Tiny flats, unemployment, mental health: Hong Kong rapper’s songs illustrate struggles of city’s youth

Yuri Tomiyama aka Txmiyama uses his music to call out the struggles that young people in Hong Kong face – ones he has experienced himself

Lyrics from one of the rapper’s songs, written a year before last year’s anti-government protests kicked off, became a rallying cry for protesters

Reading Time:3 minutes

Born in Canada to Japanese parents, Hong Kong rapper Yuri Tomiyama – aka Txmiyama – is used to feeling like he doesn’t belong anywhere as a third culture kid. Much of his music focuses on the struggles and discontentment common among Hong Kong’s youth. Photo: Kenneth Tang

Published: 12:45pm, 19 May 2020Updated: 11:30am, 20 May 2020

When Hong Kong-based rapper Txmiyama says that he only raps “about the things he knows”, he isn’t exaggerating.

Txmiyama (pronounced Tomiyama) came under the spotlight last year when a lyric from his song 5am Minibus became something of a rallying cry for anti-government protesters in Hong Kong. The line “7k for a house like a cell/ And you really think we out here scared of jail?” was spray-painted across the city, and picked up by international news outlets like CNN, Reuters and even pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong.

“I wrote that song a whole year before the protests,” says the 26-year-old rapper, whose real name is Yuri Tomiyama. Born in Toronto, Canada, to Japanese parents, he moved to Hong Kong at the age of 12. “I was simply talking about my own life – I really was living in a 120 square foot [11 square metre] apartment in Tsim Sha Tsui that cost me HK$7,000 [US$900] a month, and I really did hear stories from friends who said, ‘Jail is not that bad honestly, I’ve seen smaller houses.’”

He later also lived in a subdivided flat in the industrial district of Kwun Tong – “where the triads were still fighting downstairs over minibus routes” – and hustled meal-to-meal while struggling with drug addiction.

The lyric from a Txmiyama song spray painted on a road divider in Hong Kong during the 2019 protests.

Tomiyama isn’t afraid to use his music to call out the injustices and struggles that working-class youths in Hong Kong face, but his lyrical repertoire doesn’t just consist of screw-the-system anthems. Much of his music also focuses on the malaise and disillusionment common among Hong Kong’s youth.