The politics of credit in remix of Japanese popular culture: Between “an 80's Japanese disco floor” and “this remix is worthy of the actual game”

The Weeknd's 2022 single “Out of Time” may have felt familiar to listeners. The broader album Dawn FM evokes the 1980s, with inspirations including synth pop, dance pop, and hip-hop; however, “Out of Time” actually is from the 1980s: most of the instrumentation is sampled from Japanese artist Tomoko Aran's 1983 song “Midnight Pretenders.” Considering the YouTube comments as a window into reception, some fans didn’t know “Out of Time” used samples; some knew and loved the new arrangement; some knew and preferred the original; and some were happy this style of music was reaching a larger audience. “Out of Time,” as a song from a multi-platinum selling album by a mainstream artist, is a high-profile case of the phenomenon we examine: songs that reuse decades-old Japanese media, in which the Japaneseness is both important and attenuated. We consider four musical practices: vaporwave (electronic music featuring manipulated sounds and images from the 1980s and 1990s), future funk (which commonly samples 1980s Japanese music and speeds it up), game sounds (songs that sample or mimic 1990s and 2000s video game music), and chiptunes (songs made with 1980s and 1990s video game hardware). ¹ We ask: When amateur electronic music artists draw from Japanese media, how does Japaneseness matter?

The songs in our analysis engage Japan in two ways: Japanese-scented and auratic. In the former, vaporwave and future funk construct a simulacrum of Japaneseness without sincerity, personal connection, or, crucially, crediting the sources. In the latter, game sounds and chiptunes invoke a specific reference, leveraging what Stanfill (2023: 139) calls the aura function, “in which value comes from making the source present,” doing the cultural work that Benjamin's (2001: 50) concept of the aura does even under conditions of mediation that allegedly destroy the aura – invoking a piece of art's “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” through creating a corresponding sense of presence in mediated forms. We contend that these differing relationships to sources are essential to how these practices function. In what follows, we explore these practices in three ways: as texts that intertextually draw on Japanese media; through fan YouTube comments making sense of the songs’ Japaneseness; and through analyzing aggregated metadata for how and when Japanese sources appear and are credited. We show that, while vaporwave and future funk show clear desire for and pleasure in Japanese sources, actual sources matter primarily as signifiers of Japaneseness and are typically not credited by YouTube musicians. Conversely, game sounds and chiptunes have a direct relationship with either specific video games or material hardware, referencing known transnationally distributed culture and producing the aura function. Overall, these ways of engaging with Japanese media have significant implications for theorizing cross-cultural exchange, as the ethics of transnational remix can be radically different depending on how they engage with the material and its source culture.

The transnational flow of Japanese(-scented) media and extraction

The older media used in the practices we discuss are able to be remixed by foreigners because of exported Japanese media. Before and during the Bubble Economy, when Japan had the second-largest global economy, some anime (and fewer television programs) ventured westward (Ergin and Shinohara, 2021; McKevitt, 2010). However, Japanese companies were reluctant to export most popular culture because they feared western markets would deem them too Japanese (Picard, 2013). Accordingly, companies tried to conceal Japaneseness to make products more palatable, beginning with anime titles like Speed Racer that were dubbed in the west in the 1960s and 1970s (Levi, 2013: 6). Iwabuchi (2002: 28) termed this relation “cultural odor” to describe cultural links to a specific country; through culture laundering, media products can become culturally odorless.

Following a recession in the 1990s, commonly termed the Lost Decade, Japan exported many more products, often precisely because foreigners were drawn to their “Japaneseness” (Fennell et al., 2012). This was a form of “soft power,” which was first theorized by Nye (1990: 166) as a replacement for brute force by convincing citizens to “want what [the dominant country] wants.” “Soft power” was associated with the concept of “Cool Japan” in 2002 by McGray (2002), though Inoguchi (2009: 349) suggests that Japan wrestles with two “seemingly antithetical” forces of globalization and Japanese cultural nationalism, creating a tension between exporting and keeping aspects of culture reserved for Japanese people. Nevertheless, “Cool Japan” was embraced by the Creative Industries Division of the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (Matsui, 2014: 82). Deliberate export produced a crafted image of Japanese culture. While soft power from “Cool Japan” and consumption of Japanese entertainment helped Japan economically, constructing the nation's public face through popular culture had unintended consequences; “exporting popular culture alone does not necessarily create cultural understanding” because of the absence of cultural depth or even the country's history (Ergin and Shinohara, 2021: 43). However, precisely this shallow or abstracted understanding of Japan is often central to the music we discuss.

If exported Japanese culture is key to our discussion, creation of media that is “Japanese-scented” is a distinct facet. As Sousa (2022: 185) describes, this is a situation in which “not real Japan, but mediated ‘Japan’ (in quotes), becomes a nebulous, elastic, unfixed image” that cultivates attachments. In particular, the west tends to see Japan as “a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences” (Said, 1979: 1). While Said's (1979: 4) theory of Orientalism primarily describes western beliefs about “India and the Bible lands,” the theory is also useful to explain how Japan appears in the western imaginary (Miyake, 2023; Yang, 2022). Orientalist fantasies about Japanese “otherness” have appeared across various mass media texts (Iwabuchi, 2002; Kitamura, 2020; Matthews, 2018; Sousa, 2022). Digital media is also rife with this construction of Japan (Miyake, 2023; Yang, 2022), and with digital or techno-orientalism more broadly (Abdelmoez, 2022; Duester and Teague, 2022; Roh et al., 2015; Tombul and Sarı, 2021). In such ways, Japan becomes “Japanese-scented,” exciting and exotic but flattened out into stereotypes “despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a ‘real’ Orient” (Said, 1979: 5).

In the songs we examine, longer histories of selective uptake of Japan and user-generated content collide with the incorporation of actual Japanese media. This is part of what Miyake (2023: 218) describes as “perpetual prosumption of the Other, that further produces difference through its discursive and digital production of racialised and gendered virtuality.” As Sano-Franchini (2018) describes, such practices can be thought of as “Orientalist sound, or, the sounding of racialized, sonic archetypes that render audible fantasies of the East as constructed in the Eurowestern imagination.” Some Japanese musicians even use these sounds to their advantage. For example, one of Yellow Magic Orchestra's (YMO) first songs is a 1978 cover of Martin Denny's “Firecracker,” a 1959 recording whose vaguely Asian melodies construct an imaginary Oriental paradise. YMO's cover is interpreted as a Japanese rendition that also parodies western Orientalist tendencies (Dwyer, 2022). Orientalist sound is also present in the genre Sousa names “weebwave,” which emphasizes the “weeb” subculture known for being obsessed with this shallow understanding of Japan, and this has key resonances for the music we examine. Sano-Franchini is particularly interested in “multimodal orientalism – or, how music, soundtracks, sound effects, voice, and accent interact with and across visual, textual, and contextual modes,” and the mashup of samples, anime, and video games that we explore here participates in just such a multimodal engagement with Japan. Overall, there is both a fascination with and a flattening of Japan in the transnational circulation of Japanese culture, including in music that draws from Japanese source materials.

To analyze these remix artifacts, we use theories of cultural appropriation. While cross-cultural engagements are not inherently appropriative, extracting culture while disregarding the people it comes from raises these concerns. Cultural appropriation, or what hooks (2006: 373) calls “eating the Other,” is a form of “consumption wherein whatever difference the Other inhabits is eradicated, via exchange, by a consumer cannibalism that not only displaces the Other but denies the significance of that Other's history through a process of decontextualization.” That is, those who create and consume these songs seek out Japanese culture precisely for its difference, but strip away both the people the cultural object comes from and the reality of their experience that produced the culture in the first place. Steele (2021: 141) adds that:

to appropriate someone's culture is to place oneself in a position of power to determine how, to what extent, and in what spaces the culture is useful and acceptable and in which spaces it is disdainful. This distinction separates appropriation from appreciation.

Found footage and “weebwave”: Japaneseness as odor in vaporwave and future funk

Our first two practices, vaporwave and future funk, are sites of cultural extraction. Vaporwave is electronic music featuring sounds and images from the 1980s and 1990s (Ballam-Cross, 2021; Koc, 2017), particularly those that are “kitschy” (Glitsos, 2018; Loignon and Messier, 2020; Nowak and Whelan, 2018). These old, kitschy, and derivative background sounds, such as “Muzak,” are often “rejected as exemplifying bad taste” (Loignon and Messier, 2020: 2). It's common to significantly slow the sample(s) (Glitsos, 2018; Nowak and Whelan, 2018), use looping (Glitsos, 2018; Nowak and Whelan, 2018), add reverb (Ballam-Cross, 2021; Glitsos, 2018; Nowak and Whelan, 2018), and use pitch shifting (Ballam-Cross, 2021; Nowak and Whelan, 2018), which together “produce a ‘stretched out’ effect or a ‘melting quality’” (Glitsos, 2018: 100). Vaporwave sound and images are intricately interlinked; songs are paired with imagery such as from VHS tapes (Glitsos, 2018; Koc, 2017) or color schemes popular in the 1980s (Ballam-Cross, 2021; Nowak and Whelan, 2018). As Glitsos (2018: 108) describes, “Vaporwave digs up those waste products of consumer culture, that which capitalism discards, and brings them to the fore: old VHS tapes, technologies that never reached the market, the grating tones of corporate instructional videos, advertisements from the 1980s.” Such perceived “waste” appeared in several of our vaporwave examples, including found footage, commercials, manipulated still images without any context, and even a nondescript wedding video from 1990. ²

Vaporwave is often framed as ironic or satirical (Ballam-Cross, 2021; Glitsos, 2018; Nowak and Whelan, 2018), but multiple scholars emphasize its nostalgic implications (Ballam-Cross, 2021; Glitsos, 2018; Koc, 2017). In particular, this is nostalgia for things that didn’t happen or that is unmoored from historical facts (Ballam-Cross, 2021; Glitsos, 2018); the same digitization celebrated as democratizing media production also increases access to media made by other groups of people that can then be appropriated. Thus, when digital production is combined with transcultural nostalgia about Japanese content, the link to the source is ever more attenuated. As noted earlier, much Japanese pop culture (let alone marketing materials or videos of everyday life) was not internationally distributed in the 1980s, and what was exported tended to be culturally laundered. Often, YouTube comments show the appropriative attenuation in these Japan-referencing songs. Listeners announce things like: “I wish I had a time machine so I could go see Japan in the 80 s and 90 s.” ³ This post highlights the fact that the user did not experience Japan in this era. Another commenter quipped, “Ah yes, my Fake 80's Japanese memories again.” ⁴ Explicitly acknowledging that the memories are “fake” underscores the unmooring from actual Japan, but there is still significant affective charge.

To analyze source and credit practices in vaporwave, we used a preexisting playlist, “The Ultimate Vaporwave Playlist.” Using a list compiled by a fan of this musical practice at large lets us see how source materials are engaged across multiple artists. As this playlist had more than 1100 songs, we selected 100 by identifying videos with Japanese lettering (hiragana, katakana, or kanji) or Asian imagery. Our data encompassed songs from 34 YouTube channels. Importantly, it is common for vaporwave songs to be reuploaded by someone other than the creator, so the 34 channels encompass an unknown number of artists. That Japaneseness is central to much of vaporwave is clear from the fact that 47% of the songs in our data set included a distinct Japanese sample (40% Japanese only; 7% both Japanese and western); this is equal to the 40% that included only western samples (for example, 1980s R&B). ⁵ Moreover, 91% of the sample incorporated hiragana, katakana, or kanji lettering systems and 51% include clearly Japanese imagery (13% are ambiguously Asian, mostly images of Asian women; selected songs that did not have Japanese lettering did have Japanese imagery and music samples). While using Japaneseness is not universal (in this regard, these creators might be classified as equal opportunists), this is a significant center of gravity in this musical practice.

However, in a stark example of how Japanese culture is valued but not Japanese people, the original artist or song were not attributed in 93 of the vaporwave video titles. In the remaining seven tracks, the original song title appeared in the YouTube title, but not the original artist. Further, only nine of the samples include both song and artist (six Japanese, three western) in the video description, and in some instances the western sample is credited and the Japanese one is not. The uploaders are thus benefiting from love of Japaneseness without even providing this baseline level of respect. Notably, commenters did resist this lack of credit, with 77% of all songs having comments that named the sources (although some commenters correctly named only one feature like the original artist or song).

In academic conversations around vaporwave, there has been only passing attention to the Japaneseness of sources. There is mention of Japanese text as a frequent component of titles and visuals (Ballam-Cross, 2021; Glitsos, 2018; Koc, 2017), but Glitsos (2018: 104) suggests “this is probably born from a trend to ‘kitsch-ify’ Internet aesthetic.” Koc (2017: 65) puts more emphasis on the Japaneseness, arguing that “vaporwave art is saturated with Japanese text in order to depict a globalized future that is alien and impenetrable to its presupposed demographic of white Western viewers.” However, there has not been attention to the use of Japanese music as vaporwave samples. We argue for taking the role of Japanese culture in this type of music much more seriously as sonic Orientalism and cultural appropriation that constructs Japaneseness as a scent without any relation to the nation, its people, or its culture. ⁶

Selective uptake of Japanese exports is also central to our second extractive practice, future funk. Much future funk is rooted in Japanese “city pop” music, which, beginning in the late 1970s, combined soft rock, jazz, R&B, and funk (Ballam-Cross, 2021: 71). City pop is upbeat and catchy, arguably reflecting how Japanese consumers experienced “capitalist utopia” during the Bubble Economy (Zhang, 2021). Moreover, city pop circulation demonstrates the same extraction mechanisms as vaporwave. One vaporwave record label head said that discovering city pop “was like going back in time, turning on a TV and seeing old commercials from another world, selling the same brands and consumer products but in a different way than I remember” (Arcand et al., 2019). Notably, city pop is not quite what the commenter remembers – this is not rooted in a real experience of Japanese media in the period. In fact, Sommet and Kato (2021: 4) found that fans of city pop were likely to listen to vaporwave, and that approximately 90% of respondents were younger than 34; the percentage of listeners who knew about the music when first released was 0.5%.

This context shapes the ways many future funk producers access city pop songs through the internet and combine them with electronic beats. While vaporwave commonly slows down samples, future funk typically speeds them up. Most songs are then paired with anime (the more obscure, the better) to complete the “Japanization.” Japaneseness is central to city pop's appeal to foreign fans (Sommet and Kato, 2021: 13) – and, we argue, that of future funk. As one commenter noted, “Future Funk tracks that have japanese vocals in it, get automatically my attention haha =).” ⁷ Whereas vaporwave draws on various 1980s and 1990s media, only some of which is Japanese, future funk exploits Japaneseness quite consistently, usually via obscure audio and/or anime clips. To analyze future funk, we began from a fan-made playlist, “Japanese Future Funk.” While this playlist had 174 videos, only 87 met our criteria of having some clear engagement with Japanese culture; we found the remaining 13 in another playlist titled “Really Cool Future Funk Playlist” to reach a sample of 100 (there was some overlap between the two playlists, suggesting a degree of consensus among fans of the practice). In our data set of 100 future funk uploads, 76% of the songs had Japanese samples (73% only Japanese; 3% both Japanese and western).

Distance also manifests in future funk YouTube comments, as some commenters use the music to construct idealized fantasies of Japan: “Imagine, somewhere in the 80's on a Japanese disco floor dancing and locking eyes with the person you will love for the rest of your life as this song plays in the background … ?.” ⁸ Importantly, this quote signals distance from the source material in that the commenter asks us to “imagine” what such a scenario might entail, and emphasizing that the fantasy must take place in Japan. As Hamilton (2016: 83) notes in his analysis of race in the development of rock music, white rock artists often “held black music on a mystified pedestal, viewing it as raw, powerful, and important but at the same time denying it as presently viable.” In much the same way, future funk is love that relies on distance from the people creating the culture through emphasizing its creation as long ago and far away.

Like vaporwave, imagery is vital to future funk: 89% of these uploads had a Japanese(-scented) image source: 71 videos had an anime image or gif; 5 were of unspecified Japanese origin, such as live-action programs or commercials; and 13 had anime-inspired aesthetics (for example, possible original work). An additional four were ambiguously Asian. As Johnson (2020) describes, “Anime visuals were a seal of approval, identifying the music as part of a larger collective of nerddom that could appeal to anyone with even a mild interest in digital entertainment.” However, there is no specific link of the song to the visual. Any anime will do. This is reflected in the fact that just 35% of the future funk videos we analyzed cited the anime source they used in the video description, leaving many users to ask in the comments.

In much the same way that the visuals are largely random, Japanese media used in future funk is unmoored from its sources. Less than half of the songs, 43, named the sample and artist. Just 14 of the songs and original artists were cited in the title to clearly indicate a remix or a remaster, with the other 29 in the description. Interestingly, one South Korean producer, Night Tempo, was responsible for 11 of the 14 credits, meaning that less than 4% of the songs from other sources provided explicit credit to both the original song and artist in the title. In 11 additional examples, the original song was cited in the title without naming the original artist (occasionally, some future funk songs also omitted some words from the original titles). Notably, in 26 of our songs, samples were identified in both the descriptions and the comments, and it is unclear whether the credit was added to the description after it was identified by commenters. Lack of credit is an issue that future funk fans periodically criticize in the comments, as well as identifying samples in the comments of 74% of the videos, such as: “The original song is from the Japanese singer Yasuha. The song is called ‘Flyday Chinatown’. The remix is good but I think y’all should listen to the original at least once.” ⁹ Problems of credit and distance from sources are compounded by cycles of deletion and re-posting of these videos, with subsequent copies often not uploaded by the song's creator, making credit even more challenging.

Free-for-all taking also shows in how songs are incorporated into future funk. Mariya Takeuchi's 1987 song “Yume No Tsuzuki” was liberally sampled by a creator named Tanuki for “Baby Babyの夢,” which sped up Takeuchi's vocals over a techno drum loop and made no other changes, other than effects, for nearly three minutes. ¹⁰ In this way, the aesthetic and emotional value of the song comes overwhelmingly from the sample, not anything done by Tanuki, who might reasonably be seen as free-riding on Takeuchi. This is similar to what McNally (2017: 443, 444) describes as taking place with remix artist Diplo, who extracted Brazilian music and took credit for it even though his contribution on top of the source songs was minimal, and “by declining even to cite the original artists” he presented Brazilian genre funk carioca as his own sound; indeed, the DJ even bragged in an interview that he could steal samples in Brazil without having to complete a legal or payment process. Notably, the genres that make up city pop itself show the complexities of appropriation, as several are Black American genres. As Mahon (2004, 2020) points out, funk is a Black genre, and is often the category ascribed to music that, were it played by white men, would be called rock; similarly, R&B is what between the 1920s and 1949 was called “race music,” a category which “came to be used by the recording industry to describe music performed by African American musicians and marketed to an African American audience” (Arewa, 2010: 595). City pop's transcultural borrowing, like white American borrowing from these genres, often did not come with credit or respect, perhaps unsurprisingly given what Russell (1991: 4, 20–21) describes as “the contiguity of Japanese and Western anti-black racism” as well as the ways that “with the rise of the counterculture the influx of black popular music and culture […] the black Other was adopted as a symbol of defiance, forbidden fruit, and [Japanese youth's] own alienation from the Japanese mainstream.” These multidirectional flows of extraction continue in our data set, as several of the western samples also came from Black musicians whose songs were then paired with Japanese aesthetics. Fundamentally, future funk treats Japanese media as a parts emporium that creators can use to assert their own artistry. In much the same way, Tanuki and/or the YouTube channel that posted the video included decorative but meaningless visuals from the 1980s anime Urusei Yatsura. Here again, the Japanese media is the point, but the YouTube poster leverages it for their own gain. ¹¹

Ultimately, these uses of old Japanese media are acts not of reference or reverence, but much more like theft and treating Japanese artists as raw material. Rose (1994: 5) points out in the context of hip-hop that “Although the terms dilution and theft do not capture the complexity of cultural incorporation and syncretism, this interpretation has more than a grain of truth in it.” In much the same way, this Japanese-scented media is not created by borrowing and mixing on equitable terms. While there is clear desire for and pleasure in the Japanese source materials in vaporwave and future funk, they operate as signifiers of Japaneseness, using only odor from Japanese media, extracting the culture from the people in a culturally appropriative Orientalist fantasy.

Zombie save rooms and 8-bit synths: credit and presence in game genres

By contrast to practices that draw on miscellaneous sounds and images, the other practices we examine are considerably more rooted in their sources in Japanese games. What we term “game sounds” are songs that either employ a known sample from a specific game or recreate its feel in what Stanfill (2023) terms a soundalike, songs reminiscent of existing songs without exact copying. To analyze game sounds songs, we searched specifically for “inspired,” “alternate,” or “remixed” game music, focusing on electronic music that engaged with Japanese games in a way that mimics the sound of their corresponding games/inspirations to the point that they could be in that game. We used the web crawler YouTube Data Tools (Digital Methods Initiative, 2015) to isolate content creators with at least thousands and sometimes millions of total views. We excluded both songs with other characteristics (rock-based covers, trap beats, and lo-fi hip-hop) and songs drawing exclusively on western games (which do not engage with our question about use of Japanese media). The sample of 100 songs engages with 16 Japanese game series, including Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Street Fighter, and Tekken. The majority of songs are remixes (45%), soundalikes (30%), or use samples (22%; covers and mash-ups rounded out the list). We first identified 10 artists making this kind of music, then examined crediting practices in the 10 most popular uploads from each, skipping any western arrangements or covers if they appeared.

While there are various ways the artists in our sample use sources, all make the game present and evoke corresponding affective responses. In some cases, soundalikes are created using the same materials as the source songs, such as sample packs. In the case of the Silent Hill series, for example, composer Akira Yamaoka used samples to make some of the series’ most iconic songs, drawing from libraries like “Distorted Reality,” which is “widely regarded as the most popular sample library of all time” (Spectrasonics, 2022). ¹² Similarly, at least some music from the Resident Evil series, like “Serenity” in Resident Evil 4, was also arranged from a sample library. ¹³ Game sounds that draw on Japanese sources almost unanimously engaged in some form of citation, with 95% citing the source artist, song, or game, with the composer or company cited 48% of the time (in 11%, the remixer was cited, but not the original game composer). Because many of the songs were soundalikes (and, therefore, inspired by rather than directly drawing on the games), strict notions of credit would not seem to apply; the fact that creators do so anyway suggests a particular commitment to signaling musical relationships in their work, particularly to Akira Yamaoka.

That these new songs are made by and for a community that reveres the games (or musical practice) is clear when they engage the game's lore or even its tone. One creator, drackfreeee, frequently uses samples from games like Silent Hill. ¹⁴ He has made both songs that use recognizable samples and songs explicitly intended to sound like they belong in the series. Similarly, creator Survival Spheres makes songs that mimic Resident Evil “save rooms,” game spaces “where the player can save the game and store [their] items” (Taylor, 2004). Unlike the rest of the game, where the sound design is tense, save rooms have recognizable songs meant to soothe the gamer while they are protected from the monsters outside. Game sounds also provide corresponding imagery that, by contrast to future funk's random anime, is relevant, either taken from the games themselves or resembling them, such as castles, forests, abandoned buildings, dimly lit save rooms, and cemeteries. Notably, in sharp contrast to the indifference to crediting or active hiding of sources in the other practices, some game sound creators actively work to preserve knowledge of game music and its history. For example, Avith Ortega both preserves the memory of Silent Hill's soundtracks and informs audiences about composer Yamaoka's use of samples, occasionally making tutorials for recreating certain songs. ¹⁵ This relationship to source texts is therefore far more like the historical use of samples in hip-hop. As Rose (1994: 89) notes, “sampling in rap is a process of cultural literacy and intertextual reference,” issuing “a challenge to know these sounds, to make connections between the lyrical and musical texts. It affirms black musical history and locates these ‘past' sounds in the ‘present.’ More often than not, rap artists and their DJs openly revere their soul forebears.” We can see much the same mechanism in game sounds, as the source material is known, matters to the new song, and is perhaps even revered.

Game sounds are not uncomplicated sites of reverence, however, because the free-riding seen with future funk also lurks here. Some creators do the bare minimum, such as slowing the sample down, looping it, and introducing a new sound like rain. There are also occasional concerns around attribution. For example, Survival Spheres said that their creation “[Still] Free From Fear” was “Music by me, based on RE3's Save Room,” but the song is virtually a note-for-note copy and does not cite the original composers. ¹⁶ It is worth reiterating that musicians like Yamaoka of Silent Hill and composers for Resident Evil also used samples, and sampling in itself isn’t the problem. Rather, the issue is what creators do with the sample or soundalike – how they do or don’t credit and/or connect meaningfully to the Japanese source.

Despite some similarities, what distinguishes game sounds is a direct relationship to sources that is missing in vaporwave and future funk. That is, this music is less about appealing to a Japanese simulacrum and more about paying homage to specific, identifiable Japanese texts. Arguably the highest form of flattery for game sounds creators is that their song could fit in the video game: “This remix is worthy enough to be in the actual game.” ¹⁷ Community engagement also often demonstrates direct ties. On one of Survival Spheres’ most popular recordings, a commenter responded: “This is my favorite one. And the whole ‘I cannot return for i never left’ in the description describes how i feel about resident evil as a whole. I never left.” ¹⁸ Notably, this is alternate music, not actual music, but so successfully evokes the game that this commenter feels immersed. Other game sound creators build on a source with their own instrumentation. Sea Elegy takes in-game sounds from the Resident Evil series then constructs an arrangement using synth sounds not found in the games. In this way, invoking distinct source texts, making them present, is essential to these songs. ¹⁹ Further, many creators signal direct ties to games and samples, such as identifying their inspirations specifically in relation to game characters or locations. Survival Spheres said in the comments section of “RE3 ‘[Still] Free From Fear’ revisited” that they have been a fan of Resident Evil since the first western release in 1996, suggesting that these songs are, in various ways, specifically rooted in their creators’ connections to the games.

Finally, a source is also present when a song's sounds are tied to material hardware, as in chiptunes, which typically use hardware from 1990s game consoles to create music. A significant part of the appeal of chiptunes is their ties to this old technology; some creators believe “it is impossible to conceptualize chip music without the hardware” (McAlpine, 2018: 238). Chiptunes often implies using 8-bit soundchips like the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Game Boy (D’Errico, 2012; Driscoll and Diaz, 2009), although at least 11% of our sample pool used other soundchips like the Yamaha YM2612 in the Sega Genesis. Driscoll and Diaz (2009: 1.2) note that, though the sounds were “born out of technical limitation” of the hardware, chiptunes’ “soaring flutelike melodies, buzzing square wave bass, rapid arpeggios, and noisy gated percussion eventually came to define a style of its own.” As with game sounds, we primarily used YouTube Data Tools to identify ten chiptunes creators who worked with Japanese sources and who had at least thousands and sometimes millions of total views. We then analyzed their ten most popular videos for crediting practices.

If chiptunes music is “the nostalgic celebration – in visuals, sounds, and language – of early video game aesthetics” (Zeilinger, 2012: 22), it matters that many of these systems were developed in Japan. Chiptunes have a nostalgic connection to Japanese sounds and technology. This tie is borne out by relatively consistent citation of sources: 99 videos cited the song in the title, combined in some cases with citing the artists and games/anime as well. Citing the original artist was more uneven, with just 43 citing the Japanese artist (and four citing the western creator, but not the game composer by name); four cited the video game company but not the composer. Some chiptunes artists, like Musikage, primarily make covers of Japanese video game and anime songs; Musikage's most popular chiptunes creations were covers of the anime JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, yet he did not cite the original composer, Yugo Kanno. ²⁰ Other creators, like 8-Beats VGM, take existing short looped songs from gameplay and create complete tracks such as “Whirlwind,” originally from Shinobi 3, released on the Sega Genesis in 1993, both extending the loops and maintaining their essences as they remix, all using the same hardware. ²¹ 8-Beats VGM cited the original Japanese composers in seven out of ten of our selected videos as well as the company in nine out of ten.

Importantly, listeners are made aware of the presence of the media in question: old soundchips are a direct link back to physical hardware. In fact, like game sounds, reverence plays a role in chiptunes: “What is unique about this subculture is its reaction against the latest technological developments and digital workstations and its respect and devotion to old forms of gaming devices through the exploration of their sound capabilities” (Márquez, 2014: 78). The previous medium is essential to how the new object has meaning, in much the same way as Rose (1994: 78) describes:

rap's sample-heavy sound is digitally reproduced but cannot be digitally created. In other words, the sound of a James Brown or Parliament drum kick or bass line and the equipment that processed it then, as well as the equipment that processes it now, are all central to the way a rap records[sic] feels.

Despite material connections and seemingly sincere reverence, chiptunes creations at times stray into Orientalist constructions. YouTube videos like “Best of Chiptune July 2020 Mix” show that such songs can participate in generalized Japanese anime aesthetics much like vaporwave and future funk. ²² Further, some creators on platforms like Bandcamp have released chiptunes covers of city pop songs like “Midnight Pretenders” and Mariya Takeuchi's 1984 single “Plastic Love” under non-commercial Creative Commons licenses while using the website's “Name your price” policy, thus drawing on the popularity of those songs to literally profit without compensating the people whose cultural products they use. However, game sounds and chiptunes predominantly leverage credited connection, invoking their specific sources for an audience that knows and loves them.

How Japaneseness matters: the politics of credit

Overall, one way of engaging with Japanese media is as a distant, hypermediated, appropriated odor without credit, and the other is credited appreciation invoking the aura function. Appropriation is characterized by hypermediation, sharp separation from sources, and pastness. Appreciation, by contrast, uses specific, recognized Japanese media and is drawn more directly from the sources, intended to respect and support them.

Appropriative practices are characterized by hypermediation. This particularly includes sonic manipulation, as both vaporwave and future funk rely heavily on DJ and digital audio workstation (DAW) effects; temporal and transnational distance from the source is intensified through creating sonic distance. Further, hypermediated access adds more distance between the creator or listener and the Japanese source. It is common for online communities around this music to download songs from unauthorized sources, facilitated by community knowledge sharing, rather than coming into contact with the source directly through an authorized venue. Creators and listeners need not directly encounter the source at all, extracting it from sites like YouTube, Bandcamp, WhoSampled, or Reddit. This tendency echoes concerns raised by Hesmondhalgh (2006: 56–7) in his critique of sampling from Black artists’ recordings: “performances by non-white and non-western musicians can be incorporated directly into music made by white western musicians, without ever having any verbal, face-to-face contact with the musicians performing the sampled extract.” Hesmondhalgh was discussing sampling directly from recordings; the examples we discuss are even more attenuated, often samples of samples, and clearly a way of engaging the culture without engaging the people. The attenuation is intensified by the fact that sources are rarely credited. While using material created by others isn’t inherently exploitative and could well be respectful, the balance is tipped toward extraction by this lack of credit. Vaporwave and future funk creators often do not list the source anywhere in the track's metadata, and at times seem to do so only after listeners identify sources in the comments.

In these multiple ways, the already significant distance from the sources across space and time is radically increased through community practices. This relationship to sources is usefully interpreted through Derrida's concept of hauntology, meaning the return of the past in the present. Music scholars have leveraged hauntology to theorize “how contemporary music culture is saturated by artifacts from previous eras” (Sexton, 2012: 562). Sousa (2022: 192–3) goes further to argue that “Hauntological music pioneered, and to some extent engendered, many of the internet microgenres that shaped the sonic landscape of the 2010s,” including vaporwave. It is important to emphasize the haunting of hauntology here – these sources are involved, but in an afterlife, indirect kind of way. Ties to the source and its cultural context are tenuous at best – a haunting or an odor.

These mediated, attenuated, uncredited relationships to sources, then, characterize appropriative relationships to Japanese culture. Appropriation thus shows what Jameson (2001: 563) calls intertextuality as “the operator of a new connotation of ‘pastness’ and pseudo-historical depth in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces ‘real’ history.” This is past/iche – as Jameson (2001: 561) argues, “Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a particular mask […] but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse.” The pastness and the style are fundamental and invoked through these intertexts, even as real history is utterly irrelevant. This kind of past/iche in music is what Sousa (2022: 193) calls a “deliberately heavy-handed ‘postmodernness’ exploiting the associations of East Asian imagery with ‘futurepast’ consumer culture, cybercapitalist displacement, and techno-orientalism.”

It might seem easy to dismiss these uses Japaneseness as purely decorative: in addition to the samples themselves, vaporwave videos are often titled to suggest Japaneseness with kanji characters or gibberish using hiragana or katakana writing. Yet the existence of meaningless Japanese references as odor is quite meaningful as an indication of how Japan itself is imagined as decorative. As Sousa (2022: 193) argues, “it is the concept of Japaneseness, in all its mukokuseki (‘stateless’) or ‘culturally odorless’ splendor, that fascinates them – in other words, postmodern Japaneseness, or the Japaneseness of postmodernity, rather than any historically accurate version of Japan as a country.” As Sano-Franchini (2018) emphasizes, what she calls aural stereotyping “oftentimes accompanies other recognizable, oversimplified, stereotypical representations of ‘Asianness.’” Sousa (2022: 187) notes that “the prototypical weeaboo is ostentatiously, irritatingly, and gratuitously obsessed with Japanese pop culture,” and this is, we contend, structurally what is happening with these practices, as evidently some people's image of Japan is anime clips paired with French disco beats.

These uses of Japanese media thus treat Japanese culture as freely extractable, and demonstrate Feld's (1988: 31) argument:

musical appropriation sings a double line with one voice. It is a melody of admiration, even homage and respect […]. Yet this voice is harmonized by a counter-melody of power, even control and domination; a fundamental source of maintaining asymmetries in ownership and commodification of musical works.

In appreciation, by contrast, the specific reused source is relevant – and recognized. Thus, such reuse is not freeloading on Japanese culture but genuine engagement. In game sounds and chiptunes, the source of the sampled sound not only matters, but is known. This music functions through recognition of the source, whether a sample or approximation of a specific game (game sounds) or music generated by game hardware (chiptunes), not just a general recognition of Japaneseness. Much as was historically the case in hip-hop – where sampling originated – the specific source of a sample matters. As Rose (1994: 89) describes, sampling is “a process of cultural literacy and intertextual reference. Sampled guitar and bass lines from soul and funk precursors are often recognizable or have familiar resonances.” This direct connection with the source is aligned with the historical expectation that samples be acquired by crate-digging. As Schloss (2014: 79–80) argues, “the process of acquiring rare, usually out-of-print, vinyl records for sampling purposes has become a highly developed skill” and “individuals who give themselves to this quest are held in high esteem.” Digging and sampling are ways to show lines of musical descent, and directly naming the games similarly displays such relationships. Even when samples are not directly taken – as there is evidence that Spectrasonics’ and Yamaoka's samples have been floating around the web for decades, such as in the Silent Hill Heaven Forum ²³ – it is notable that they are not decontextualized but rather knowledge of the source travels with them.

Recognition makes the sources present in the song, leveraging what Stanfill (2023) calls the aura function. This concept builds from Benjamin's famous argument that forms of art made through processes of mechanical reproduction, like film, dissipate the authority of the original, the aura; under mechanical reproduction, there is no longer any sense of a “real thing” opposed to an inferior, secondary copy. However, the fact that there is no single original any more doesn’t mean there is no more aura. Instead, the aura function may still be fulfilled, simply changing forms. That is, much as Foucault (1980) argues that the author of a text is less important as a specific human than as a concept reflecting how society constructs meaning from texts, and that the author function – the work the concept of the author does – persists even after attempts to decenter the author as the source of meaning, the aura function is about how authenticity is socially constructed, which may differ across time and over space but does not disappear as a value. Thus, while it might seem counterintuitive to talk about a sample having an aura, it can absolutely invoke a source text and make it present in a way that inspires the same reverence as a statue in a museum. This reverence also corresponds to Stanfill's (2023: 139) findings in their study of popular perceptions of transformative musical works:

there's a consistent sense that good transformative musical works support what they transform, […] often driving interest in the source […]. This norm of respect for source texts and artists articulates with the requirement that […] in taking existing music as raw material, producing something new from it must be done thoughtfully and well.

By thinking through reuses of old Japanese media in terms of appreciation or appropriation, we provide a framework for parsing out Orientalist fantasy from sincere reference and reverence. We have presented examples for how to recognize and evaluate the value, production, and homage/sincerity of videos that invoke “Japaneseness.” Reuse can even help some IPs find new life. Unlike many series in our game sounds sample pool, Silent Hill was a dormant franchise until Konami unveiled several projects in October 2022 (Winslow, 2022). Perhaps these musical creations helped preserve memory for the series – at least for the community of fans that stop by and listen – such that in maintaining fan interest that Konami can leverage, these creations support what they aim to transform, much like the mods we described in our earlier work (Kretzschmar and Stanfill, 2019). Now that the franchise is once again active, it is likely this small (and growing) community will have further incentive to create inspired recordings. The ethics of transcultural exchange are notably complex, but by thinking through this relationship in terms of sincerity and specificity as opposed to that which is vaguely Japanese-scented, we can better understand what it means to borrow media from long ago and far away.