reggae music and Rastafari—the music’s dreadlocked,
Afro-centric religious foundation—are lenses through which we can view Japanese social
identity, complicating binary West/Other models and instead creating a triad in which the
West as a site of identity formation is decentered and destabilized.
5
Sterling is the primary
authority on Japan’s interaction with reggae, specically, though others have contributed to
the literature on the interaction between the island nations.
6
This work argues that reggae
records offer the same model for decentering the Atlantic and destabilizing the digital focus
of the moment, drawing on Sterling’s emphasis on culture and further contextualizing it
within the industrial frame.
On a larger scale, the promise of Afro-Asian reciprocity, though, is long-standing: Mullen’s
Afro-Orientalism suggests Black sharecroppers saw East Asia as “an imaginary ‘third way’ out
of the crushing oppositional hierarchies of white supremacy,”
7
and W.E.B. Du Bois compared
Japanese civil rights efforts during the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 to those of Black people
throughout the world, eventually making clear that the “color line” he saw as the dening
problem of the new century included the struggles of Asian people.
8
In 1912, Booker T. Wash-
ington told a Japanese journalist, “In no other part of the world have the Japanese people
a larger number of admirers and well-wishers than among the black people of the United
States.”
9
Complicating racial binaries enables rich re-theorizations of cross-cultural relations, which is
evidenced in the larger literature on interactions between Black and Asian identities.
10
Note-
worthily, Prashad’s Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth
of Cultural Purity historicizes Afro-Asian solidarities and argues that cross-cultural texts
are not just idle places of co-capitalist production but instead can be spaces for liberatory
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praxis.
11
Japanese–Jamaican solidarity is performed by reggae fans and industry workers
through their shared relationship to musical texts.
And so, the present article offers a practical counterpoint to the preguration of the music
industry and its behaviors as ongoing processes of coloniality. The Japan–Jamaica vinyl
resale exchange relationship illustrates the economic forces and business frames that shape
this site of industrial formation, taking vinyl records as the empirical objects of a rich and
understudied micro-economy. What is the role of the Jamaica–Japan relationship within the
larger global industrial ow of music and recorded music? Why does this relationship mat-
ter? What can it teach us?
Material Music in the Japanese and Jamaican Contexts
Scholarship and popular writing have addressed vinyl’s niche role for collectors, DJs, and
enthusiasts.
12
Some writers have connected vinyl to research about the contemporary digital
music age.
13
But these (as well as the mainstream media coverage that addresses material
music) typically treat vinyl as a curiosity—as a niche audiophile subculture. The Japanese
reggae vinyl story certainly represents a relatively small community, but the durability of its
international industrial relationships and its broader ideological role suggest that there is
more to the story and that the collector subculture is birthed from a specic set of interna-
tional, cultural, and industrial relations.
In the recent past, music business experts have suggested that Jamaica produces more music
per capita than any other country in the world.
14
But outside of attracting tourists, Jamaica
writ large has struggled to prot from the global prole its music has helped cultivate. At the
turn of the 21st century, the United Nations Commission on Trade and Development calcu-
lated the recorded music products of Jamaica to have had a worldwide wholesale value of at
least $1.2 billion in 1994, but the island’s recorded music exports totaled $291,000 that year.
15
This disparity has roots in insufcient copyright and cultural expression protections as well
as the privileging of a network of major labels run by Western nations most suited to prot
from the creative labor of Jamaican producers.
Independent material music infrastructure in Jamaica begins with entrepreneur Ken Khouri,
who imported a Finebilt record press to Kingston in 1954 that would eventually become Fed-
eral Records, the country’s rst major studio, record-pressing and distribution company,
before its sale to the Marley family in 1981. The press is housed at Tuff Gong Studios in King-
ston today. “What was the signicance of this press and its output on the island and as part of
a larger system of global trade and distribution ows?” the researchers asked previously.
16
And
where were the records produced on this press now? The answer—in large part—was Japan.
Meanwhile, the digital revolution has come swiftly to Jamaica, a phenomenon that concerns
many cultural producers. In an article in The Guardian, DJ David Rodigan explained the vinyl
industry’s downturn in Jamaica and its effect on cultural producers on the island.
17
It’s a reection of the economic realities in Jamaica that the emotional motivations of overseas
collectors have for years propped up vinyl manufacture. Particularly in Europe, people still want to
own reggae in that form because it helps them connect to the music’s original roots and culture.
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Jamaican music industry workers are pulled in different directions, but the history of collec-
tive musical expression on the island is a democratizing one with vinyl at its heart.
At the same time, contemporary reggae fans and experts know that old and rare vinyl have
always played an important role in DJ cultures, which also derive from Jamaican performance
traditions.
18
During the golden age, enough of the island’s population was unable to afford
buying their own radios, turntables, and vinyl records that public listening became popular,
and entrepreneurial Jamaicans purchased generators, turntables, and vast speaker arrays,
hosting parties and playing records for paying guests and bridging the gap between the
lower and middle classes.
19
Within that cultural fabric, a rare record from the 1960s or 1970s could be a key piece of
an artist’s oeuvre, DJ set, or sound clash competition arsenal then and today. Unreleased
dubplates—test discs and remixes pressed onto acetate and sometimes used for marketing
purposes—are highly sought after and could be major attention-getters for Jamaican DJs,
called selectors. While the genre’s popularity growth was largely artist-driven, rare vinyl
records also played an important role in spreading Jamaican music throughout the globe for
collectors and enthusiasts.
20
Novelty—unheard songs, deep cuts, the experience of surprise
in the live setting—was something vinyl could and still can offer.
The Japanese context is similarly unique, due to its outlier status with regard to musical
medium. The island nation’s outsized impact on the mainstream music business is signif-
icant, though due to a conux of factors—from language barriers to longstanding Orien-
talist presumptions—the famed Japanese musicians have, in large part, failed to achieve
the level of Western crossover, particularly in comparison to K-pop, the music of their
East Asian neighbor (and former colony) Korea. Japan is the world’s second-largest music
market after the United States, but in stark contrast to US sales data, the vast majority
of Japanese music sales today are still in the form of physical items. According to 2017
data from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), a preeminent
trade group, 70 percent of the United States’ $5.3 billion in retail music sales came from
digital, with 18 percent coming from physical.
21
Meanwhile, in Japan, the numbers were
reversed, with 72 percent of its $2.7 billion in sales coming in physical formats. Digital had
only a 20 percent share, though that number has increased in the years since. According
to a 2,728-person survey conducted in December 2021 by the consumer data rm Statista,
45 percent of respondents suggested their most-commonly used method of consuming
music was YouTube.
22
Though things are changing, the power of material music is still evident experientially while
walking Tokyo’s streets. While the last Tower Records in the United States closed in 2006, a
nine-story record store behemoth (one of seventy-six throughout Japan) looms in the heart
of the well-trafcked Shibuya neighborhood, with large sections devoted to reggae CDs and
vinyl records. There is a performance space in the basement that hosts concerts and events
as well as large areas for memorabilia, connecting the commodities to the larger “It really
sort of presents music as this all encompassing experience, you know, and of course, they
want you to leave with a CD or in recent years a record, but they also want to highlight so
much more,” one Japanese writer remarked in 2022.
23
There is a social and public dynamic to
listening that vibrates at the same frequency as the reggae sound system.
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Reggae had a presence in virtually every mainstream store in the city, in addition to the
niche stores focusing on vintage vinyl, such as Dub Store, Nat Records, Coco-Isle Music, Face
Records, and Oasis Records. According to the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ),
the island nation boasted roughly 6,000 music stores when this research was conducted; the
United States, by comparison, has less than one-third of that number for a population nearly
double the size.
24
The persistence of material music forms also has aesthetic, affective, and performative
dimensions for Japanese fans, often in parallel with Jamaican contemporaries. “I prefer CDs
to downloads because I have the desire to physically possess what artists make,” a school-
teacher told Metropolis, the large Tokyo-based English-language magazine in 2017.
25
“And
there’s this inexplicable sense of joy and excitement I can feel as I open the package and
smell the lyric booklet. I even enjoy just seeing my whole CD collection in my CD rack at
times. I like CDs with cool cover artworks.”
Marketers and labels have adjusted and devised strategies to appease material-seeking con-
sumers.
26
In a setting where the mainstream music market places a particular emphasis on
Japanese artists, boy- and girl-groups such as Arashi, Nogizaka46, and AKB48 satiate collec-
tors and create a rabid market. These groups and others like them are marketing machines.
The latter, for instance, offers multiple versions and releases of its albums, corresponding to
different members of the group, often with no changes to the actual content of the recorded
disc. This prompted music industry expert Mark Mulligan to name the process “merchandise
disguised as albums.”
27
This is the context in which Japanese music is bought and sold, nurtured as much by fan
interest as by industrial conditions, providing a counterexample to developments in the
rest of the world’s music industries. It is also the context in which the fandom of reggae led
to a signicant accumulation of vinyl records imported from Jamaica. This is explainable
through a combination of Japanese cultural engagement with material music goods and
the larger meaning-making and cultural/communal tradition of the music, according to my
interview data.
Historicizing Reggae Relations Between
Japan and Jamaica
Reggae originated in Jamaica in the mid-1960s as a blend of other indigenous Jamaican and
Caribbean musics, like ska, calypso, and rocksteady.
28
By the 1970s, a variety of studios and
labels had been established, and the genre entered its “Golden Age.” Scaling the industry
became an important next step for the production and distribution of indigenous musical
texts—the ability to change a production-forward process (the playing of the songs) into an
industrial one (the recording and distribution of them). By manufacturing a material vessel to
export reggae, Jamaicans could capitalize on their music and move their economy.
29
Thanks
in large part to Island Records and its label head, the London-born navigator of postcolonial
frictions Chris Blackwell, Bob Marley became the rst international reggae superstar and the
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rst globally successful musician of the global South, drawing on a philosophical tradition of
Black internationalisms even if the distribution apparatus that carried his music across the
globe was effectively neocolonial.
30
Reggae was also a mixed media phenomenon, with two
music-centric lms—Jimmy Cliff’s The Harder They Come (1972) and Rockers (1978)—becoming
important cultural texts in the popularization of the genre across the globe.
31
Jamaica won independence from its British colonial overlords in 1962; Japan and Jamaica
established bilateral diplomatic relations in 1964 in what is today known as the J-J Part-
nership. Contemporary materials suggest the nations saw sustainable co-development as
necessary for “overcoming the vulnerabilities particular to small island states.”
32
As early as
1978, requests from Japan for Jamaican music fan pen pals were appearing in Kingston news-
papers.
33
That year, Cliff would tour Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto, “spreading the reggae gospel
along the way,” according to Kingston’s newspaper, the Daily Gleaner.
Marley followed Cliff to Japan, performing at Nakano Sun Plaza Hall, Tokyo, in April 1979. The
concert became a cultural touchstone for Japan’s growing reggae subculture. By the mid-
1980s, Jamaican papers were calling Japan “the fastest growing market for the music.”
34
In
1982, Shizuo Ishii launched Riddim magazine, named after the reusable instrumental tracks
that accompanied many Jamaican reggae songs. Ishii obtained distribution rights for Rock-
ers and screened the lm for sold-out crowds in Tokyo, with 3,000 guests attending in just
one week. In an interview, Ishii cited the importance of informal, interpersonal networks in
building reggae’s reputation in Japan: He only came to know of the lm because the wife of
one of the producers was Japanese. His label, Overheat, was rst launched as a distribution
company for Rockers, and he partnered with EMI to distribute the soundtrack in Tokyo after
the lm’s success. Ishii said he tried then and now to highlight the particularities of Black
music, calling it “special” and admitting that in the early stage, he was unsure if there would
be a market for it in Japan because of its particularity. He underestimated its relevance and
potential.
During this period, Japanese tourists started traveling across the globe to visit famed reggae
record stores in Jamaica, such as Randy’s Records and Rockers International. Federal Records
and Studio One ramped up their recording and production rates as the genre’s global reach
expanded. Jey Inoue, later the founder of Oasis Records, led what he believes to have been
the rst “record collector expedition” in 1983, serving as a guide to Japanese reggae fans vis-
iting legendary record stores. One member of the trip would later become Rankin’ Taxi, one
of the most successful and signicant Japanese reggae (J-Reggae) artists.
35
Economic ties between the two nations expanded throughout the 1980s, with Jamaican
Prime Minister Edward Seaga visiting Japan in 1981 and 1985. Japan’s Overseas Economic
Co-Operation Fund loaned the Jamaican government $17.8 million to assist with economic
recovery in 1981 and a $22 million digital electronic phone system supplied through a con-
tract with Matsui and Company in 1983.
36
As Jamaica’s Minister of Tourism Frank Pringle
suggested, Japanese investment would go hand in hand with attracting tourists.
37
According
to Jamaica’s Ministry of Justice, the number of Japanese tourists visiting Jamaica increased
annually, from just 29 in 1980 to 11,534 in 1995.
38
Reggae music and culture were at the heart
of the relationship. Jamaican academics even pointed to the maintenance of Japanese cul-
tural identity in the face of the Marshall Plan as a model for the conicted Caribbean nation
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Media Industries 10.2 (2023)
to follow.
39
“Japan has remained Japan, different in culture and in society from the United
States,” Errol Miller, a Jamaican professor, remarked in reference to ongoing Cold War ten-
sions and soft power.
40
Though Japan did not lack for its own international relations-driven
self-interest, commentary such as this does suggest a more equal-footing reciprocity rather
than neocolonial domination.
Ienaga, the founder and owner of Dub Store, the premier player in the scene, made his rst
record-buying trip in 1993; three years later he opened a storefront and mail-order service.
As part of broader efforts throughout the Caribbean to attract more Japanese tourists inter-
ested in reggae and coffee (today, Japan imports roughly 80 percent of the well-regarded
beans farmed on Jamaica’s Blue Mountain
41
), Jamaica’s Ministry of Tourism pointed to Japan
as a linchpin of the tourism industry.
42
Arguments for a Jamaican music hall of fame cited
Japanese tourists specically.
43
As both nations established embassies in the other’s capitals, J-Reggae and Japanese reg-
gae fandom surged in the 1990s. Ienaga built relationships with producers and artists
in Jamaica, such as Studio One and Federal Records, to distribute their work in Japan,
though they lowered their output of vinyl in favor of more compact discs based on mar-
ket conditions. Many older reggae vinyl records fell out of print and circulation; Iena-
ga’s focus on Golden Age records meant that he accumulated many recordings in vinyl
because it was the only way they were circulating. At the time, many of the Federal press-
ings were in London; living in London at the time, Ienaga, an avid collector, accumulated
about 200 duplicate copies of vintage records in his personal collection. He moved back
to Tokyo, placing advertisements in music magazines and beginning a mail-order busi-
ness to accompany the store.
At the social level, two major events epitomized Japanese engagement with reggae culture,
both driven by media technologies: In 1999, Yokohama group Mighty Crown won the World
Clash sound clash in Brooklyn. A sound clash is a battle between different DJ groups, with
vinyl records played through a massive sound system speaker array while toasting (comically
boasting or dissing) the opponent. Mighty Crown’s victory established Japanese selectors as
important keepers of Jamaican sound recordings and cultural practices—they had the vinyl
records and uency with the performance practice to win the title. The 2002 victory of Jap-
anese woman Junko Kudo in the National Dancehall Queen competition in Jamaica likewise
reected Japan’s place in reggae history. Kudo beat out an international group of dancers,
suggesting in an interview with the Gleaner that she had learned to dance by watching Jamai-
can videos.
44
Cross-cultural events of this type cemented the relationship as more than just
music—reggae culture was vibrant among Japanese enthusiasts, who Sterling suggests were
invested in the symbolic capital of performance uency that lent their subculture authen-
ticity. Coco-Isle Music Mart’s Kazuki Nakamura suggested reggae’s popularity in the 1990s in
clubs and primed the pump for social hip-hop listening soon after. I see the vinyl and tech-
nologies of social reggae playing an essential role in the sociality of what Christopher Small
has called “musicking.”
45
The internet has in some ways democratized access to some musical texts, but it has done so
unevenly and in a way that throws the alienation and commodity fetishization that Frith traces
through the history of recorded music into hyperdrive.
46
This research suggests industrial
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rearrangement has—like the scholarship around contemporary music industry distribution
and organization—moved too quickly, often to the disadvantage of participants—both work-
ers and fans. The speed at which the digital has moved across the world has been striking
and impactful, but for Jamaica, it has not been an unquestioned boon. Cultural industries
workers there continue to wrestle with how to participate more equitably in the global music
industry. As I have previously argued, vinyl’s history on the island may be key to current
attempts to participate more equitably in the industry.
47
This work, which the authors pre-
sented at industry conferences held at JAMPRO, a wing of the nation’s Ministry of Economic
Growth and Job Creation, can thus serve as context for recommendations for Jamaican art-
ists and independent music business workers.
48
Despite a slowdown in the subsequent years, a number of cultural producers invested in
Jamaican vinyl remain optimistic about its potential impact. In a recent Gleaner article,
Debra Bissoon, brand manager at the Bob Marley Group of Companies, singled out Japan as a
nation whose tourists seek out vinyl purchases when visiting Jamaica.
49
Since 2013, Kingston
has held a “Japan Day” each February, and a new means of promoting cultural exchange, the
Japan-Jamaica Friendship Association (also called the JJFA or “Japamaica”), was launched in
August 2022.
50
Findings and Analysis
The interview data yielded a number of worthwhile insights. First, interview subjects agreed
that Japanese cultural tastes have created a landscape of music consumption uniquely suited
for vinyl’s prominence because physical music sales have been so normalized in Japanese
culture. They distinguished themselves from the idol group fans but acknowledged similari-
ties around collectability and materiality, communicating value. Store owners cited collect-
ability as a major motivator for fans, their employees, and themselves.
There is more to the story, though: In the case of reggae vinyl, attachment to the genre
and the records themselves specically gave fans an experience of heightened authen-
ticity, where knowledge of the deeper, rarer cuts was a way to signal more serious fan-
dom. The store owners and reggae fans that I interviewed are devoted to the music. They
cite its bass sounds, unique cultural performance practices and traditions, and feel-good
messages as motivations for their fandom. Like many vinyl consumers around the world,
interviewees suggested the “real” way to hear music was analog. However, interlocutors
such as Kazuki Nakamura, owner of Coco-Isle Music Market, intimated that this was
especially the case for reggae in both private listening and public performances such as
sound clashes, thus mirroring discourses around musical mediums in Jamaican cultural
circles. Nakamura called vinyl and sound systems “necessary” for him and his contem-
poraries. Many Japanese DJs sought out vinyl for their live performances as a way to
perform with the same authenticity. Records factor into the social life of reggae music
in the city. According to Chikuma Tsuboi, Dub Store’s distribution manager, “Everyone’s
involved somehow—with some club nights or bar nights that give us opportunities to play
our records,” he claims.
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This pursuit of authentic connection also opened spaces for consciousness raising, often with
particular acknowledgment of the politics of reggae. “World war is changing to conscious-
ness,” Yumi Uehara said, mentioning the suffering of Vietnamese boat people and nuclear
fall-out. “People want to be conscious. That’s a thing in the lyrics . . . hip-hop and reggae.”
Store owners claim that they serve as informal translators, explaining the music’s political
themes and lyrics to interested record collectors. “While they continue to listen they might
be interested in lyrics and they’ll check the dictionary. Sometimes our customers will ask me
about a lyric. ‘What did Derrick Morgan want to tell the people through this tune?’ ” Uehara
shared.
This follows a smaller subcultural movement connecting Rastafari themes and ideologies
to J-Reggae, specically Rankin’ Taxi, whose song “You Can’t See It, And You Can’t Smell It,
Either,” became a protest anthem following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
51
“Every-
one’s feeling people not getting treated right,” Tsuboi said. “I think that’s what we have in
common.”
For a relatively small subculture, the small circle of leading gures in Japanese reggae sub-
cultures gure prominently in the global history of reggae from the late 1980s onward. For
example, Shizuo Ishii claims (perhaps apocryphally) that naming his magazine Riddim stand-
ardized the word’s spelling worldwide (beating out Jamaican artist Sugar Minott’s Rydim
(1985)). Though unveriable, this claim is signicant because it comes as part of a larger set
of conversations where the historiographical roles of Japanese gures like Ishii, Ienaga, and
Rankin’ Taxi are more signicant than one would assume at rst glance. These types of per-
son-to-person relationships nourished the growing subculture and market centering around
the trade of vintage vinyl. Ienaga, Inoue, and others describe cultivating relationships with
Jamaicans and Japanese citizens living abroad who would send dozens of records each month
for them to sell to friends and customers for their new businesses. It would seem easy to
suggest a top-down approach where international relations—replete with power dynamics—
drove ongoing relations between the nations. Reggae’s history suggests a more bottom-up,
people-driven approach. Store owners served as precursors to larger mainstream connec-
tions between Japan and Jamaica through major labels and festivals like Japansplash.
But how do we eschew concerns about a new colonial enterprise and argue for a more recip-
rocal one? After visiting Japan in 2017, reggae icon Winston “Wee Pow” Powell called the
Pacic island “the capital of reggae music”: “The Japanese. . . have visited Jamaica and they
bought maybe 90 per cent of our vinyl collection and that vault is now in Japan,” he said.
[C]lassic vinyl that your grand parents [sic] used to collect. The Japanese came here and they
knocked door to door and bought out the vinyl records . . . so most of our catalogue is in Japan. . . .
We as a people and the government nuh
52
really embrace our music the way we should. . . . So the
Japanese took it, and they proceeded to do what we should have been doing, and that is the reason
why some people would say that they are the capital.
53
What does it mean for Japan to be the capital of Jamaican music? A facile takeaway from
the current condition would suggest the resonances between Japan’s control of sig-
nicant vinyl and the reverberations of (neo)colonial plunder. Instead, though, when
11
Media Industries 10.2 (2023)
contextualized in this history, we might recognize it as a product of a lengthy period
of meaningful cultural interchange, where Jamaican producers might take advantage of
these under-traveled trade routes, growing the relationship between the two nations with
music at the forefront of exchange. After the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, Jamai-
can artist Junior Reid raised funds to aid the island’s recovery, telling the Gleaner, “They
support our music, so we af
54
support them.”
55
Contemporary Jamaican newspapers cite
scholars such as Noriko Manabe, who suggests reggae as a gateway to a counter-hegemonic
state of being for Japanese fans.
56
Ienaga acknowledged the power dynamics at play, suggesting that his 21st-century move
toward reissues and re-pressings had a more equivocal reasoning. “I kind of got fed up with
doing the secondhand records because the money we make doesn’t really go to any artist
or the producer or whoever who made the music,” he explained. “Factory-new records, the
money properly goes to the producer and the artist. Some of the records I liked was not
available. Nobody was putting them out. So I started to talk to those people that I want to
press those records and that’s how my label got started.” The label has emerged as a pres-
ervationist enterprise, re-releasing unheard studio recordings and Iyaric Rastafari religious
eld recordings in addition to maintaining a vast archive of vintage vinyl items for sale. With-
out Japanese collectors’ recognition of the complex value of reggae records (and the market
for collecting and preserving rare vinyl), it is possible that many of these records would have
remained even more obscure or become extinct.
Conclusion
Jettisoning the material in favor of the digital ultimately hurts the Jamaican record industry’s
potential to maintain this partnership with Japan, which, interviews suggest, could benet
from a more robust process of producing new reggae vinyl. The premium placed on digitality
keeps Jamaican cultural producers trapped within a prevailing industry network infrastruc-
ture that has never supported them—a new hegemon in a space of ows that has adapted and
adjusted in the echoes of colonial organization. Japan can become for the Jamaican industry
what Bob Marley called a “Small Axe”—a tool for resisting music industry hegemony.
Orthodoxies and market-epistemological assumptions preclude the kind of creative thinking
that spawned the unique relationship between Japan and Jamaica in the rst place. Scholars,
artists, and creative industries professionals around the globe should move more cautiously
toward the digital as a panacea for a agging industry and for our scholarship. Alterna-
tive distribution networks might be more protable for Jamaican artists than the traditional
ones. Alternative orientations toward the digital might be more protable for our scholar-
ship than recent ones.
What does the emphasis on the digital overlook? How do we ensure that the industry-wide
rush to accommodate the digital does not overwhelm scholarship? How do we account for
the materiality of music products and their role beyond “retro” or nostalgic desires in the
digital era? The case study of Jamaican vinyl in Japan shows that there are ongoing industrial
12
Media Industries 10.2 (2023)
relationships outside of hegemonic trade routes and ideological assumptions that continue
to trafc in material music—vinyl and otherwise—even as we settle into the digital era.
For industry professionals, it opens new pathways to protability. In the Jamaican case, con-
tinuing to develop partnerships with independent labels outside of the West is a way to
maintain a more autonomous, participatory place in industry discourse. Japan’s industrial
prerogatives, cultures, and buying patterns are ultimately more in line with some of the val-
ues held by Jamaican creatives. In this specic case, these ndings can be both protable and
meaningful for Jamaican musicians and copyright holders. The Japanese industrial organi-
zation’s ability to elide pre-established trade routes and preference for material media could
open new avenues for Jamaican artists to prot from their work.
Necessary for this is a sustained engagement with the meaning and specic power of reggae
and the medium of its message. The interlocutors with whom I spoke articulated a con-
sciousness and respect for the art and those who make it. When digital technologies devalue
artists, messages, and media delivery methods, reggae vinyl in Tokyo is a case study for
respectful, mutually benecial relations.
Alternative industrial ows are productive because they generate new ways of thinking
about the global distribution of music, for both scholars and industry workers. For the for-
mer, it upsets traditional and staid epistemological frameworks about music distribution,
suggesting new knowledges generated from surprising national relationships such as Japan
and Jamaica might help us retheorize our understandings of global ows. Uehara, the female
store owner, suggested a kind of gravitational pull of American culture and cultural inu-
ences throughout global popular culture. The relationship between Japan and Jamaica, she
suggested, gave both countries a different partner for less-fraught cultural exchange.
In January 2017, vinyl collectors around the world were excited to hear that Tuff Gong, home
to the Finebilt record press that engaged the researchers years ago and launched this schol-
arship, would begin undergoing renovations with the goal to begin producing new vinyl
again for the rst time in years. By early 2020, new presses were up and running, promising
250,000 records pressed per year, including limited-edition, rarer nds for collectors and
selectors.
57
Undoubtedly, some of these will make their way to Tokyo.
“Whatever music technology is, it is not one thing alone,” musicologist Timothy Taylor
writes in his important work Strange Sounds: Music, Technology, and Culture. “In short music
technology—any technology—is not simply an artefact or collection of artefacts; it is, rather,
always bound up in a social system.”
58
This article attempts to explicate the specic sys-
temic relationality between Japan and Jamaica that gives vinyl its particular acclaimed status
betwixt the two countries within a rapidly digitizing world. Digital les and analog records
have different social-capital statuses and socio-cultural meanings, and by excavating the
signicance of reggae vinyl through an unexpected and rich international partnership, we
can more fully understand the music industry and its workings.
John Vilanova is Assistant Professor of Journalism and Communication and Africana
Studies at Lehigh University. He researches structural and institutional inequities
in the culture industries, with a particular emphasis on anti-Blackness in global
popular music.
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