By: Yildiz Subuk, Staff Writer
Content warning: mentions of internment camps.
The Vancouver Asian Film Festival premiered brilliant films and documentaries this year. One that stood out was Nobuko Miyamoto: A Song in Movement, which tracks the life of third-generation Japanese immigrant Nobuko Miyamoto. As an artist and storyteller who decided to break away from the white gaze to create powerful performance art and music, Miyamoto has established a legacy of using art to unite communities and creating spaces to tell the stories of the unheard.
During her childhood, Miyamoto and her family were part of the 120,000 Japanese Americans forced to relocate in internment camps during World War II. They spent most of the war in crowded concentration camps, facing discrimination from American society during a time of mass anti-Japanese sentiment. After the war, Miyamoto, who had found music as a way to lull the isolation she felt, went into performance art.
Miyamoto’s voice, soft yet powerful, radiates in every minute of the documentary as she presents her reflections on art and the importance of creating community through her craft. She is not simply answering questions about her life, but providing a narrative. The film provides decades of archived footage edited together to effortlessly give audiences a visual progression of her life, allowing her to have full agency over her story.
“Miyamoto’s voice, soft yet powerful, radiates in every minute of the documentary as she presents her reflections on art and the importance of creating community through her craft.”
The early years of Miyamoto’s career had her working in musicals like West Side Story and Flower Drum Song. As an upcoming star, she realized there was something problematic in the way her culture was being represented when she performed “Chop Suey” on stage for Flower Drum Song. She realized the audience she performed to had no actual knowledge of her culture, and the authentic representation she thought she would be a part of was, instead, a cheap watered-down attempt to fetishize East Asian cultures. She was performing for the white gaze, a concept that obscured the story of her people through stereotypical caricatures of her culture. “There was something in the way those delighted folks looked at us. In a flash I realized, WE were “chop suey,” she said. The white gaze notes how stories are made to keep white audiences at the center of viewership. As Miyamoto walked away from the mainstream, a spark was lit. She didn’t want to be used as a prop in cheap attempts at multicultural storytelling — she wanted to create spaces for underrepresented voices to thrive.
Miyamoto’s dedication to merging art and activism, a process known as artivism, started with performing songs during advocacy campaigns. She did not perform in venues, but in open areas amid large groups of people who were vocal about change. In her early years, she was involved with the Black Panthers and protested the Vietnam war. These experiences, as well as her desire to create spaces for Asian communities to learn and engage with art across America, show her belief in the transformative power of art. These spaces include empty studios and Buddhist temples, where she taught performative art and spent a lot of her early years as a mother.
A Song in Movement not only captures Miyamoto’s story from a personal lens, but also a communal one. We see the impact her art has on the Asian communities she gets involved in, and we see how she uses music and performance as an instrument for revolution and breaking the mold of white-dominated storytelling through music. The documentary captures how Miyamoto starts a performance project called FandangObon. This dance project turned into many different communities collectively dancing in a circle and playing their music. It’s a dynamic form of performance that not only links communities together, but also invites many to engage in it.
The beauty and empowerment permeating in songs like “We Are the Children” could only be created by someone who not only understands the importance of authentic storytelling, but has devoted genuine care and taken action throughout her life. It’s a testament to the rich thoughts behind A Song in Movement, as well as the impact it has on storytelling within localized communities. A Song in Movement is the perfect example of a story that connects the audience with a past that laid the foundations of decentering art that only focuses on the white gaze.
