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| Buddhism in Action |
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| "Shout It Out" |
| By NYCCA, Japan |
I was born in Hong Kong in 1980. My father is Chinese and my
mother half-Japanese. We came to live in Japan when I was 10
years old. It was my interest in skateboarding that got me
into street culture, and I started rapping while messing
about as a dancer and DJ.
At first I didn't have the slightest interest in rapping in
Japanese, but when I was 15, I met a rapper called RINO and
was inspired to try to express my opinions about the world
in Japanese.
I went to Soka High School and then to New York State
University in 1999, but I got into drinking and taking drugs
every day to the point where I started hallucinating. After
three failed suicide attempts I was admitted into a
psychiatric hospital.
Suffering from depression and debilitating apathy, I came
back to Japan to rehabilitate. It was at this time that I
started practicing Buddhism seriously. When I chanted, I
felt an energy welling up from my inner self; and this
energy became a conviction. The doctors told me it would be
at least three years before I was cured and that I would
likely experience serious trauma in the years ahead. In
fact, to everyone's surprise, I was cured within a half
year.
I spent the next year working in a factory, and started to
visualize what would become the O'LIONZ PROJECT ("Only Life
In Our NecessitieZ"), as well as starting to perform again
in small events. I started mixing Japanese, Cantonese and
English, trying to produce trilingual work.
There are many kinds of rap, but the way I understand it is
that rap began as prisoners calling out to each other,
without any musical instruments: so rap is a tool to call on
people to speak the truth. In that sense, I feel rap is a
way of fighting with words, the most human way for people to
approach things and deal with difficult situations with
hope. It's also interesting to me that rap rhythms and
chanting Buddhist sutras sound alike.
In hip-hop, people often say, "Keep it real." When I create
a song, I try to put my experience, truth and Buddhist
philosophy into my music. The name, O'LIONZ, is trying to
express the idea of keeping it real, that the truth
inevitably lies within your own life. Whatever the topic, it
is related to the core and essence of life and all
phenomena. Whatever we experience leads us to seek out the
truth of life. For me, Buddhism is about reason and the
underlying principles of the universe.
In February 2003 I put together a group called O'LIONZ 11,
consisting of friends and acquaintances. Our first gig was
in front of 1,000 people. In March 2005 we released an indie
CD, and that July we were the Japanese winners of the urban
section of Diesel-U-Music, a competition held across five
countries (Belgium, Italy, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S.).
In August 2005, the O'LIONZ PROJECT performed at the Hug the
World with Music event in Indonesia, a charity concert
raising funds for the victims of the March 2005 Sumatra
earthquake, which was broadcast throughout Indonesia. I then
was able to quit my day job and become a fulltime artist at
the beginning of 2006.
In August that year I took part in a 200-member Soka Gakkai
youth exchange visit to China, and was able to perform
during our exchanges in Shanghai and Beijing.
In 2007, Universal Records offered O'LIONZ PROJECT our
major-label debut, then our single, "Daijobu," was taken up
as the theme song for a TV show, and in June we released our
first full album. I'm currently trying to write a song for
the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
I have found that by putting Buddhist philosophy into
action, the positive effects come back to me in my daily
life. I feel now that it's just impossible to predict how
great this driving force in my life will become in the
future.
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[Courtesy, January 2008 SGI Quarterly] |
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