Cultural Diplomacy in the spirit of our Community: Shofuso and Japanese Americans

This article originally appeared in the 2021 Holiday Issue of Pacific Citizen.

When I learned that this year’s holiday issue theme would be the spirit of the community, I began thinking about how this concept relates to the work that all of us do here in the JACL. Our entire organization is based on the legacy of the Nisei who laid the foundation for both our civil rights agenda and preservation of Japanese American history and culture. As active members of this organization we are contributing to a story that began long before us and will hopefully continue on for many generations after we are gone. With these topics in mind, this theme also helped me to better understand the work I am currently doing at Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia (JASGP).

JASGP is a non-profit organization that seeks to foster mutual curiosity, understanding, and collaboration between Japan and Philadelphia. Like many Japan America societies, their programs are a mix between citizen-to-citizen diplomacy, transnational business relationship building, and cultural programs. Since merging with Friends of the Japanese House and Garden in 2017, JASGP also operates Shofuso Japanese House and Garden in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, hosting over 40,000 visitors annually.

In August 2021 I accepted a new full-time position with JASGP to oversee a two-year grant funded project called Reimagining Recovery. Funded by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, the project’s main goals are to reestablish Shofuso as a Japanese American community site, and also to engage the predominantly Black neighborhood residents of Parkside West Philadelphia, where the house is located.  

This position differs greatly from the work I have done in the past in Japanese American community spaces, in that the staff of JASGP who operate the Shofuso site are predominantly white. In one sense, ancestry is not a prerequisite for cultural participation, especially given the distance than many of us from the Sansei, Yonsei, and Gosei generations have from our ancestral culture of origin. That being said, there are certain sensitivities that people from outside of our community will never fully understand – for example, the extent to which cultural stereotypes impact our lived experiences as persons of Japanese ancestry in the United States.

In the last year and a half since the pandemic began and in the aftermath of the George Floyd Uprising and ongoing anti-Asian violence, there has been a lot of soul-searching within JASGP. As a predominantly white institution that disseminates Japanese culture abroad, the staff of JASGP acknowledged that their organization needed to revisit the impact their programs have on the lived experiences of the Japanese American community.

Granted Japanese Americans are few in the Philadelphia region (approximately 3,000 according to the latest census), but our community is notably absent from many of the cultural programs that they offer. This may be in part due to the disconnect that many multigenerational Japanese Americans feel from both traditional and contemporary Japanese culture. For those of us whose families have assimilated to the extent that we no longer speak Japanese at home, it can sometimes be intimidating to walk into Japanese cultural spaces without feeling the imposter syndrome. Whatever the reason, Japanese Americans are largely absent from the one physical site in Philadelphia that is visibly Japanese.  

The Reimagining Recovery project was developed to address these issues head-on through a series of staff trainings and implementation of a Diversity, Equity, Access, and Inclusion plan. This in turn will help JASGP’s staff to adopt a more intentional approach to engage both the Japanese American and African American communities through arts-based programming at the Shofuso site and elsewhere in the Parkside neighborhood.

Historically Japan America Societies (and really much of the US-Japan Relations apparatus) were not designed to include Japanese Americans as their main constituencies. We have either been thought of as too Japanese or too American to fully participate in diplomatic discussions in an unbiased way. The persons of Japanese ancestry who have been involved are typically Shin-Nikkei and Japanese expats, who obviously have a very different understanding of Japanese culture and the impact that its proliferation has on the lived experiences of our Japanese diaspora.  

Similarly, African Americans have also been excluded from many of these conversations involving cultural exchange with overseas Japanese. This project offers a valuable opportunity to reframe this discussion by challenging the fundamental notion of who is American enough to participate in diplomatic affairs. In the local context with Philadelphia being a predominantly Black city, this shift is part of a larger narrative involving equitable representation in all facets of society.

As I began my tenure with this organization, my first project was to develop and lead a five-part staff workshop series about the history and culture of the Japanese American community. Having gone through over ten hours of training with the entire staff of JASGP, I am pleased at the level of nuanced dialogue and intentionality with which our team is now approaching these topics. My hope is that this newly gained perspective will help shift some of JASGP’s programming to be more inclusive of our local Japanese American community, which in turn will create a space for more Japanese Americans to be involved in this organization’s work. After all, who but Japanese Americans stand to benefit more from the cultural exchange that JASGP has to offer? Especially considering the strength of the Shofuso site in dispelling misconceptions about Japan and its people by demystifying Japanese culture and making it more accessible to the broader American public.

In many ways, Shofuso was created as a physical embodiment of US-Japan relations during the postwar era. Just eight years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the people and government of Japan came together to fund and build Shofuso. Conceived by Japanese architect Junzo Yoshimura, Shofuso was loosely based on the 17th century temple guest house at Kojo-in and designed for an exhibit at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. Although the exhibit series “House in the Garden” that Shofuso exhibited in was meant to focus on Modern architecture, Yoshimura successfully argued that the utilitarian nature where form follows function within the traditional Japanese house met the contemporary Western definition of Modernism.

The house was built entirely using traditional construction methods in Nagoya before being disassembled and shipped to New York where it was reconstructed in the sculpture garden at MOMA. In the two seasons that Shofuso was exhibited in Spring/Summer 1954-1955 more than 220,000 visitors attended. This exhibit had such a significant impact on normalizing US-Japan relations in the postwar era that New York’s Japan Society (then under John D. Rockefeller III’s leadership) decided to pay for Shofuso to be relocated to the current site in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, where it would be shown in perpetuity alongside the park’s other historic houses. This location was also chosen because it was close to the former site of the Japanese Pavilion at the 1876 Centennial Exposition, itself the first physical presence of Japanese cultural exchange in the United States. Unfortunately, the city of Philadelphia devoted few resources to the upkeep of the site and after several decades of deferred maintenance and frequent acts of vandalism throughout the 1970s, Shofuso fell into a state of disrepair.

As I was onboarded into my new role, I was surprised to learn that it was actually JACL Philadelphia leadership who helped to organize fundraising and restoration efforts that brought the house back to its present condition. They did so by establishing a separate non-profit organization in 1982 called Friends of the Japanese House and Garden (FJHG). In past FJHG board rosters I found the names of many Nisei leaders including Louise Maehara, Hiroshi Uyehara, Mary Watanabe, Shigeko Kawano and even Jack Ozawa – our founding Chapter President in whose name the JACL Philadelphia Scholarship is named.

I have spent much of the past four months learning about the leadership role that our local JACL Chapter played in restoring and maintaining Shofuso, and how it is that over time our organizations and members have grown apart. The founder and first president of FJHG was the late Mary Watanabe. Watanabe was an active member of JACL Philadelphia as were Reiko Gaspar, Hiroshi Uyehara, and Steve Yanai, all of whom also served as president of FJHG from its origins until the early 2000s.

The only surviving member of the original group who founded FJHG is Sansei Teresa Maebori. A longtime board member of the Philadelphia JACL and past Chapter President, Maebori remembers, “It was very much a crossover in terms of JACL and the Friends, but they were entirely different kinds of organizations with a different mission. As the years went by, the JACL members who were the original people that started it - they've all died. So, because of that we've lost that connection, and it went more towards Japanese. You know, it's a Japanese house rather than Japanese American house, so I think that's why there wasn't as much togetherness there.” 

Mary Watanabe played a pivotal role in fundraising for the restoration work, having previously organized major fundraisers for Nisei Judge William Marutani’s reelection campaign in 1977. She was also deeply invested in traditional Japanese arts and culture. Maebori continues, “I think it was Mary Watanabe who really understood Shofuso as a treasure so she started this group. She was very much in with the arts community, she and her husband Warren, their ukiyo-e collection went to the museum, so they had a very strong relationship with the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Her connections in that way sort of came along with the show.”

Another Nisei leader Louise Maehara was instrumental in organizing the cultural programs at Shofuso in the early decades of FJHG. Maehara served on the board for more than a decade from 1983-1994 and made sure both her daughter Miki Rotman and grandson Lucas got involved. Miki Rotman recalled, “when the Japanese roofers came to repair the house, Louise cooked all their meals from scratch. It was important to her that they felt welcomed, and they appreciated the extra effort Japanese Americans put to make them feel at home.”

Maehara’s grandson Yonsei Lucas Rotman worked at Shofuso as a teenager in the late 1980s and remembers both Japanese Americans and Shin-Issei working collaboratively on cultural programs during that time. “Michiko Bley was one of the many first-generation Japanese who worked as tour guides at the house. They had the added duty of teaching non-Japanese and us less knowledgeable JA's about the house and the culture. Michiko-san was a lovely person and really spent so much time teaching me about the house, Japanese culture, and tea ceremony. She was like an aunt to me.” Shin-Issei Taeko Shervin was also deeply invested in sharing her culture with generations of Japanese Americans and non-Japanese audiences as a tea practitioner from the Urasenke school. Now her students continue the tradition at regular intervals throughout the season, practicing tea and hosting public demonstrations out of Shofuso’s tea house.

For many years, a major annual fundraising project for JACL Philadelphia was the preparation and selling of bento box lunches at the Summer Festival that was held at Shofuso. Preparing the bento was a fun event that brought together many of our members, their families, and friends in a celebration of Japanese culture. This also gave the Sansei an opportunity to learn how to prepare traditional Japanese dishes like chirashi zushi and teriyaki chicken, which were not readily available at the time, before Japanese restaurants had proliferated the city of Philadelphia. Birthdays, weddings, and even memorial services were held for prominent JACL members at the only physical site in Philadelphia that was identifiable as a Japanese American community space.

Outside of her work at Shofuso, Mary Watanabe was instrumental alongside Hiroshi Uyehara, Sumiko Kobayashi, and several other JACL Nisei leaders in helping to organize the 1985 exhibit “The Japanese American Experience” at the Balch Institute of Ethnic Studies. At the same time another Philadelphia Chapter member Grayce Uyehara was leading JACL’s efforts in the Redress Movement through her role as Executive Director of the Legislative Education Committee. Based on the overlap of persons involved in each effort, the intent of the Nisei generation in getting involved with Shofuso becomes clear. I believe their efforts to preserve and maintain Shofuso were an intentional way of sharing the traditional culture of Japan with local Philadelphia audiences in a way that would help dispel harmful stereotypes and misconceptions about our own Japanese American community.

Throughout the history of Japanese diaspora in the United States and elsewhere, rarely if ever have we been in control of the narratives that are used to describe our communities. From the beginning of diplomatic relations with Japan, cultural exchange has played a central role in the ways that the general public has understood Japan and its people.

During the 1980s-1990s when US-Japan trade war rhetoric was reigniting anti-Japanese sentiments nationwide, and especially in the aftermath of the murder of Vincent Chin, how could the Nisei involvement with Shofuso be read as anything but activism? Without confirmation from the Nisei themselves I can only speculate, but perhaps if these motivations had been made clearer to younger generations in the Japanese American community we would have maintained a more direct role in Shofuso over the past two decades.

Although some Japanese Americans remain involved in the Urasenke and Omotesenke tea schools, our community’s direct involvement in the daily operations at Shofuso was lost as engagement with traditional Japanese cultural practice waned among the Sansei. Much like the heritage businesses in West Coast Japantowns that are closing due to lack of interest from the younger generations, it seems that there were not enough Sansei willing to take up the mantle as the Nisei aged out of active participation in the organization. In their place came newer immigrant generations of Shin-Nikkei and non-Japanese people who developed an appreciation for the culture while working or studying in Japan. These demographics were also reflected in the membership and board of JASGP prior to their merger with FJHG.

JACL Philadelphia Chapter Board Member Hiro Nishikawa offers his comments on the separate history of JASGP, whose origins can be traced to the international business community. “Half of the active members of JASGP were white and most of them had connections with businesses in Japan. Some of them even knew how to speak Japanese because they've been there so often, so there was an interesting mix of people white and Asian that constituted the JASGP, but it was a business focused and business centered organization. When they merged with Shofuso a few years ago, I thought that was a huge shift because when Shofuso was established as a cultural organization it was managed by Japanese Americans and Japanese expatriates. That focus shifted over time, but it was a cultural organization and so very distinct from JASGP. So that merger… I still find it puzzling. I think the business part of it was largely supported by people who have Japanese background, who came to the US on temporary job assignments, and then went back to Japan. Those kinds of families constituted a significant portion of JASGP.”

When JASGP was established in 1994 there was still a lot on incoming investment from overseas Japanese corporation in the Greater Philadelphia region. Although their membership was largely Shin-Nikkei, some Nisei leaders were also involved with JASGP during their first decade of operation. Grayce Uyehara served on their board for several years starting in 1994. Her son Paul Uyehara also served a brief stint on the JASGP board in 1998 during his term as JACL Philadelphia Chapter President. He remembers, “I don't recall any discussion with Mom about her motivations for getting involved. It might have been a networking angle, something she was very aware of from the Legislative Education Committee work where it was so instrumental to lobbying. Also, the tie to the consul, possible JACL membership recruitment (she was the chapter membership chair at some points), and corporate funding.” One might also guess that having a seat at the table where conversations that might impact the Japanese American community were taking place, also played a factor in Grayce Uyehara’s decision to join the board.

In the past three decades since the Nikkei stock market crash in 1989 new investment from Japan has slowed, although Subaru of America headquarters are located in nearby Camden, New Jersey along with a few local branches of overseas Japanese pharmaceutical companies in the Philadelphia suburbs. With less interest in Japanese business programs and declining populations of Shin-Nikkei immigrants, JASGP gradually shifted their focus towards cultural presentation from the mid-2000s onwards. Given the focus in that era on “Cool Japan” popular culture products like anime and manga, this actually further alienated many Japanese Americans from participating in JASGP’s cultural programming, which was unrelated to their own experiences or understanding of Japanese culture.

The merger between JASGP and Shofuso is still somewhat new; only three full seasons of programming have taken place prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the current state of flux, this presents a unique opportunity for the Japanese American community to help redefine the kind of work that JASGP does going forward. To be successful in this endeavor, we as a community must revisit the ways that Japanese Americans engage in cultural diplomacy – with both our country of ancestral origin, and non-Japanese audiences in the United States.

Culture is a powerful tool when used to build empathy among diverse communities. This is particularly effective in regions like Philadelphia where we do not have a large Japanese American population. For that reason, it is important for Japanese Americans to have a say in how Japan is being represented, and this project is our opportunity to reclaim the narrative in a way that is inclusive of both overseas Japanese and multigenerational Japanese American perspectives. Our historic connection to Shofuso through the Nisei JACLers who saved it can be the starting point for these conversations to continue as we work together with JASGP and the Parkside residents to define what the Japanese American relationship to this site is in our current time, and for generations to come.

I am grateful to the cultural stewards who came before me in FJHG and JASGP, both Japanese American and non-Japanese, who have worked diligently for decades to preserve the Shofuso site. It takes a tremendous amount of vision from the staff, and board leadership to acknowledge the need for a project like this to take place, and also courage to embrace the change that will come as a result. I am hopeful that the conversations we are having now will eventually rekindle the special relationship that our local Japanese American community once held with Shofuso. In doing so, I believe that we can move forward together with JASGP in the spirit of our community.