We recently received an interesting comment on Instagram about House Shoes Presents: BEATS!!!! The Japanese Sound!
"What makes this the Japanese Sound? It's Hip-Hop. It's the Black sound. Don't steal our culture."
I didn't think that was the point, but I completely understood where he was coming from.
The idea was to showcase what beatmakers from Japan are creating, not to claim Hip-Hop as Japanese.
Around the same time, I came across an Instagram post about Denzel Washington talking about Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg.
The point, as I understood it, was that Spielberg could make Goodfellas, and Scorsese could make Schindler's List. But the films would never turn out the same. They grew up in different cultures, and those experiences shape how they tell stories.
Back in 2007, TRES released Lifestyle Marketing, an instrumental album by Thes One of People Under The Stairs. He had discovered records featuring music composed by Herb Pilhofer for American TV and radio commercials in the 1960s and 70s, and turned those sounds into Hip-Hop beats.
I was involved in releasing that album, and the experience was truly inspiring.
Years later, my father-in-law gave me a record of Japanese TV and radio commercials from the same era. That inspired me to create Marketing the Lifestyle, my own beat project using samples from old Japanese commercials.
I have a lot of respect for diggin' culture and the art of discovering obscure records. But I also love taking familiar sounds and turning them into something unexpected. Making people go, "Wait, you made a beat out of THAT?" To me, that's creativity. And that's Hip-Hop, too. I'm now working on Marketing the Lifestyle Vol. 2, continuing to explore those sounds from Japan's past. Maybe the sounds I choose reflect more of my cultural background and who I am than I ever intended. Somehow, all this thinking has made my direction as a beatmaker a little clearer. Chikara Photo: Replace Records, Nishi-Ogikubo, Tokyo.
November 14, 2026