Awich Talks ‘Okinawan Wuman,’ Motherhood & The Fight for Women’s Place in Hip-Hop: Billboard Japan Women In Music Interview
Categoria: Musica
Awich spoke candidly about balancing motherhood and a career and the environment for women in the music industry.
Por Billboard | 08/06/2026
Billboard Japan spoke with Awich for the latest installment of its Women in Music interview series. The initiative launched in 2022 to celebrate artists, producers and executives who have made significant contributions to music and entertainment and inspired other women through their work, following the footsteps of Billboard’s annual Women in Music honors. This series featuring female players in the Japanese entertainment industry is one of the highlights of Japan’s WIM project. The interview with Japan’s rap queen marks the occasion of the one-night-only special live event Women in Music – EQUAL STAGE, presented by Billboard Japan and Spotify on June 9. Born and raised in Okinawa, she moved to the U.S. where she started a family, then lost her husband. Through all of it, she has pushed to the very front of Japan’s hip-hop scene. She spoke candidly about balancing motherhood and a career, her identity as an Okinawan woman, and the environment for women in the music industry. It’s been about six months since the release of Okinawan Wuman . Has anything shifted for you since then? I feel like I’ve made an album I can be proud of anywhere in the world as my introduction. RZA of Wu-Tang Clan, who produced it, was someone I once thought existed above the cloud. Now our relationship extends to both our families, and he’s someone I respect both as a musician and as a human being. Making an album that paid genuine respect to Okinawa and to hip-hop gave me the confidence of knowing I’ve built a foundation that won’t be shaken, no matter where my music goes next. How did the collaboration with RZA come about? The idea had been floating around for about three years, but I spent almost a year uncertain whether this was really the project I needed right now. And yet something inside me kept insisting that there was no one else who could fill this role. Okinawa is the birthplace of karate, and a place with its own deep history with the U.S. A hip-hop artist born from that place, being lifted up by RZA, who has been drawing inspirations from martial arts and eastern philosophies, is a very profound full-circle story. Could anything be more perfect than this? Deciding to listen to that inner voice was where this album began. What did you want to say with the title? Okinawa is where karate originated, a place shaped by war and occupation, a crossroads of cultures. I think of it as a place that could be a microcosm of the whole world, and as someone born from that island, I wanted to carry both its pain and its beauty in my expression. “Wuman” also carries a tribute to Wu. RZA gave me a message: “You are a mother, an artist, an activist, an Okinawan WUman. May your light reach people all over the world.” Okinawan women have historically been asked to be strong. “Grandma is the strongest,” “always do what grandma says” are things you hear all the time in Okinawa. Women work harder and oftentimes exp