Namichie spends the first stretch of our call running a one-woman show-and-tell, working through a fat Ziploc bag of secondhand jewelry she hauled back from Ghana, holding each piece up to the camera before letting it drop back in: a thick gold bangle that catches the 9 A.M. light that filters in through her living room window and a pearly white cowrie shell necklace. Her father sits next to her on the couch, ostensibly on hand to translate, though he keeps breaking from that job to remind her, in Japanese, to take her hand off her chin and sit up straight. She catches one of these mid-display and leans back from the phone, laughing. “Nande?” she asks him, Japanese for roughly “what?”, and the second she works out what he’s been chipping away at, she straightens up, lasts maybe a minute, and lets her chin slide right back into her palm where she can think best.
The real haul, though, lives in her closet. She tilts the camera toward a few pieces her mother has sewn with Kente turning up in the most inconspicuous places, including the handle of a tote bag. Her mother, off-camera the entire call but audible just to her left, makes most of what Namichie wears, and the rest she digs up secondhand and reworks herself, which leaves the wardrobe either family-made or Namichie-made with nothing in between.
“I want to spread African culture more in Japan,” she says, and it’s the same story that makes up the backbone of GHANA, her new EP released earlier this year: sung almost entirely in Japanese, riding Afrobeats from Ghanaian beatmakers BeatMaster Nanakay, Criss Blaze, and Slim Drumz, and named, without a shred of fuss, after her father’s home country.
Her father is from Ghana, her mother is Japanese, and Namichie, 28, grew up between the two of them in Chigasaki, a surf town an hour outside Tokyo, before moving to the city for art school. Like the creatively-restless tend to do: she does a bit of everything. She raps, she paints, she writes, and she creates kigurumi, the full-body mascot costumes that live at the center of Japanese cosplay. To her though, it’s all one thing. “Everything is mixed,” she says. “Everything becomes art.”
The kigurumi started as a hiding place. At 13, Namichie worked out that the quickest way to stop people staring at her half-Ghanaian, half-Japanese face was to take it out of view entirely, and a full animal suit does that as well as anything. “People form preconceptions based on my appearance,” she says. “I wanted to see the reaction without my looks.” Sixteen years later the kigurumi have remained a part of her identity even as the urge to hide behind them has thinned, but the reason now is gloriously low-stake and has only gotten sweeter: she is, by her own cheerful admission, obsessed with animals, and a kigurumi lets her turn into one. Her wholesome obsession surfaces once more, later in our conversation, on her sunny patio.
“I made it with the feeling that I am a person of this nation. I was often assumed to be a foreigner just from how I look.”
Namichie didn’t start rapping until she was 19, but when she did, she didn’t leave any room for subtlety. Her debut track, “Kokujin Rap,” was written with the Japanese kanji for “person of this country”—a response to a lifetime of being treated like a tourist in her own hometown. “I made it with the feeling that I am a person of this nation,” she says. “I was often assumed to be a foreigner just from how I look, so wanting to express my own identity and my own place is where rap started for me.”
She gave GHANA two months in her father’s country and spent the first one doing pleasantly little. She was out the door by morning, off after the neighborhood kids and whatever animal would let her tail it around the yard. It wasn’t until month two that she started writing. When she did, she says the lyrics came in pieces, swinging with her mood—emotional when she needed to unload, sometimes gentler when the day allowed. But whenever she explains where it came from, she goes back to the land itself: the trees, the heat, the long hours she spent parked under an unrelenting sun that takes no days off.
The Ghanaian music, she remembers of that visit, was at full volume on every corner: King Promise’s “Terminator” was impossible to escape that season, plus Shatta Wale and Davido and Tyla from farther down south. “Most of my inspiration is Ghanaian nature,” she says, drawing a parallel from Ghana’s pull to how she was raised in Japan. Shintoism puts the divine in the natural world, and she says Ghanaians, more or less, are of a similar school of thought. “We pray to nature. God is inside everything, the sea, a mountain, a river, a flower, a bird,” she says. “In Ghana, it’s the same”.
By the time she sat down with Slim Drumz, she had the concept worked out, and a heavy one at that: post-colonialism. “I want to see directly to Africa, without the Western mind,” she says. She gave him the full tour of how her brain works, then left him with a casually massive assignment: turn African culture into a feeling, and that feeling into a sound. “He taught me a lot about the rhythm,” she says of her collaboration with Slim Drumz. The formula from the jump was Afrobeats and Japanese, built strictly production-up. She let his beats set the pace, then dropped her Japanese lyrics right over the top, letting the track handle the rhythm while her words did the heavy lifting.
“At the center of my work is my experience living as a mixed-race person,” she says. “Growing up between Japan and Ghana, between multiple cultures, made me think about identity and borders”. She is, simply put, not in the ambience business. “I want to make work that gives people a reason to think about society and history, not just entertainment.”
The songs are about identity and immigration, colonialism and the long tail of empire, subjects most pop wouldn’t touch without a chaser. “The music I make is the complete opposite of J-pop,” she says. “In the Japanese music scene, most songs are about romance and personal feelings. I write about society, history, and identity. Colonialism, immigration, discrimination, the inheritance of culture.” She is as particular about the wrapping as the contents. “I try to express it poetically, not like a sermon. Conscious content and precise word choice, that’s what defines my music.” The empty calories of a capitalist sugar rush do nothing for her, but it’s the sad songs she guards like heirlooms. “Because sad things are real,” she says. “Only focusing on happy things isn’t real.”
“I want to make work that gives people a reason to think about society and history, not just entertainment.”
But hand her a free stage and 30 minutes and she’d skip the musical rigamarole to talk politics and maybe some history. She’d been to Cape Coast Castle on her last trip and came home with the history sitting somewhere between her ribs. “Now I’m very focused on colonial history,” she shares, and she wants more of it in her music, not less.
She has exactly zero interest in the standard hands-in-the-air concert routine. “More than getting a crowd excited, I want people to experience a complete world,” she says. “I want to build a stage that feels closer to a poetry reading or a work of art. The kigurumi, the costumes, the visuals, I think of a live show as total expression, not just the music”. You can still dance if you feel like it—but it’s strictly an extracurricular.
She is equally blunt about how Japan tends to consume Black culture. The appreciation is real, but it rarely makes it past the aesthetics.
“Some Japanese people who love hip-hop, they only love hip-hop superficially,” she says. “They know African American culture, but they don’t know the slave history, or they don’t understand the meaning of cornrows”.
It’s a love affair with the look, while the history itself just gets a shrug. She wants to hand people the unglamorous side too—colonialism, post-colonialism, and the messy realities of economic control. “I want to share both sides,” she says. Most audiences rarely get the chance to learn about Ghana from someone who actually lives on both sides of the hyphen, so she’s decided to just do the job herself.
The collaborators who get the best out of her are the ones who can actually keep pace, and DANNY JIN tops that list. The 21-year-old Palestinian-Japanese rapper is the grandson of Nakba survivors, making the exact same kind of resistance-driven music she does. They’re two twenty-somethings who would rather lose an entire afternoon to a heavy geopolitical tangent than fake their way through small talk.
“He’s half Palestinian, so I talk about politics a lot with him,” she says. “He’s only 21, but he’s very smart. That’s why I love to talk to him about the deep, deep things.”
Their recent single, “Time Before the War,” happened on a totally unremarkable night at her apartment. He dropped by to record, the conversation wandered to the war, and he floated the idea of putting it on a track. The release documents his Palestinian-Japanese heritage and his family’s history, and she didn’t need any convincing to help him get it done.
“The music and the lawsuit both mean raising my voice. Through my work, I want to create chances to think about the problems society overlooks.”
The politics in her songs are not theoretical. In 2021, Tokyo police arrested her on suspicion of carrying marijuana. What she was actually carrying was CBD, legal in Japan, which didn’t stop them from holding her for 13 days. She’s not interested in putting it delicately. “It may have been racial profiling. Japan has a lot of this problem,” she says. “I had only legal things, but they mistook it.” She’s taken the government to court over it and already won the lawsuit regarding the arrest, with the detention still being fought.
For someone with every reason to make this about herself, she barely does. “This case isn’t only my problem,” she says. “There are many people in Japan who face disadvantages because of preconceptions about their appearance or their roots. If my case becomes a precedent, it could protect someone in the same situation in the future. That’s why I keep fighting.” The courtroom and the recording booth are, to her, the same address.
“The music and the lawsuit both mean raising my voice. Through my work, I want to create chances to think about the problems society overlooks.” It’s the clearest proof that the politics in her songs were never for decoration: a mixed African and Japanese woman as committed as she is to writing about colonialism and racial profiling is rare in Japan, and a public that knows what to do with her is rarer. Still, she shares the jitters behind the outcome: “Now I’m still feeling nervous.”
Namichie realizes that not everyone’s going to follow her into post-colonial theory, at least not yet, but a good plate doesn’t need translating, which is maybe why what she most wants to hand Japan from Ghana is the food. Tokyo, inconveniently, has very few places to get it, she says, so the version she trusts comes out of her family kitchen. Her father makes the Ghanaian dishes, and her mother makes them too, except Japanese palates, as she explains from off-camera, don’t go in for much oil. So she eases off, and a dish will every so often come out more Japanese than Ghanaian—a Ghanaian recipe run through a Japanese sensibility—which Namichie laughs at as she divulges.
Her mother holds up the proof: a jar of her homemade shito, a chili paste that’s supposed to come slick with oil, here dark and nearly dry, but still worth the heartburn after a hearty meal. Her father has his own nominee for what Japanese people would go wild for: an apotoyowa, the earthenware mortar you grind pepper and spice in. Namichie confesses she’s hardly ever used one, so we walk her through it on the spot, and she decides it’s pretty cool. As for combinations she swears by, there’s miso soup with jollof, which earns a double-take and, by her account, a second helping.
For all the food and the jokes, the heart of the record is somewhere more personal. Her lead single is named for heaven: “Osoro” is the Twi word for it, and she chose it thinking of her grandmother, Nyamekye. At first there was nothing else to it. While translating the Japanese lyrics, we noticed that osoro sounds identical to a Japanese word for matching, or being together, and when we mention it, she lights up, laughing, admitting it had never crossed her mind. “This is a really good double meaning,” she says. “I want to add it.” We tell her she’s allowed to say it was the plan all along, so the discovery is hers now.
Namichie never got to meet her grandmother, who passed away 34 years ago, but Nyamekye travels everywhere she does. The moniker “Namichie” is “Nyamekye” romanized into a spelling that also reads natively in Japanese. The trip to Ghana was planned around the 30th anniversary of her passing, and Namichie’s father was meant to come, until a stroke shortly before made the trip impossible for him.
“My father couldn’t go, so I went alone, timed to the 30th anniversary,” she says. “The imagery came from being there, and I made the EP from it.” Standing at the memorial in his place, she met aunts who had flown in from Germany, and laying down the tracks from the EP became her way of finally introducing herself to the woman whose name she’d been carrying all along.
For all the heavy, unvarnished reality she packs into her music, her ultimate method for coming down from it is gloriously low-effort: she takes a nap. She cops to it with a sheepish laugh, fully aware of how deeply un-rockstar it sounds to literally just go to sleep. The catch, though, is that turning your art into your livelihood means the off switch vanishes. She admits she can’t even let a casual playlist run in the background without mentally dissecting the production, and a fleeting idea rarely stays an idea for long before she’s forced to make something out of it. “When I don’t create, I feel stuck in my mind,” she says.
Off-duty, she’s funnier than her catalog suggests. Her mom swears she has natural comedic timing—a claim Namichie humbly shoots down, completely ignoring the hard evidence till living on Tamura King which is an old YouTube channel she used to run with her siblings. The proof is undeniable: a video where she paints herself into full Snoop Dogg cosplay and lip-syncs “Drop It Like It’s Hot” alongside her younger sister. It is, for the record, an absolute masterpiece. She casually keeps a childhood black belt in karate in her back pocket, too. But the things that explain her best are her animals, and meeting them requires a sudden change of scenery. She grabs the phone, taking us off the couch and walking right out to her patio drenched in early-afternoon sun for a proper introduction.
She’s up, phone in hand, through the living room and out to a patio drenched in early-afternoon sun, where two big turtles sit baking on the screened-in deck. The bigger one had a cameo in a music video of hers seven years back, an deep-cut easter egg if you can find it. Back inside, she introduces Kobu, her tabby, wedged between two cushions with his head buried in his own paws. “His name comes from the Japanese word kobu, which means to inspire or to encourage,” she says. “I wanted a name that felt uplifting and energetic.” “Kobu-chan,” she coos, her hand finding his stomach for a rub, and Kobu, encourager-in-chief, does not so much as open an eye. He is, comfortably, the most pampered fur-baby in Chigasaki.
She’s played a lot of parts during our conversation: comedian, turtle wrangler, and one-woman talent show, but for the last thing Namichie wants to say, she drops every one of them. The loose, joking ease she’s kept up all morning falls away, and she goes quiet, chin in her palm as she thinks over each word before she lets it out. “I think the medium of music is freedom,” she says. “They need to know my music by no bias.”
Listen to the full EP on Spotify or Apple Music:
Written by: HQ
Photography: Mia Sato O’Neal
Styling: Indra Ito
Makeup: KANAKO / BIANCO BIANCO
Creative Direction: Efuwa Aikins
Editor-in-Chief: Valerie Amoaku
