We investigate the low-lying excited states of the spin J ferromagnetic XXZ
chain with Ising anisotropy Delta and kink boundary conditions. Since the third
component of the total magnetization, M, is conserved, it is meaningful to
study the spectrum for each fixed value of M. We prove that for J>= 3/2 the
lowest excited eigenvalues are separated by a gap from the rest of the
spectrum, uniformly in the length of the chain. In the thermodynamic limit,
this means that there are a positive number of excitations above the ground
state and below the essential spectrum