Exploring Vinyl from Japan’s Urahara Streetwear Scene

Hiroshi Fujiwara purportedly bought the first crates of hip-hop records that reached Japan. He was fresh from a trip to early ’80s New York, from being Boy George’s roommate in London and starting his legendary collection of the Sex Pistols’ favorite garb, Seditionaries. Fujiwara quickly began DJing, spreading hip-hop and punk through Japan’s music world and streetwear experiments like GOODENOUGH, a perpetually mysterious line that mixed clean pop culture graphics with technical iterations of Western tech wear.

Crossovers in the worlds of music and clothing were common: one of the vinyl releases, Last Orgy, from his group Tiny Panx (a play on “tiny punk,” one of Malcolm Mcclaren’s nicknames for Fujiwara) showed Fujiwara to be both a Japanese hip-hop force deemed worthy to open for the Beastie Boys and an inspiration for an oft-referenced TV show and column in the pop culture magazine Takarajima. For this reason, Fujiwara is labeled a “godfather.”

Fujiwara’s first solo record, 1994’s Nothin Much Better to Do, is neither hip-hop nor punk. It’s a mix of his proficiency as a session guitarist and sampling process. The album fuses ‘90s groove and R&B with more traditional soft rock, the occasional ballad, and pop inflections. 

“This is a message from Futura/don’t prophesize the future” is the lyric many associate with Leonard McGurr’s music career, a line from the Clash’s “Overpowered by Funk.”

During the Clash’s live sets in 1985, McGurr became Futura 2000, the graffiti artist painting live and creating American bonds between English punk and American hip-hop. The Escapades Of Futura 2000 exemplified these bonds; the 1982 album featured production and performances by the Clash alongside Fab 5 Freddy – an under-appreciated look at an icon in hip-hop and punk at his musical height. 

Beyond his work as a musician, Futura’s work on vinyl is most present on the covers of Mo Wax records releases. The British trip-hop label was started by UNKLE’s James Lavelle, an obsessive of Fujiwara’s Major Force (the first Japanese hip-hop label.) Mo Wax quickly became the bridge between Japan’s hip-hop and his own U.K. trip-hop, releasing records with artists as varied as DJ Shadow, Dr. Octagon, Rammellzee, and DJ Krush.

Futura’s artwork became their unifying aesthetic on Mo Wax, often including tie-ins with toys and with his brand Recon (a military-inspired streetwear brand popular in New York and Japanese circles). Of all his releases, Futura’s cover for UNKLE’s 1998 debut Psyence Fiction (featuring Thom Yorke & Kool G Rap) most represents the cross-cultural, cross-genre feeling of Urahara and Futura’s work. 

Hiroshi Fujiwara and his assistant Tomoaki Nagao looked so much alike that Nagao was nicknamed “Nigo” (“number two” in Japanese.) Nigo later opened the store NOWHERE with Jun Takahashi, selling U.S. vintage alongside handmade iterations of their brands. Nigo’s was called A Bathing Ape. As Nigo began getting jobs styling Japan’s major artists like Mankey, Cornelius, and Scha Dara Parr, Bape became the uniform of 1990s Japanese hip-hop. Later, Nigo would launch the Teriyaki Boyz as an in-house hip-hop group for and styled by Bape that would find global acclaim for their single “Tokyo Drift.” It was Pharrell’s discovery of Bape that truly brought the brand into international renown and cemented it as a ubiquitous uniform of hip-hop royalty.

Mo Wax’s 1999 Ape Sounds is Nigo’s first album as a solo artist and shows his blending of influences in not just hip-hop but rock and U.K. dub as well. By then, Nigo had started lending art and music to Mo Wax for several years. Ape Sounds recalls the grooves and soft rock moments on Fujiwara’s Nothin Much Better to Do, but with far more ambitious, disparate, and esoteric references. Nigo’s trip-hop, rap, and dub moments recall the Mo Wax catalog with a fair share of rock and pop combos. Many have given Nigo credit for setting the stage for hip ]-hop mixed with a heavy rock on songs like “Jet Set,” a style popularized by Pharell Wiliams, Chad Hugo, and Shay Haley’s hip hop/rock trio, N.E.R.D. Ape Sounds was only released on vinyl twice, once in an original Japanese pressing and then a year later in the U.K., both times with art by Futura.

While Nigo went from the NOWHERE shop to streetwear fame and dressing hip-hop royalty, Jun Takahashi turned to higher fashion. Takahashi founded Undercover from a base love of punk (he and Nigo were in a Sex Pistols cover band) and started showing runway collections in 1994. Comme Des Garcons founder Rei Kawakubo took him under her wing and brought Takahashi to Paris. There, Takahashi created runway presentations invoking Patti Smith, CAN, Jesus & the Mary Chain, Television, Bill Evans, and the Talking Heads. His soundtracks reflect his taste for the esoteric, from Glass Beams’ Australian psychedelia to Thom Yorke.

There have been various vinyl releases for Undercover runway soundtracks, the earliest available on Discogs for his FW97 collection by Ram Jam World. Undercover houses a modern Urahara label, Undercover Records, which features work from DJs Mars89, Ron Morelli, and Krikor Kouchian. What sets Takahashi apart from his contemporaries is his focus on keeping these releases as vinyl exclusive. Takahashi’s love of vinyl is so deep he once created a range of imagined Krautrock bands for his SS06 runway show “T,” releasing merch, wristbands backstage passes, and records so rare they aren’t even sold on Discogs (yet.)