Bridging Communities - Taking Stock on the Past Two Years

A version of this article originally appeared in The Parkside Journal.

Two years ago, the Japan America Society began a project with support from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage that sought to deepen relationships with and connections between Asian American and African American communities by reimagining the Japanese cultural programs at Shofuso to be more inclusive of West Philly residents. As the formal project timeline comes to an end, our work with the Parkside neighborhood is just getting started in many ways, but we wanted to take stock of what has been accomplished during these past two years.

Working alongside neighborhood consultant (and publisher of the Parkside Journal), Michael Burch, our team has benefited immensely from his insight and introductions to many of the Parkside residents and community leaders. The success of our programs and events are largely thanks to the foundation of dialogue that Michael established between JASGP staff and the Parkside neighborhood. 

Our first public event of this project took place on February 26, 2022 at the School of the Future, which was the Black History Month Bunka-sai (Cultural Fair). The event consisted of an artist fair produced by BlackSci-Fi.com, a historical exhibit on African American veterans of World War II by ACES museum, and a series of film programs that explored the shared experiences among African Americans and Japanese Americans as racialized minority groups in the United States.

Many of the artists and cultural institutions who participated in the Bunka-sai would contribute to other programs throughout this project as vendors at the Cherry Blossom Festival, visitors to special neighborhood programs hosted at Shofuso, and participants in some of the ongoing projects such as our artist residency program. While we decided to forgo a second Bunka-sai, JASGP has continued to build its relationship with School of the Future, hosting several group tours of Shofuso for the school’s anime club and other West Philly school groups (including Belmont Charter) during the past two seasons.

From February to September 2022, Shofuso hosted Nigerian-born, Philadelphia-based multimedia visual artist and deejay Oluwafemi Olatunji as our Artist-in-Residence. Through a drawing club that he hosted bi-monthly at Shofuso throughout the residency, Oluwafemi engaged neighborhood residents and general audiences alike in a creative exploration of the site. After spending nearly 8-months working closely with site staff at Shofuso, Oluwafemi produced a series of sketch drawings in response to the elements of the house’s architecture and natural surroundings that impacted him the most. His culminating exhibit titled Paradise: Patterns of Shofuso was shown at Shofuso from November 18 to December 11. Beyond his exhibit, Oluwafemi collaborated in many other projects with the JASGP staff as he redesigned many collaterals including the Cherry Blossom Festival graphics that we used in both 2022 and 2023.

Another result of the Pew Recovery Project, we began a relationship with our current taiko artist-in-residence, Mac Evans. Throughout the 2022-2023 seasons Mac has led a series of free taiko drum workshops on Saturday afternoons. Advance registration is encouraged on the JASGP website, but walkup participants are also welcome. We plan on continuing Mac’s taiko workshops into the 2024 season, so be on the lookout for an announcement in early April next year.

Parkside residents who have visited Shofuso may be aware that it was designed after a 17th century temple guest house located at Kojo-in, a temple complex East of Kyoto. The intended purpose of such a space is to house honored guests who were visiting the temple such as Buddhist scholars or itinerant monks. In its original context, Shofuso would have served as a place to visit with such guests and discuss important matters. So it makes sense that architect Junzo Yoshimura would choose such a space to model Shofuso after, given the role that it was meant to play in the early postwar era to rekindle US-Japan relations.

Knowing this history, it seems fitting to host community meetings and convenings between different groups at Shofuso, which has become another outreach strategy for both Parkside residents and other stakeholder communities that JASGP would like to better serve. Over the past two years, JASGP staff have hosted a number of such convenings in partnership with other groups whose missions have aligned with our own, many of which Parkside residents and community leaders participated in. A few examples are the Multicultural Media Professionals Week presented by Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, two mixer events between the Asian American and African American Chambers of Commerce, a Cherry Blossom Festival sponsor reception and Parkside Community Day, and the Black + Gold Leadership Boot Camp.

For those unfamiliar, Black + Gold Series Leadership Boot Camp, was a three-part event organized by the Mayor’s Office of Public Engagement that brought together leaders from the African American and Asian American communities. JASGP hosted a special convening at Shofuso in July 2022 as the final session of the Black + Gold Leadership Boot Camp, where in addition to the 40-person cohort, leaders of local Parkside community organizations were also invited to participate.

Of course, the crowning achievement of this project has been the reimagining of our annual Cherry Blossom Festival as a local community event. The past two festivals have presented an incredible lineup of talented musicians from West Philly, alongside traditional Japanese performers and Japanese American musicians. These events were covered extensively in previous issues of the Parkside Journal, but I want to take this opportunity to again thank all of our attendees from the Parkside community, the neighborhood cultural institutions, and community leaders for your eager participation in these events.

We truly could not have done this work without your support, and we are excited to continue building more inclusive programs like this in the years to come. As we look to the past, I also want to share a couple announcements about upcoming programs and events.

JASGP recently opened a new exhibit titled Okaeri (Welcome Home): The Nisei Legacy at Shofuso, a multimedia installation that tells the stories of the Nisei – or second-generation American-born persons of Japanese ancestry. The majority of Nisei were forcibly removed from their West Coast businesses, schools, and communities in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor and mass incarcerated in federal prison camps. These same individuals later resettled in areas throughout the country where they had to rebuild their communities from the ground up, including here in West Philadelphia where many families settled in the late 1940s – early 1950s.

Through a combination of video projection, archival photos, and other period artifacts, the Okaeri exhibit shares the untold story of Nisei leaders who saved and preserved Shofuso for current generations with general audiences throughout Philadelphia. In the process we have unearthed incredible stories about the same Nisei leaders who actively participated in the civil rights movement – some who attended the 1963 March on Washington and 1965 Selma-Montgomery marches, others who worked as pro-bono civil rights attorneys and did hate crime reporting with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the Jim Crow South. I hope that many of our Parkside neighbors will have the opportunity to see the exhibit, which is on view during normal operating hours at Shofuso through the last day of our 2023 season, December 10.

I am also pleased to announce another special exhibit that will open next year in June 2024, titled Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s-1970s. As the name suggests, this exhibit will explore experimental film and video art created by Japanese immigrant artists who lived in the US during the tumultuous period of the late-sixties. Living and working in the US as artists of color at a time of incredible social upheaval, these artists benefited from an exchange of ideas brought about by the social movements of that era. From civil rights to the birth of the Yellow Power Movement, Women’s Liberation, and anti-Vietnam War Protests – the context of producing work as Japanese nationals in the US at this time period indelibly shaped their work. In addition to the main exhibition held at the Philadelphia Art Alliance from June-August 2024, we will explore these works through public programs that assess the impact of various American social movements on the Japanese artists. We look forward to sharing more details about these programs in the coming months.

While there is much work left to be done to make JASGP a truly community-oriented organization, the seeds have been planted thanks to this project. Our staff is committed to continuing this work, and have already begun institutionalizing the community engagement strategies piloted during the past two years. Thank you all for your continued support in these endeavors, and we look forward to welcoming you to Shofuso sometime in the near future.