The Linguistics of Japanese Rap: Interview with Dr. Shigeto Kawahara of Keio University

All right. Hello everyone. I'm here today and I have the honor of interviewing Dr. Shigto Kawahara of KO University who has done a lot of really interesting work on a lot of things actually . But specifically today I'm hoping to talk about his work on Japanese hiphop . Before that though, just to begin uh just before talking about this , you're a phenologist by training. Is that correct ? Yeah. And so you now have about 20 plus years of postphd research at a bunch of different universities . Yeah, I got my PhD in 2007 . So yeah, about 20 years and I've taught at three different universities . And what initially motivated you to get into linguistics and specifically into phenology, phonetics ? Well, the initial step was really I, you know, I grew up in Japan, but I loved studying English , so I just wanted to keep studying English in college . And then I got interested in Japanese, like the comparing between English and Japanese . And I was amazed by the similarity that Japanese and English have . So that's what like current linguistics is kind of exploring, right ? Like the the uni universality between languages . So I got into theoretical linguistics . I think that I was a sophomore student at that time . Then I went to um UC Santa Cruz for an one-year exchange program and that program is like like like excellent . they have very good undergraduate linguistics program and I took a bunch of courses and just I don't know phenology and phonetics those sound related disciplines they just clicked so although I kept my interest in other aspects of languages you mentioned English and Japanese being I think that might surprise some people like many people find them to be very different in terms of how they work . How did you find them to be similar ? H good point. Well, we we search from that point of view