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 expected to be stronger than men. But I didn’t just want to express that strength. I wanted to express where it comes from, that it comes from love, that it comes from pain, and to stand proudly as someone carrying all of that.
What has it been like to keep making music while raising your daughter?
My whole world shifted when I got married and became a mom. Suddenly I had to be home all the time, had to be there for childcare. I kept pushing back at my husband, asking why nothing had to change for him while everything had to change for me. He could do whatever he wanted, but if I did the same things, I’d be called a failure as a mother, a failure as a wife. I envied men and fought that fight for a long time.
How is your relationship with your daughter Toyomi these days?
She’s 18 now. I’ve never brought that framework of “this is how a mother has to be” into our relationship. I showed her my whole unfiltered self. Even as a small child she took that in, and she’d actually tell people around her, “Let Mommy be Mommy.” She was saying that from a very young age, if there is a gap I couldn’t fill, my daughter would step in to fill that. I am forever appreciative of her for becoming a true friend and a strong partner to me.
Has the environment for women in the Japanese music industry changed?
I think it has. The awareness around things like balancing a career with childcare has changed a lot. For example, for fathers to say, “I’m helping with the kids,” is no longer the right framing because more people know that raising children is a shared responsibility between both parents, not just moms.
But the higher up you go in any organization, the fewer women there are. When someone says, “An important CEO is coming,” everyone pictures a man. When it turns out to be a woman, the reaction is, “Oh, a woman, that’s awesome.” No matter how loudly we talk about gender equality, that’s still sitting in the subconscious. And when a man states his opinion forcefully, he’s seen as impressive, but when a woman does the same thing, people can be like, “Are you in a bad mood today?” or “Are you feeling OK?” As if it comes from mere emotional problems. It’s especially pronounced in hip-hop, where there are very few seats for women. It’s fine for male rappers to share the same styles and characters, but when women do so, they are immediately told, “We already have one of those.”
There are people who have a reaction against the image of the “strong woman.” Anyone who listens carefully to your albums or hears you speak between songs onstage can understand where that strength comes from, but how do you respond to the criticism that strength isn’t the whole of womanhood?
I don’t get to choose what the world picks up on. I want people to listen to everything I put out, to read every interview I give, but that’s not how it works. Being someone in the public eye means accepting, to a degree, that things will be taken out of context. I keep putting out the message that my strength comes from pain, not just that I’m strong, but there’s an appetite in the world to clip and spread the “strong” part only. At the same time, if that’s the part that reaches women who are in need of inspiration to take a step forward, I’d say so be it. So I have no choice but to keep putting myself out there without fear.
What do you think is necessary to change things?
To just keep showing up. In hip-hop, for example, the more women like me and LANA reach the top, the more destinations there are for the women coming up behind us. And refusing to give in to the energy that tries to pit women against each other. Sisterhood is really important right now. Maybe someday we’ll reach a point where we can be like, “Being friendly isn’t enough, let’s really compete,” but right now we’re at a stage where we all need to work together to bring something that started in the negative up to ground zero.
What would you say to someone who can’t take that first step?
What I consider the most important in my life’s work is having dialogues with yourself. Not every woman has to go out and toughen up — being the one who holds a home together is equally valid, and so is every other way of living. But if you can’t hear your own voice telling you what you want, you won’t find happiness no matter where you go. That goes not just for women but for men, for every human being. Self-love is everywhere as a concept right now, but you can’t love something you don’t understand. What do you like, what are you good at, what brings you joy and what brings you grief? If you don’t understand yourself day to day, you’ll spend your whole life complaining. And if everyone truly committed to understanding themselves, I think you’d find that everyone wants something different. Right now people are most likely not having that inner dialogue, and that’s why they end up thinking that they want what the media and advertising are showing them, so everyone moves in the same direction, and conflict follows. If people were really listening to their own hearts, everyone would want different things, and we’d be able to cheer each other on. Journaling, meditation, exercise, whatever works. Please, find a way to talk to yourself.
You grew up in Okinawa and then lived abroad. What does it mean to you to leave the place you’re from?
The further you go from where you started, the more clearly you can see the whole picture. Things you took for granted stop being obvious. You hear something described as common sense elsewhere in the world and think, “That’s actually not common sense at all.” Being able to notice that matters. In the study abroad charity I run, we have a workshop where participants write about what they felt when they went out into the world and came back. (Since 2025, Awich has co-organized Know The World — Awich Global Education Project, which provides free English language learning opportunities, including an Atlanta study abroad program and local immersive programs, for high school students and people up to age 22 in Okinawa Prefecture. The program in partnership with HelloWorld Inc. and the HelloWorld Association has run for two consecutive years.)
As the scope of your work has grown, what has stayed the same and what has changed?
What’s stayed the same is being able to talk about the things that matter to me with the same passion, no matter where I am. I used to think it was out of place to talk about street culture in a luxury setting, but I’ve come to understand that when a person speaks with genuine passion, it gets through. What’s changed is to sense when and when not to push hard for things to land. I’ve recently developed a feel for reading the other person’s timing. Like, when verbally expressing myself seems invalid for the moment, I learned to make an impression through presence and observing rather than force.
You’re also active as an Okinawa Global Ambassador. What do you most want to communicate about Okinawa right now?
Personally, I think nature is its greatest treasure. No building, no amount of money can compare to it. Places where nature remains are disappearing all over the world, and the key to the environment we human beings will need to survive lies within it. You can hold whatever beliefs or identity you want, but if all of humanity doesn’t start taking care of nature together, we won’t have anywhere left to live. It’s an incredibly basic thing to ask.
What matters most to you in sustaining a long career?
Remembering that everything is a collaboration. No matter how much my name and face are out front, everything I do exists because of the many people involved in making it. Expressing gratitude and being considerate of them matters. This is not to say that explosive, selfish or edgy expressions have no place in the music career; of course they do. But in terms of “longevity,” meaning existing across time and space, the support of many people is necessary. So staying conscious of the fact that it’s always a collaboration is the most important thing.
Finally, what does music mean to you?
I’ve been working with words my whole life, but music was what showed me that words can enter the body directly without having to be processed by the mind. For me, music is the tool that lets me deliver the messages I want to share as something people can feel physically. It’s what connected my overthinking head to the rest of my body.
—This interview by Rio Hirai first appeared on Billboard Japan
