Locking, locs, and the lines between appreciation and appropriation

I recently got back from Japan, my first time in Asia, and while I went there to explore, connect with people, and experience the culture. I also went to train with Japanese dancers whose styles I’ve long admired.

I practice a funk style of street dance called Campbellocking (or Locking), which originated in LA in the late ’60s and early ’70s, created by Don Campbell and popularised through Soul Train.

While the foundations of locking stay the same, most of us who weren’t there at the start are learning it through different lenses. A lot of early Campbellocking dancers outside the US didn’t have access to old footage or direct teaching, which means the names of moves, the techniques, and even the spirit behind them can vary wildly around the world.

Even though we’re all influenced by the same art form, our vantage points are different. I’ve always tried to engage with the dance’s history; watching rare clips, learning from the originators (if they’re still with us), and doing what I can from here in the UK.

It’s a Black art form, and while it’s travelled the world, evolving and reshaping as it went, I’ve always tried to stay rooted in its origins.

But dancing in Japan and seeing how locking lives there brought up a new line of questioning for me. When does participation start to look like appropriation, especially when you’re engaging with Black culture from the outside?

These questions extended beyond the dance studio.

Walking through the streets of Osaka, I saw people rocking locs, permed afros, and clothing I associate with Blackness and African-American hip-hop culture, or at least, an aesthetic. It caught me off guard. Not necessarily in a bad way, but enough to make me pause.

I’ll admit I’m not deeply clued up on the history of fashion trends, and my personal frame of reference is limited. But it did get me thinking. In the same way, I come to locking from a UK-based, outsider perspective, many people in Japan are coming to elements of Black culture, the look, the style, the sound, from their own specific context.

But the frame of reference I have as a young mixed Black adult living in the UK for people carrying out similar practices feel very different. When people from different cultures in the UK interact with Blackness there’s discomfort due to a history of punitive treatment towards Black people and ongoing discriminatory realities, also from my own experiences. 

So when people wear your culture in that scenario as something they can try on and take off, it can feel like a costume, or perhaps a seasoning. An interesting flavour or element to add to their character, without consequence. That often leaves a bad and distinctly culturally appropriative taste in my mouth.

But being in Japan laid my preconceptions bare. I was in a foreign land, with little awareness of the local racial history, and in a society with far less ethnic diversity. It made me pause again: 

What is the history here? What are the racial dynamics like? And could this actually be appreciation, not appropriation?

Cultural appropriation usually centres on power,  how our social identities interact with histories of exclusion and inequality. It’s about who gets to engage with culture, how they’re perceived when they do, and whether they’re acknowledged or erased. It often refers to dominant groups borrowing or stealing from communities that have been historically marginalised.

But this dynamic doesn’t always run in straight lines. And the Japanese context shows just how complicated it can get.

Japan’s relationship with Blackness

Japan is not the US or the UK, and the country’s relationship with Blackness has its own distinct, and often overlooked, history. Colourism, for one, has long been embedded. In simple terms: the closer someone is to Whiteness, which gets read as intelligence, status, beauty, desirability, the better they’re perceived. That ideal goes back centuries, even before there was a noticeable Black presence in Japan, but also doesn't exactly set them up for success either. 

Black presence in Japan hasn’t been very common throughout history; it was during the post-World War II occupation that Black and Japanese people in large numbers came into prolonged proximity, maybe for the first recorded time in history. African American soldiers technically held power as part of the occupying force, but that didn’t shield them from either the racism of U.S. segregation policies or the colourist attitudes present in Japan. During that time, Black soldiers were often referred to as kurumbo, a deeply derogatory racial slur. So while Blackness was visible, it wasn’t always embraced.

Appreciation or Appropriation:

Fast forward to the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and things shift again. As Black American art forms, particularly hip-hop, spread globally, some artists and cultural figures even relocated to Japan, bringing the culture with them (this was notably how campbellocking / locking came to Japan). Suddenly, you have young Japanese people embracing not just the music, but the full aesthetic: afros, dreads, grills, oversized clothing.

From my perspective, sometimes it looks like a celebration. Other times, it feels like straight-up fetishisation, an excessive fixation on Blackness that reduces people and their culture to objects of desire. Traits like skin tone, hairstyles, and clothing are stripped of context and meaning, and turned into something to be consumed and used rather than understood and respected. 

Scholar Nina Cornyetz offers a layered interpretation here. She argues that when Japanese youth emulate Blackness, they’re not trying to be Black; they’re actually pushing back against rigid social expectations in their own society and using it to find ways to express their own individuality. The problem comes when aesthetics are lifted, but the history and substance get lost. That’s a form of appropriation too, just working through a different cultural lens.

Without ongoing dialogue or lived experience in Japan, it’s hard to draw a clear line between appreciation and appropriation, particularly as I’m just people-watching. But from what I did experience,  especially in the locking dance spaces, I saw a real depth of appreciation. People recognised its origins, its movement history, even the cultural and political context behind it. Honestly, I learnt so much from them and I was genuinely amazed.

So here I am again, reflecting on my place in all this. I’m a young mixed-race man from the UK, finding my own expression in a dance style rooted in Black American culture. I’ve asked questions of others and it’s only right I ask them of myself too:

 Am I appropriating?

 Or am I appreciating?

The truth is that the answer is embedded in an ongoing responsibility to ask, reflect, and act in the interest of the culture. To keep learning. To keep honouring the source.

At The Unmistakables, we've tried to turn that personal responsibility into something more systemic. Working with creative agencies, we’ve developed a tool called Exploitation to Appreciation: a set of cultural consideration checks that help teams think more critically about how they engage with different cultures. Doing this work well, means thinking beyond inspiration and building with intention, accountability, and respect for who and what we draw from.