Original gangster

Hideaki Ishi, better known as DJ Krush, is one of the very few artists from Asia who has commanded two decades of cred in the global hip hop scene. The 49-year-old Japanese producer and DJ got his first big international break in the mid-1990s from the Mo' Wax label with a series of genre-defining instrumental hip hop albums. Now he is something of an elder statesman for the beat-loving, bleary-eyed backpacker set who continue to turn up en masse for his gigs worldwide.

Over the years, Ishi has lent his boundary-defying production palette to collaborations with artists as various as CL Smooth, The Roots, Mos Def, Toshinori Kondo, Herbie Hancock and K.D. Lang. His nine albums have all sold far better abroad than in his native Japan.

This ascension to international hip hop-fixture status is as unlikely as it is rare for an artist of Ishi's origins. His upbringing was rough: his father was a day labourer and his mother a mama-san in a local nightclub. By all accounts, the family was largely left behind by the 'golden sixties' of postwar Japan. An indifferent student, Ishi dropped out of junior high school and kicked around with local street gangs throughout his teens, lifting car stereos, racing stolen motorcycles and partying the nights away.

Eventually, Ishi says, he exhibited enough street hustle to earn a low-level job with the yakuza.

There are two turning points in the DJ Krush back story - episodes that Ishi's sneaker-head devotees can generally recite offhand. You might call them the founding myths of this enduring counter-cultural tribe of the 1990s.

As Ishi revealed in an interview with The New York Times in 2002, not long after he joined the yakuza as an apprentice he discovered a severed finger neatly wrapped in a handkerchief in his office. The removal of digits by blade is a common ritualistic punishment for misdeeds in the yakuza, but when he learned the finger belonged to his best friend and fellow gang member, Ishi was shaken - and scared straight.