Anime is more popular in America than ever before. Last year, Crunchyroll, the American distributor focused on video streaming East Asian media, announced it now had 1 million paid subscribers. These days, it feels as if a significant portion of those subscribers are current or aspiring rappers. Anime has emerged as an important reference point for a new generation of rap artists. And many in this generation of rappers have gravitated toward “Naruto,” the hit series still airing late Saturday nights on Adult Swim’s revamped Toonami programming block. This year alone, Lil Uzi Vert, the late XXXTentacion, and SahBabii have made the show’s characters and themes integral parts of their songs. Rap’s fascination with “Naruto,” and anime in general, continues a courtship between two cultures that has been ongoing for decades.

Rap and anime have commingled before. Shinichirō Watanabe’s anime series “Samurai Champloo” was a retrofuturist fever dream that reimagined Edo-era Japan as a hip-hop mecca, introducing the West to Japanese jazz rap sampler Nujabes in the process, and Aaron Mcgruder’s “The Boondocks” comic strip turned Adult Swim series was built on twin pillars of anime and hip-hop. Santa Inoue’s “Tokyo Tribes” featured characters modeled after Tupac in Juice, Ice Cube in Boyz N the Hood, and Wu-Tang’s Raekwon. “Infinite Ryvius” was soundtracked by rap songs. In turn, rappers like Chance the Rapper, Lil Yachty, and Curren$y have sampled anime in their songs.

Logic, a self-professed “Cowboy Bebop” stan, had series voice actor Steve Blum play the main character on his anime-tinged album The Incredible True Story, in which (not so subtly) the United States and Japan merge into a super nation before a series of events leaves Earth uninhabitable. Most notably, “Afro Samurai,” Takashi Okazaki’s black swordsman revenge epic starring Samuel L. Jackson, was inspired by A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and J Dilla. Just as The Samurai and The Ninja have become shorthands for “cool,” so too has The Rapper, and these points of reference intersect often in anime, which has become a hotbed for code-switching.

“Naruto: Shippūden,” image courtesy of VIZ Media

“I believe samurai in the Edo period and modern hip-hop artists have something in common,” Watanabe told the New York Times, explaining the relationship between the iconography. “Rappers open the way to their future with one microphone; samurai decided their fate with one sword.” “Naruto” itself has a character who is a ninja that is coded as black that talks exclusively in raps. Even Japan, an isolationist community, has come to reflect the wider world it lives in, and as anime made its way West, its art has broached a distance between outsider groups.

“I think, like most people in my age group, it was ‘Sailor Moon,’ ‘Dragon Ball,’ everything that came on the moment you got out of school,” says Father, crediting Cartoon Network’s afternoon Toonami block and later Adult Swim’s late-night anime block with introducing anime to its black audience. (Father recently released a mixtape, Awful Swim, in partnership with Adult Swim.) He sees some parallels to the Wu-Tang Clan’s obsession with Chinese martial arts cinema. “I feel like back in the day obviously Wu-Tang wasn’t talking about anime because it wasn’t that available. Niggas like them would’ve been watching hella anime and rapping about the shit the same way, but they was watching those crazy-ass karate movies and shit. I feel like that’s the equivalent now. Shaolin was their thing and now we’ve got a different import so we can talk about that.”