Word: hip-hop
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...building in a candy-colored, open-air mall called the American Village. A pink and blue neon sign shows where everyone's going: 3F, a bar and restaurant with a Southeast Asian theme. A couple hundred people are already there, drawn by $3 cocktails and reggae and hip-hop tunes. It's so crowded that manager Jeff Short has abandoned his tiki-hut office to help behind the bar. The crowd is familiar, mostly female Japanese partyers and U.S. servicemen. Many of the girls dress alike?stiletto heels or sneakers, low-slung capris and halter tops, a spray of body...
...Kokujo (girls who like black men) paint their skin cocoa, weave their hair in cornrows, dress like Destiny's Child?all the better to attract the prime catch, the black military man. The phenomenon has already become a pop-culture staple, propelling hip-hop acts like Dragon Ash to Japanese platinum success and launching the career of best-selling novelist Amy Yamada, whose memoirish Bedroom Eyes detailed a Japanese woman's sexual exploits with black servicemen...
...global image peddlers like MTV to very basic questions of racial and sexual identity. There is an objectifying component to the kokujo's particular infatuation, and by definition that is dehumanizing. If you are saying a black is better than a white, that's racism, albeit through a twisted, hip-hop hula hoop. And isn't part of the appeal of these black Americans that they represent some taboo, the stereotype of potency and virility, combined with the perception that Western men are more romantic than Japanese...
...smoky disco just outside the gates of Kadena Air Force Base; on Friday nights it's the Globe & Anchor, a vast R. and R. complex on Camp Foster with arcade games and pool tables around a pulsing dance floor; on Saturday nights it's Slum, a three-story hip-hop club on the divey back streets of Naha City. (In the wake of the June 29 incident, the club 3F has fallen off the circuit.) On any of these nights at any of these venues, men invariably outnumber women by ten to one. A girl can't go five minutes...
...dated the defendant; others speculate her friends shamed her into calling it a rape. They all agree the incident has brought unwanted, critical attention to them and their habits. "Amejo is a derogatory term, isn't it?" says Hitomi Murayama, a long-haired 24-year-old in baggy hip-hop clothing. "It's just another way for mainland Japanese to look down on Okinawa. They don't understand that we Okinawans are naturally friendly and outgoing?and that includes toward American servicemen...