Building Black-Asian Solidarity through the Shofuso Cherry Blossom Festival
A version of this article originally appeared in Pacific Citizen.
In the past nine months while working for Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia, I have had the opportunity to ponder at great length the ways in which public programming that is meant to celebrate Japanese culture while also strengthening US-Japan relations can both cater to the specific interests of a localized audience and also retain the spirit of Japanese culture. This is no easy task in of itself, and the challenge is further compounded by the necessity to find ways for that programming to resonate with both multigenerational Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals living abroad.
As a result, this year’s Shofuso Cherry Blossom Festival of Philadelphia looked a great deal different from previous years, as we highlighted the overlap among Japanese and African American musical cultures. While still adhering to the traditional ohanami practice, encouraging families and friends to picnic under the sakura blossoms, the new event format consisted of a three-day concert series more akin to a music festival than previous years where performance showcases were limited to cultural demonstrations.
This is largely owing to the investment from Pew Center for Arts & Heritage who funded the Re:imagining Recovery Project that I was hired to oversee. The project’s main goals are to re-establish Shofuso Japanese house and garden as a Japanese American community site, while also better engaging the predominantly Black neighborhood residents of Parkside West Philadelphia, where Shofuso is located.
From the outset of this project we have been pursuing a two-pronged strategy for building these relationships: to explore our shared experiences as historically oppressed communities, and highlight the existing overlap within our cultures. Through educational programs such as the Black History Month Bunka-sai (Cultural Fair) that was hosted at a local high school in February, we effectively explored mutual experiences such as the segregated troop regiments of WWII. That event also featured a screening of Jon Osaki’s short documentary Reparations, which explores the struggle for Black Reparations through the context of Japanese American Redress. While this earlier program was effective at conveying the shared history within an educational context, for a large-scale public event like the Shofuso Cherry Blossom Festival we figured it would be better to lead with a celebration of our shared culture instead.
In the hundreds of conversations that I have had with individuals and organizations in the African American community about this project, the topic of music came up every time. Anyone who has spent time in Japan will recognize the impact that Black music culture has had on Japanese popular music. From the Jazz era to Funk, City Pop, Reggae, and Hip Hop - African American artists have inspired generations of Japanese musicians to take up these genres and leave their mark on global music culture. As Japanese Americans, we too derive much of our popular music expression from musical genres originated within the Black community. From swing jazz dances in the concentration camps to Hip Hop culture infused street fashion boutique Japangeles, the influence of African American culture is palpable across generations of Nikkei cultural expression.
Undoubtedly there are ethnomusicologists whose scholarly work on this subject could convey these points with far greater nuance, but from my limited knowledge of music theory a few facts stick out. Blues is based on the Pentatonic scale – the same five tones that are used in Japanese traditional music. Syncopation and call-and-response lyrics are often used in both Gospel and Japanese folk music. Taiko drumming and African percussion styles are both based in complex polyrhythms. In the way that we might recognize sonic Black-ness within musical genres that are derived from African American communities, given these similarities there must also be some correlation to the aural properties of Japanese music. Ultimately these were the elements that this concert series sought to explore.
The festival began on Friday night with a Hip Hop show featuring Shin-Nisei rapper G Yamazawa as our headliner. G had previously performed at the 2018 JACL National Convention in Philadelphia so he was a natural choice for the lineup. Funnily enough, the idea for a Hip Hop night actually started in a conversation with Jason Chu, a Chinese American artist-activist. Chu recently released a concept album titled FACE VALUE with rapper and R&B singer Alan Z that explores the history of Chinese Exclusion contextualized within the uptick of anti-Asian violence amid the pandemic. Billed as “the Chinatown Tour” – they also performed alongside MC Tingbudong aka Jamel Mims, an African American man who studied Hip Hop in China on a Fulbright Scholarship. Mims raps and sings in Mandarin Chinese as well as English, so the two acts combined were already addressing the themes of solidarity building and intersectionality that our concert series was built around. As the primary sponsor of their tour, Organization of Chinese Americans was also involved by helping to promote the concert and hosting a situational awareness workshop and bystander intervention training as part of their visit to Philadelphia.
To contextualize their tour within the work we are doing in West Philly, it was also important to have local artists involved. DJ Oluwafemi (who is currently Shofuso’s artist-in-residence) is a Nigerian-born artist and musician who has been based in Philly for the past two decades. Femi started out the evening with a DJ set to warm up the crowd and served as house deejay for each of the hip hop artists. The other local artist who joined Friday’s lineup was Red Mcfly, a biracial Black-Japanese American whose given name is Kenjiro Lucas. Bookending the Chinatown Tour performances with our two Nikkei artists we were able to frame the broader conversation of Black-Asian solidarity within our Japanese American community’s relationship to Hip Hop.
Day two of the concert series was billed as our Taiko and Funk night, anchored by none other than Japanese Hawaiian taiko virtuoso Kenny Endo. For anyone who is familiar with Endo and his music, you can see how his group would feel at home among the lineup of West Philly Funk bands. Case in point, as Endo was loading-in he ran into the drummer from the next act, Badd Kitti, whom he had played with several decades earlier in Hawaii. Speaking to the incredible versatility of Endo’s troupe, as part of their performance we coordinated a special collaboration with Opera Philadelphia. JACL Philadelphia has had an interesting relationship with Opera Philadelphia over the years, from a rocky start when we successfully advocated against their use of yellowface makeup in the 2016 production of Puccini’s Turandot. Through that experience we were able to develop a productive collaboration that has led to the inclusion of a Japanese Canadian directed production featured during their Fall 2022 Opera Festival. Amid our ongoing cultural advisory conversations, Senior VP of Artistic Operations David Levy had the inspired idea to pair a chorus of opera singers alongside Endo’s troupe. The result was a magical rendition of Ame, a song that Endo originally dedicated to the victims of 9/11, performed with a dozen opera singers under the sakura at peak bloom.
Neither Badd Kitti nor Omar’s Hat, the two West Philly Funk bands who joined the bill after Endo have Japanese American members, which initially led to some questions from our own team about whether they should be included in the lineup. In talking with Brieze Thompson, the keytar extraordinaire frontwoman for Badd Kitti, she reminded me that most of the musical equipment that gives Funk its unique sound is made in Japan. In essence, without the synthesizers, keyboards, and effects pedals designed and produced in Japan, Funk would not sound the way it does. Needless to say, she sold me on that idea, and the local crowds from West Philly came out in droves to see both bands.
DJ Oluwafemi also returned on Saturday night for a special deejay set combining motion graphics projection timed to the beat of the music he was performing. Drums, patterns, and the rhythmic evolution of repetition are woven into Oluwafemi’s African-inspired musical style and visual explorations. Combined with the abstract renditions of sakura blossoms that he developed for this year’s festival design, Oluwafemi visualized the coalescence of African and Japanese culture merging into a third distinct, blended culture. It was beautiful to behold, and I look forward to seeing what else Oluwafemi comes up with during his residency at Shofuso, which extends through Summer 2022.
The final day of the Sakura Concert Series was the longest, with performances running from 11am-5pm. Starting with a welcoming performance from KyoDaiko, Philadelphia’s longest running taiko troupe, we then transitioned into a brief speaker program titled the Unity Ceremony. Featuring Ambassador Mikio Mori of the Consul General of Japan in New York and local elected officials, speakers stressed the importance of friendship within the context of US-Japan Relations and Black-Asian solidarity. Following the ceremony was dance group NYC Yosakoi Team Kogyoku, who performed a form of Japanese dance born in the post-WWII era that embraces Jazz and Hip Hop fusion with traditional Japanese music.
The rest of the afternoon showcased a variety of percussion groups including Swarthmore Taiko Ensemble, Casual Fifth Taiko, and Yoko Nakahashi Taiko in addition to two West Philly based drumlines. First up was the West Powelton Drummers, also known as the Sixers Stixers because they frequently perform courtside at Philadelphia 76ers home games. Another drumline called Acarajé brought the tradition of Samba Reggae styled after the Afro-Blocos of Bahia, Brazil. Created in the 1970s as a mix of Brazilian Samba and Jamaican Reggae by Neguinho do Samba (Father of Samba Reggae), this music is often cited as an extension of the Brazilian Black Pride Movement as it sought to return Samba to its African roots. As the program season at Shofuso continues through the Fall, we hope to expand on the connections made between various percussionists through a series of free taiko workshops being offered by Mac Evans of Casual Fifth Taiko.
Philadelphia Jazz Project contributed one of the highlights of the festival as they presented a tribute to John Coltrane performed by the Dylan Band Ensemble. The centerpiece of their performance was a special rendition of Coltrane’s under-recognized classic, Peace On Earth, which was written for and debuted during Coltrane’s concert tour of Japan in 1966. Philadelphia Jazz Project Director Homer Jackson described the performance thusly, “this song and his visit to the Nagasaki Peace Park commemorating the atomic bombing of the city on August 9, 1945, illuminated Coltrane’s desire to seek and inspire a greater peace and understanding among all human beings. In this special concert, the Dylan Band Ensemble transformed the original composition into a suite of various movements, sonic textures and moods offering musical features for solos, duets, trios and full ensemble performance segments culminating in a triumphant celebration of life and the newness of Spring.” Given the fact that Coltrane lived in Philadelphia just a few blocks from where the concert series was held in Fairmount Park, this is yet another testament to the existing connections among our communities.
Following the incredibly impactful performance curated by Philadelphia Jazz Project, the festival ended with the one group who embodied the vision of our concert series in a most literal sense. Hailing from Brooklyn, NY, the eight-piece Reggae band Brown Rice Family is comprised of Japanese, Jamaican, Haitian, Nigerian, and South African musicians united in their quest towards global solidarity. The members' diverse national backgrounds set the stage for their unique coexistence through musical creativity and dance. In their own words, the band describes their sound as, “guided by a strong belief in the natural flow of things, BRF provides the masses with a distinctively organic World Roots Music, which encompasses reggae, hip hop, dancehall, afro beat, jazz stylings, rock, Brazilian, Latin, and funk. BRF’s colorful sound waves will carry rhythm surfers on a musical journey that straddles ancient and contemporary global sounds.” Although they were originally planning a 30-minute set, Brown Rice Family had so much fun with the audience that they played for a full hour – inviting participants on stage and even jumping offstage to dance with the crowd.
The reception of this festival was overwhelmingly positive with an estimated 17,000 attendees between all three days. Hosting an event on a scale like this during the pandemic has not been without its challenges, but thankfully the large outdoor environment in Fairmount Park allowed audience members to safely distance themselves. As we continue to navigate this next stage of the pandemic, it gave me great hope to see how an incredibly diverse group of people who reflect the full diversity of our city came together in celebration of shared culture. There will be much work needed to continue the work of Black-Asian solidarity, but I believe this event has laid a foundation from which our communities can grow together in meaningful ways as we continue the program season at Shofuso.