This is an academic study of the followers of Jamaican reggae music in Japan. It naturally makes for fascinating reading — the two cultures could hardly, you would have thought, be more different. But the Japanese are nothing if not ardent imitators in many fields, and nowhere more so than in music. And thus it is that Jamaican reggae, dancehall, and Rastafarian cultural manifestations generally have a significant following among some young Japanese.
It’s all very admirable, you might think, a feature of an international youth culture, and even of a benign form of globalization — until, that is, you come across one horrific element in the situation. This is that Jamaican reggae and Rastafarian culture is vehemently, even murderously, anti-gay.
Being perceived as gay, or even being suspected of being gay, is literally life-threatening in Jamaica — it has been called the most homophobic society on earth. The murder of gays is common, and several countries have granted Jamaican gays political asylum because of the real danger of death should they return home. In 2004 the founding member of the island’s only ever gay rights organization, Brian Williamson, was stabbed to death at his home the day he was interviewed by a Human Rights Watch researcher. She arrived back on the scene to find a crowd dancing with joy and singing “Boom bye bye,” a line from a Jamaican reggae singer Buju Banton about the need to execute gay men. “Battyman he get killed,” they chanted, using the abusive term for gay men common in Jamaica.
So how does this go down in Japan? Japan is not a notably homophobic society, and in addition violent crime of any kind is comparatively rare. But because the young Japanese followers of Rastafarian fashions want to be as authentic as possible, and do everything that their Jamaican musical mentors do, they too, in addition to growing their hair in dreadlocks, chant “Battyman fi bun,” apparently chanted ad nauseam in Jamaican dancehalls. It means “Gays must burn.”
It’s all very well to say that perhaps these young Japanese would-be Rastafarians don’t really mean it, that they shout such things on Saturday nights but then go home to peaceable, largely tolerant homes and think no more about it. But the sentiments on the lips of their MCs and DJs are nevertheless unambiguous. This author quotes one Japanese MC as introducing Banton’s Boom Bye-Bye song as follows, here translated into Rastafarian English:
So, all who no like battyboy,
Hand up inna di air now!
Me, I really love reggae!
And there is one thing I hate
especially!
And that is: homos,
transsexuals, lesbians,
same-sex lovers!
Marvin D. Sterling, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University, has written an interesting account of this scene. His writing is admirably free of theoretical jargon, and he evokes Japanese partying scenes he has himself witnessed, conveying the atmosphere cool-headedly but also vividly. In the relatively short space he devotes to the homophobic element in the story he’s clearly trying to be even-handed and just. At one point he says that the Japanese fans of this music cannot be absolved from blame for the cruel sentiments they give voice to simply by saying they are only imitating their Jamaican mentors. The weakness of the book, however, lies in just this academic nature of its approach.
On the one hand, academic works are not meant to be protest pamphlets. The ethos of the university is rightly one of observation and comparison. But it can be, and in this case should be, one of evaluation as well. The prevailing orthodoxy in American socio-literary academic circles is strongly pro-gay, or at least anti-homophobic, and so it seems strange that Sterling, sane and objective though he undoubtedly is, should refrain from a more blanket condemnation of this culture. It does result in people’s deaths, after all, not to mention the day-to-day living in terror of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of others in Jamaica itself.
This extreme Jamaican homophobia is not unrelated to other aspects of the country’s cultural life, where women are strongly subordinated and male adultery and promiscuity generally are, reportedly, widely viewed as admirable qualities.
Examples in this book of Japanese reggae artists penning anti-gay lyrics include Nanjaman, who sings of an America “that enslaved black people ... that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan … [and] where men marry men,” as if these were crimes of equal standing.
Where the lethal Jamaican hatred of gays might have come from is briefly dealt with in this book. Contributing factors were undoubtedly the anti-sodomy laws of the colonial British, and a law stipulating a maximum 10-year prison sentence for some gay sexual activities is still in place on the island. Nevertheless, it’s hard to believe that the general antipathy to homosexuals in most of Africa today doesn’t play some part in the evolution of Rastafarian culture in general, a culture that believes Jamaica is “Babylon” (i.e. the corrupt West), and the only true salvation lies in re-migration back to Africa, home of the movement’s god-king, the benign and good-natured late emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie.
A campaign under the name “Stop Murder Music” was launched in the UK in the 1990s, specifically aimed at the anti-gay lyrics of Jamaican reggae. But to date it seems to have had little effect.
This, then, is an important book, but one that could have been a very different one. We can only hope Professor Sterling will make up for his sins of omission in less mild-mannered observations on the same topic elsewhere.
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