For most non-Japanese speakers who know anything about it at all, hip hop from Japan is represented by turntablist/producer DJ Krush. Working a genre that crowns lyrical excellence to the near-exclusion of melody, star rappers like King Giddra are unknown quantities for most outside of Japan.

So how does rap work in Japanese and what do its lyricists write about? A couple of scholars provide us with multimedia windows onto the hip hop soul of Japan.

CUNY PhD student Noriko Manabe's "Globalization and Japanese Creativity: Adaptation of Japanese Language to Rap," the lead article in the current issue of Ethnomusicology, explains that rapping in Japanese is no simple matter. Here's a bit of a red flag: the Japanese language is ill-suited to rhyming and the country has little or no tradition of rhyming poetry. Secondly, Japanese lacks stress accents, which are crucial to lyrical flow in English. As a result, Manabe tells us, Japanese emcees have to be very creative in their efforts to emulate African American verbal styles. This is a key theme in transnational studies and ethnomusicology--globalization doesn't create a monoculture of imitators. Instead each culture adapts styles to suit its own local purposes.

Check out this 45-minute lecture by Manabe in streaming video. She gives a quick history of hip hop in Japan, then breaks down flow in Japanese.

If you want to know what's on the minds of these Japanese artists, Ian Condry is your go-to man. The MIT Assistant Professor has assembled a Japanese Hip Hop page that includes English-subtitled music videos by the likes of Giddra, whose crew unravels the geo-political complexities of 9-11 with lyrical aplomb.