Hackney to Tokyo, Manga to Mic: How Kraftykid Rewrote Japan’s Rap Scene, Proof That Grime Travels
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- 12/09/2026
Here’s a plot twist most artist profiles don’t get to open with. Kraftykid didn’t move from Hackney to Tokyo chasing a rap career. His plan A was becoming a manga artist. That’s the actual reason he ended up on the other side of the world in the first place and it’s the kind of detail that tells you everything about who he is before you’ve even heard a bar.
He started writing at fourteen, back in Hackney, a kid with a notebook trying to make sense of his world the only way that felt available to him. Music became the place he could put feelings he didn’t have any other language for and growing up surrounded by Grime, picking up a pen felt like the most natural thing in the world. By the time he actually landed in Tokyo, music had already stopped being a hobby and become something closer to a calling, even if the move itself was chasing a completely different dream.
Even his name carries that same handmade, DIY spirit. Kraftykid, one word, no space, comes from arts and crafts, a name his cousin Uwafeme gave him. It’s a small detail, but it tells you something important. Kraftykid was building things with his hands and his imagination long before he ever built a track.
Since 2009 he’s been moving between Grime, UK Drill and everything in-between, staying rooted in the sound of where he’s from while living somewhere that couldn’t be more different in history, tradition and rhythm of daily life. This isn’t a small thing to pull off. Plenty of artists leave home and either lose themselves trying to fit into a new scene or stay so rigidly attached to where they came from that they never actually connect with where they’ve landed. Kraftykid did neither. He became a member of Tokyo based collective The Hilt, built genuine creative relationships with artists like ghostpops, Samon Kawamura, ralph, Jinmenusagi, Tade Dust and Bonbero and found a way to be fully Hackney and fully embedded in Tokyo’s underground at the same time.
His songwriting has taken him even further into the fabric of Japan’s music industry. He’s written tracks for Japanese Hip-Hop legend SEEDA, one of the most respected names in the genre’s history there and for German-Japanese singer Aki Ella. His own music and the tracks he’s penned for others have landed on major playlists including ラップスタア誕生 and Monday Spin, and he performed at POP YOURS festival in 2025, one of Japan’s most significant hip hop stages. He’s also stepped confidently into media, going from guest to interviewer at Neet-Tokyo, sitting across from names like Alligator Jesus and JNR Choi with the same ease he brings to writing bars.
His new EP, ONEWORDNOSPACE, produced by the talented yuta109, started as a joke about people constantly splitting his name into two words when it’s always been one. Somewhere along the way that small frustration turned into something much bigger, a metaphor for compression itself, thoughts running together, emotions stacking without space to breathe, the particular exhaustion of modern life leaving no room to separate anything cleanly. Across the project he moves fluidly between English and Japanese, working through ego, exhaustion, fake perfection, paranoia, intimacy and adaptation, pulling sonically from Grime, UK rap, disco, R&B and Tokyo’s underground scene all at once. It’s a genuinely bilingual, bicultural body of work, confidence sitting next to doubt, humour sitting next to frustration, escapism sitting next to brutal self-awareness.
What makes Kraftykid‘s story matter beyond his own catalogue is what it proves is possible. A lot of talented people never make it further than their own postcode, let alone somewhere as culturally distinct and historically dense as Japan. Doing that as a young Black artist from Hackney and not just surviving there but genuinely contributing, writing for a Japanese hip hop legend, performing at one of the country’s biggest festivals, becoming a real fixture in Tokyo’s underground rather than a novelty passing through, is something close to a triumph. It’s proof that identity isn’t a fixed address. You can carry Hackney with you anywhere on earth and it doesn’t dilute; it just finds new ways to speak.
INTERVIEW:
Cheryl: You moved to Tokyo chasing manga, not music. Is there a version of you in another timeline who actually became a manga artist and do you ever wonder what he’d think of the rapper you became instead?
Kraftykid: “It could still happen. Rap is something that had an immediate calling for me because they say it’s a young man’s game (not that it should be considered such), but it demands stamina from running about on stage, breath control, memorising lyrics, being in clubs at late hours, things that tend to worsen with age. Illustration however, is something you can do at any age sat at a desk. Well, you might get carpal tunnel. But anyway, maybe I’ll pick it back up in my 40s or 50s. Sometimes I think about cruising the world while drawing on a boat as a pensioner haha!”
Cheryl: Your name comes from your cousin Uwafeme and it’s built around arts and crafts. What’s the first thing you ever actually made with your hands, before any of this, that you’d say Kraftykid the artist still carries traces of?
Kraftykid: “Shoutout to Uwafeme. He makes music as well! My earliest memory of drawing was as a kid drawing on the walls in red ink. But instead of staying angry, my mum got me art sets and nurtured my curiosity. Now here we are. I also still have one of my first paintings framed back home. I think I was six years old or something.”
Cheryl: ONEWORDNOSPACE started as a joke about people splitting your name in two. What’s the most Japanese way someone has ever mispronounced or misspelled “Kraftykid” and did you secretly enjoy it?
Kraftykid: “Well, the Japanese language sometimes adds extra syllables to foreign names which is interesting. So in Japanese my name would be pronounced “Ku-la-fu-tee-ki-doh”. As far as misspellings though, which is a separate thing, when I first started rapping it was funny, but 17 years later, not so much… Spelling someone’s name correctly just shows attention to detail. It’s “Kraftykid” with no space for SEO reasons. So that I show up and not art and craft pages haha!”
Cheryl: You write in both English and Japanese, sometimes in the same verse. Is there a feeling or a joke that only really lands in one language, something that just refuses to translate no matter how hard you try?
Kraftykid: “Absolutely! That’s why it takes me so long to write a song in Japanese. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done! It’s like learning to walk again. I exaggerate, but, yeah, It’s humbling. And I always promised myself I’d keep music fun, so personal challenges are good!”
Cheryl: You went from guest to interviewer at Neet-Tokyo, sitting across from artists like Alligator Jesus and JNR Choi. What’s one question you’ve been asked in interviews so many times that you’d genuinely pay someone never to ask you again?
Kraftykid: “Not really. I’m an open book. And any interview could be someone’s introduction to me, so I don’t take that lightly. Shoutout to yuta109 for the amazing production and engineering on this EP by the way! ONEWORDNOSPACE EP out now! Everyone, please give it a listen, and thank you Bonus Magazine for taking the time to interview me!”
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