Yeah, Nobuko and some of us started saying, “Well, it’s time, instead of borrowing Kin records from Tokyo, we should start doing our own.” And so we began writing things – mixed Japanese/English and then finally in English. We’re still trying to get live orchestras – groups – to play it rather than tape that and play that record. It’s an on-going thing. One of them was the Gardener’s Dance, which, unless you’re born and raised here, you don’t have a clue what’s going on. People from Japan are going, “What is this?” because they have no experience of a Japanese gardener in California. So it was based on that. There was some resistance to it. Some gardeners thought that we were making fun of them, but the majority of gardeners who heard it, they really liked it. They thanked us for it, which is nice. But there was some objection to it because we used Japanese English.
Date: December 3, 2004
Location: California, US
Interviewer: Art Hansen, Sojin Kim
Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum
Journal feed
