Babylon East: Performing, Dancehall, Roots Reggae, and Rastafari in Japan

In Babylon East, the anthropologist Marvin D. Sterling traces the history of the Japanese embrace of dancehall reggae and other elements of Jamaican culture, including Rastafari, roots reggae, and dub music. He provides a nuanced ethnographic analysis of the ways that many Japanese involved in reggae as musicians and dancers, and those deeply engaged with Rastafari as a spiritual practice, seek to reimagine their lives through Jamaican culture. Sterling considers Japanese performances and representations of Jamaican culture in clubs, competitions, and festivals; on websites; and in song lyrics, music videos, reggae magazines, travel writing, and fiction. He illuminates issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class as he discusses topics ranging from the cultural capital that Japanese dancehall artists amass by immersing themselves in dancehall culture in Jamaica, New York, and England, to the use of Rastafari as a means of critiquing class difference, consumerism, and the colonial pasts of the West and Japan. Encompassing the reactions of Jamaica's artists to Japanese appropriations of Jamaican culture, as well as the relative positions of Jamaica and Japan in the world economy, Babylon East is a rare ethnographic account of Afro-Asian cultural exchange and global discourses of blackness beyond the African diaspora.

"The globalization of Jamaican culture has inspired Rastafari devotees and reggae/dancehall fans worldwide to claim hybridized identities, as evidenced in the unexpected emergence of a `Jamaican' subculture in Japan. Babylon East is a rich, energetically written ethnography that lucidly articulates the contradictory ways in which exoticized cultural difference is voraciously consumed in a nation that is decidedly ambivalent about accepting the physical presence of the racialized `other.' Deploying the Rastafari trope of Babylon as the biblical beast of Euro-American imperialism, Marvin D. Sterling judiciously destabilizes East/West binary constructs, authoritatively delineating the complexity of the Japanese performance of Jamaican identity."---Carolyn Cooper, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica

"Marvin D. Sterling sensitively portrays the wide range of Japanese reggae dancehall practitioners, from chart-topping stars such as Miki Dozan to underground pioneers such as Rankin' Taxi, as well as Junko Kudo, the unlikely winner of Jamaica's premier dance-diva contest. Along the way, we get to know the urban musicians who make up the traveling groups known as sound systems, as well as `Japanese Rastafari' in the countryside. By considering Japanese youth who travel to Jamaica on journeys of self-discovery and the Jamaicans who sometimes look ambivalently on the explosion of the reggae scene in Japan, Sterling completes an engaging circle of analysis in this fascinating and insightful book."---Ian Condry, author of Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization

Marvin D. Sterling is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University.