Tonkatsu DJ Agetaro Script

This has not been proofread, so watch out.

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Tonkatsu DJ Agetaro Script

Okay, so one of the most straightforward scenes in Tonkatsu DJ Agetaro is when he first enters Club Box, a place that seems to be a reference to The Womb in Shibuya. He’s immediately caught up in the atmosphere. However, quite shortly afterwards, the screen goes black, the music stops, everybody’s confused.

And coming out of it, punctuating the silence and the blackness, is DJ Master Fry, a character who I think is a reference to DJ Grandmaster Flash. With a focus on drum beats - very reminiscent of Flash, Agetaro is swept up into the frenzy and has somewhat of an epiphany.

As this scene diverges Agetaro’s father and Fry into a single entity, there’s one very specific thing that Fry says that really sticks, all things considered. He chides Agetaro specifically, or at leaset Agetaro has this hystericized chide, I’m not entirely sure, by saying “But you ain’t have no pride in yo job!”

If we take that sense of job as belonging, trade, identity, and community, then Tonkatsu DJ Agetaro actually plays around with some very curious politics of belonging.

And it’s actually quite interesting.

A short show about a boy who becomes a DJ and works at his father’s Tonkatsu shop, Tonkatsu DJ Agetaro shows a pretty straightforward coming-of-age story that is draped in the images of the Shibuya area. I mean, after all one of the main recurring images is of the famous Hachiko memorial statue in Dogenzaka - up to and including a sign that literally says Dogenzaka. The first club Agetaro goes to is reminiscent of a club named “Womb”, and Akitaro Daichi notes that the Shibuya portrayed in Tonkatsu DJ “is actually a composite of several places” (Japan Zoom).

And I spoke to Noriko Manabe of Temple University, who has done work on DJs in Japan. She confirms that feeling, stating that “the pictures of Shibuya, Dogenzaka, and the clubs capture the atmosphere well” (email). And given that Daiichi did scout out the place before production, it’s no surprise that it does seem to fairly capture the general scene.

But I think there’s something very telling about how particularly open it is through its depiction of Shibuya’s DJ scene, not necessarily as any sort of commentary. Rather, it’s actually quite celebratory of a sort of openness worth mentioning.

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This is Liyoon, a Korean-Japanese rapper part of the group KP, standing for Korean Pride. In October 2010, Liyoon released a song titled “Japanese KillerWhale”, itself, according to David Morris, a “response to international controversies over Japanese whaling and fishing practices, which peaked with the release of the film *The Cove*” (Morris 466). Though Liyoon has responded to concerns of nationalism in his lyrics, Japanese Killer Whale does foreground cultural and national sovereignty as central to expression. After all, part of the concern is to actually do these things that are counter to what seems to be the hegemonic order.

And there’s a particular irony that Morris notes, which is that Japanese Killer Whale is a case where through the use of rap makes a comparison to Blacks in America, but that connection seems to be reconstructed into a message purporting Japanese nationalism.

In this way, it’s actually quite reminiscent of Benedict Anderson’s idea of an imagined community, where people construct being through an understanding of belonging.

And we can see how that swells into situations like Liyoon’s, where this imagined community wields new, in an almost Barthesian way, mythic messages on that belonging. And not every story is as explosive as Liyoon’s: the same sense of belonging and identity is negotiated on, say, the album cover of emcee Kohei’s *The Adventures of Kohei Japan*’s juxtaposition of the funk sign and woodblock print or the inclusion of the Shakuhachi in DJ Krush’s collaboration with C.L. Smooth’s ‘Only the Strong Survive’, a move that Krush believed that “with a sound from traditional Japanese music, it would be in keeping with the philosophy of representing in hip-hop” (Manabe 38).

So how does this relate to Tonkatsu DJ Agetaro? Where does this come into play? Because Tonkatsu DJ is about where to belong, but its depiction is actually somewhat chaotic.

In fact, in some ways, it’s actually seems to be quite countercultural, at least in the way in which it approaches the idea of an imagined community.

See, Agetaro is not initially a fan of being a part of his father’s practice, but the moment he notices that his newfound passion is aided by knowing how to make Tonkatsu there’s now a sort of instrumentality to it. This is repeated later on when Agetaro asks his father to teach him his grandfather’s sauce or when the show legitimizes a lot of these practices as being a result of his experiences in the trade.

Now, there is a really straightforward idea behind this, which is to stress that there’s no uselesness in what we learn, but it also plays around - if perhaps unintentionally - with peoples defined by belonging.

After all, Agetaro is himself an embodiment of two people - a budding DJ at night and an assistant to his father’s tonkatsu shop during the day. Now Lipyao, the author, did originally intend for them to be two characters, but ultimately decided on one because two would be too complicated. And that’s important to consider, but by keeping Agetaro as one character juggling multiple identities does allow the story to play with ideas of how the body is situated in cultural spaces.

See, a lot of Japan’s DJing community - especially its Hip Hop communities - is quite, well, nationalistic. But it’s not so much to purport a particular imperialism, but rather it seems to attempt to distinguish a sense of being by drawing upon a mix of global identities and then remaking them into something new.

According to Manabe, EDM DJs are considered a white / Berlin genre, whereas Hip Hop is considered a Black art. And so what this means is that coming into these practices are messages that often become reappropriated into new layers of signification. David Morris has done considerable work on the Hip Hop aspects in particular, noting that identities of struggle against authority and hegemony are often used bolster a sense of minzokuha, a derogatory term used for right-wing ethnic nationalism (Morris 460). 

And so many Japanese DJs - particularly Japanese Hip Hop DJs - have expressed comments that we can construe with Japan’s right wing nationalist groups. K Dub Shine, for instance (who literally has a voiceover cameo in episode 10) has called for the honoring of the “war dead at Yasukuni Shrine, laments the erosion of Japanese identity…and denigrates Japanese rappers who use English catchphrase” (Morris 460). Mummy-D, who has a voiceover in episode 11, has used the term “Yellow B-Boy” to describe a possibly unintentional repression of internal differences, implying that the yellow is Japan (Morris 475).

Now this isn’t necessarily applicable to everyone, but I mainly wanted to stress that there does exist a politics to a lot of these performers, particularly because of the very politics of the form itself. Even in someone like DJ Krush, who attempts to steer clear of any nationalist discussion, still attempts to imbibe a certain ‘Japaneseness’ into his material. His first album - *Kakusei* - sampled instruments such as the *shakuhachi*, *shamisen*, and *koto* heterophonically, which is remniscent of Asian - and in particular, traditional Japanese music (Manabe 38).

So how does this relate to Agetaro? Why is this important? Because Tonkatsu DJ Agetaro is a survey of various DJing groups and in doing so, actually distances itself quite well from any particularly problematic discussions on minzokuha, but at the same time it still captures some of these sentiments. And so there’s a sort of meaning trap that - perhaps unintentionally - gives us a useful lens on why and how nationalist messages emerge in some of Japan’s subcultures. In other words, it inadvertently engages with these dialogues of belonging and community that underlines a lot of Japan’s nationalist DJs but ultimately expresses a much more cosmopolitan perspective.

Agetaro is, in many ways, a manifestation of these very concerns over Japaneseness and community belonging made manifest. Being influenced by DJ Fry is both a nod to Japan’s DJ (specifically Hip Hop) roots but also the message that Fry imparts to Agetaro is also a stand-in for Hip Hop’s messages to many Japanese Hip Hop artists. In fact DJ Fry’s love of Tonkatsu establishes this meaningful connection between a vague traditional Japanese sense of identity as emphasized in the shop, and the iconic figure as a stand-in of the art. In doing so, it implies that the sentiments of Japanese definition is not too far off from anti-hegemonic messages of Hip Hop.

The emphasis of the Tonkatsu shop stands in as a marker for both social obligation that thus dictates a sense of belonging, but also the more practical economics of it. Agetaro undertaking his father’s practice stresses a multivalence of messages: that tradition is both intrinsically valuable, but also instrumentally valuable and that new messages (DJing) build upon older messages (Tonkatsu), similar to how Black messages of resistance and definition are reconstituted into messages of national identity.

Just like how Liyoon and the Zainichi might emphasize their Korean-Japanese identity but are subsumed into broader discussions of a singular body population, so too is Dong Myung’s ethnicity emphasized by the show using Korean honorifics but such differences are ultimately subsumed because the narrative is about Agetaro and the ‘new wave’ he represents.

And that new wave? Not only is it presented by Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa, but the emphasis on DJs in the 2010’s somewhat reminiscent of challenges faced by Japanese DJs in a global scene: for instance, despite the fact that Japanese DJs won the 2015 and 2016 World DJ Championships, only one DJ made to Resident Advisor’s Top 100 DJs list of 2016 at number 97. What we have here is, embodied through Agetaro, a need for self-definition, and in doing so, walking this tightrope between absolving things you are *not* versus things you *want* to become. And by teaming together, it emphasizes cohesion to stand out, which could be construed as one attempt to define oneself in the market. After all, DJ Krush’s focus on a Japanese aesthetic in his work and on the ‘national’ style is because he wanted to partly differentiate himself in a global scene.

And the show itself consistently establishes Shibuya through the statue of Hachiko, which would generally be considered a straightforward location icon, but Agetaro quite literally addresses those sentiments when expressing his anxieties over Oily’s reluctance to continue performing. He notes that he can’t be as patient as Hachiko, but that very loyalty he expresses - to his father, to his craft, to his teacher - are still imbibed through that image. It’s no surprise then that Hachiko shows up not only in the very first scene, but as a pillow shot in the very last episode, as if to emphasize that loyalty, not only by Agetaro to all of these institutions, but others to him.

What we have here is the building blocks of many of these drives for self-definition that *could* lead to nationalist sentiment, but never does. Rather, Tonkatsu DJ Agetaro pulls back from going too deep into how this sense of definition might be distorted into right-wing ethnic nationalism. Rather, in showing a survey look at DJs, it also shows a survey look at how these DJ artists might legitimately begin to conflate “understanding Japaneseness” to “emphasizing Japaneseness”.

And that’s fascinating. Tonkatsu DJ Agetaro embodies some of these concerns over definition that has been outlined by a lot of Japan’s nationalist DJs, particularly its nationalist hip hop DJs, but never gets to the point where its messages are problematic. Rather, it’s a blueprint on understanding the logicks of someone like K Dub Shine or Zeebra or Mummy-D and why they would project these messages of right-wing nationalism, but at the same time, not consider themselves ‘nationalist’. And so it makes sense that it is broadly endorsed by the DJing community, especially considering that famous artists have cameos in every episode. It attempts to, I think, portray these very sentiments that come with the form, but never politicizes it. And yet, at the same time, it shows just how seductive politicizing it can be.