As a woman whose earliest childhood memories include being incarcerated at a Japanese internment camp with her parents and grandparents, 85-year-old Nobuko Miyamoto has a lifetime of experience with “gaman,” or endurance. She finds it painful to see the same Alien Act of 1798 that imprisoned Japanese Americans during her childhood years be used against immigrants today.
Instead of quietly stewing over the cycles of oppression that many endure today, Miyamoto dances, sings and has now memorialized her story of resistance in the film Nobuko Miyamoto: A Song in Movement.
“I’m not stopping,” Miyamoto says. “As long as we can breathe and move, we have an obligation and a joyful responsibility to be a part of the movement.”
On May 23 at 7pm, Miyamoto will attend the Town Hall Theatre in Lafayette for a screening of the film, a dialogue and a signing of her book, Not Yo Butterfly.
Miyamoto moved from internment camp to dance, using the stage as the canvas of her artistry. When she became aware of tokenization and consumption of her art by a largely white audience during one of her performances, she didn’t leave the stage. She dove deeper into her cultural roots.
“I started training when I was 7, and was working in the film industry by the age of 15,” Miyamoto says. “I started getting frustrated with the sometimes stupid things we had to do to make money. That’s when I started looking around to find what other ways I could express myself. And that’s how I started singing.”
Miyamoto studied with Danny Clark, who introduced her to Nina Simone, Lena Horne and other powerful vocalists. And then she encountered folk singer and activist Chris Ijima in New York City. “I would say he was the James Taylor of Asian America, and it was easy to sing with him,” Miyamoto says.
This creative partnership led to something much bigger. “We realized there had never been a song about who we were as a people that the younger generations could identify with,” Miyamoto recalls. “That’s when we started creating music and realizing there was power in it.”
Miyamoto was only a few months into the journey of mothering when she was widowed as Attallah Ayyubi, the father of her son, was killed at a mosque in Harlem.
“I had to learn how to be a mother of a biracial child; to know, to see and be part of the Black world as well as my own Japanese-American culture, and to see the world and more through more than one view,” Miyamoto says.
She fell in love with her husband Tarabu Betserai Kirkland, a filmmaker, playwright and founding member of KPFA’s Third World media department, some 30 years ago. Kirkland says it’s more important than ever to preserve stories like Miyamoto’s.
“We have to understand how all these issues are connected to our survival and history,” Kirkland says. “Nobuko has also done a really good job at connecting people from all different communities with her work.”
El Cerrito-based performing artist Carla Vega joined Miyamoto’s Great Leap’s Collaboratory mentorship program for emerging artists nearly 20 years ago; she’s sung, danced and expanded the movement of resistance through the arts with Miyamoto ever since.
Vega says that the film gives folks a glimpse of the woman behind the songs and dances. “It gives us an intimate perspective and broad scope of her life experience and creative processes—a deeper dive into the woman behind the music, dance, activism,” she says.
She says that art like that of Miyamoto’s may be the thing that gets people through these turbulent times.
“The arts are central to our resilience,” Vega says. “In creating festivals and events that bring people together—these opportunities can be healing and fortifying, reminding us of our humanity, our interdependence, giving value to creative and innovative ways of understanding the world around us.”
Nobuko Miyamoto will be at the Lafayette Town Hall Theatre on Friday, May 23, at 7pm for a screening of ‘Nobuko Miyamoto: A Song in Movement’ and audience discussion. For tickets and info, visit townhalltheatre.com.
