ABSTRACT
For many people awareness of the existence of blacks in the Japanese imagination fi rst began to emerge in the mid-and late-1980s with reports in the American media on the popularity of Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo, on anti-black statements by a troika of conservative, right-wing Japanese politicians, beginning with Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, and on the questionable hiring practices of US-based Japanese companies. On the whole, these Japanese attitudes toward blacks were discussed in the context of external black, primarily African American, populations. That Japan had its own, albeit small, black foreign population and stereotypes about blacks, derived in large part from the West, went largely unremarked. Nonetheless, by the late 1980s and early 1990s in the United States, Japanese anti-black racism had become an expected characteristic of a society and culture that was regularly depicted in the American media as insular, xenophobic, and racist. Concurrently, this period also saw the emergence of a growing discourse, both popular and scholarly, on the popularity of ‘black culture,’ particularly as embodied in hip hop and rap and other forms of highly commercialized and commodifi able African American ‘street culture.’
