Transpacific Im/Mobilities: Two Movements in Nisei Musical Practice
2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/19452349.41.1.04
ISSN1945-2349
Autores Tópico(s)Asian American and Pacific Histories
ResumoTo address the social and musical experiences of Japanese Americans in the first half of the twentieth century—to consider their passage across oceans, archipelagoes, urban centers, and rural outposts—is to trace a history of continuous and multifaceted mobility. At the same time, however, to do so is also to confront a certain terminological paradox. That is, if one aims to account for the centrality of movement and motion to Japanese American musical practice—or to endeavor in any way to deploy mobility as a thematic or interpretive keyword—one must acknowledge the equal importance of immobility as well. Paradoxically, one must grant that the histories of Japanese American musical practice are equally, and often simultaneously, ones of migration as well as incarceration, of place-making and displacement, of mobility and immobility at once. This is indeed the case for the vast number of individual and shared experiences that have come to populate the historical record, and which can be traced through an ever-widening array of archival initiatives, oral history projects, and academic studies. Across these accounts, one repeatedly encounters the impossibility of discussing either term apart from the other, and thus the impossibility of framing the very notion of mobility in the largely celebratory terms in which it is often invoked in public discourse.Here, I have elected to foreground this issue by way of addressing im/mobility, a typographical rendering that illustrates the impossibility of invoking what scholars like Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong have termed “the American myth of mobility” without first giving voice to the exclusions and immobilizations that cast its centrality into relief.1 This myth of mobility, as many have observed, is unquestionably one of the most durable formations of the American cultural imagination, if not its sine qua non. Whether framed in geographic, aesthetic, or socioeconomic terms, the image of the endless frontier and its assurance of unbounded movement and acquisition serves as the dominant aspirational metaphor for American public life and its horizons of possibility. Yet since the time of the Middle Passage, the most enduring symbolic vectors of this aspiration—the oceanic route, the transcontinental railroad, the highway—have connoted captivity, displacement, and racialized exclusion for Black, Asian, indigenous, and other marginalized populations as often as they have signaled the promise of freedom. Likewise, as Wong notes, Asian Americans have until quite recently been “conspicuously absent in existing generalist formulations of a presumably universally applicable theory of American mobility” despite partaking in its discursive and material construction over the course of nearly two centuries.2In this way, the experiences of minoritized populations in the United States belie the mythopoetics of mobility that prevail in American narratives of unfettered freedom, ascent, expansion, and conquest over acceded terrain. In contrast to these heroic narratives, minority experiences have historically involved the inextricable dynamics of displacement and forced relocation, in which the fundamental foreclosure of agency amounts to its own form of immobilization. The extraction and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II throws this paradox into relief: insofar as mobility entailed both moving and being moved, the term could therefore index both the assurance and the denial of the very freedom it implied.With this history in mind, one can fairly note that for Japanese Americans (as for a plurality of nonwhite and indigenous minority populations in the United States), to seek social and geographical mobility has historically entailed exposure to social and geographical displacement (and it is worth noting that the latter is often the very condition that the term “mobility” serves to euphemize). At the same time, however, many accounts of Japanese American incarceration during World War II suggest that the paired ordeal of forced displacement and immobilization did not necessarily equate to a total foreclosure of mobility. In music, one finds numerous instances of agile adaptation, self-fashioning, and imaginative redistributions of the sensible, where those immobilized by circumstance used sound and the body to create new spaces of social and aesthetic ambulation that extended across and beyond the camps themselves.3 One can also point to many Japanese Americans whose willingness or refusal to be mobilized for participation in the American war effort constituted one of the most consequential exercises of agency that could be conceived under conditions of forced imprisonment.In this sense, Japanese American musical narratives offer (to adapt Wong's phrase) “oppositional mobilities” that cast critical light on the American mobility myth. They serve, in other words, as correctives to otherwise heroic or celebratory accounts that risk reifying the false premises of Manifest Destiny so deeply embedded in the American usage of “mobility.”4 What is crucial to note here, however, is that many Japanese American musical narratives have found articulation in the vernacular of jazz. Of course, it is not surprising that this would be the case in the 1930s and 1940s, when jazz was at the zenith of its popularity in the United States. Yet it is also worth considering how Japanese Americans articulated their experiences through a musical tradition so thoroughly shaped by the resonant paradox of im/mobility among Black Americans—for Angela Davis, a music that bespoke both the emancipatory promise of transits like the Great Migration, as well as the “frustrations, disappointments, and disillusionment” that many Black men and women “suffered as a consequence” of such movements.5 In short, to the extent that jazz has served, in Fumi Okiji's words, as a “dwelling in mobility”—a “mobile squat” for those wandering, displaced, or seeking return to new homes—it is especially worth attending to its significance in the social and musical lives of Japanese Americans.6 Such a project is vital, I argue, if we are to come to terms with experiences of movement and motion that point away from the ordained myths of the settler-colonialist frontier and toward broader coalitions and archipelagic solidarities among the diasporic and the dispossessed.It is in the latter spirit that this article highlights the movements of Betty Inada and Helen Sumida, two Japanese American musical performers whose career trajectories from the early 1930s to the mid-1950s illuminate the imbrication of these terms—mobility and immobility—in the wider context and history of Asian American jazz. For those who have read George Yoshida's invaluable 1997 compendium Reminiscing in Swingtime, E. Taylor Atkins's 2001 study Blue Nippon, or Michael Jin's more recent 2021 work Citizens, Immigrants, and the Stateless, Inada and Sumida may be recognizable as part of a cohort of Nisei (second-generation) Japanese American singers and musicians from the West Coast who found notable success performing in Japan before, during, and after World War II, and who helped to shape the sound of jazz in Japan from its interwar advent to its renaissance in the early postwar period and after.7 Yoshida notes with some irony that, obstructed by racialized barriers to entry in the world of American popular entertainment, these “adventuresome Nisei did heed the cry, ‘Go west, young man!’” and set off between 1930 and 1935 for Japan, where they swiftly ascended to the upper echelons of that nation's budding world of jazz and revue entertainment.8 Embraced by Japanese audiences and critics as fluent interpreters of jazz and American popular music, Nisei performers succeeded, as Atkins suggests, in translating this “aura of authenticity” into massive popularity on records, stages, and silver screens.9From the vantage point of Japanese studies, these Nisei performers are vital yet largely overlooked figures in the transpacific history of Japanese popular music—figures whose movements helped to forge networks of performance and media circulation that linked the development of jazz in Japan to the transits of the nation's diaspora, and that now reveal the musical economy of Japan's burgeoning culture industry as one buoyed not only by importation but by remittance as well. Elsewhere, I have discussed the strangely unheralded significance of these performers in Japan's musical and cultural history, as well as the vibrant transpacific circuit of sonic and social crossings in which this history is embedded.10 Here, however, I am interested more specifically in considering how this musical remittance economy relates to both the mobility of these figures and the experience of wartime incarceration that so many Japanese Americans underwent. In so doing, I hope to elaborate the intimate coarticulations of mobility and immobility that characterize the experiences of so many Nisei across this period, and thus (in Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong's salient phrasing) to trace mobility and “its various forms, its promises, its elusiveness, its negation.”11To this end, we can turn first to Fumiko “Betty” Inada (1913–2011), one of the best-known singers of Japan's interwar jazz age. Born in Sacramento, California, to Issei (first-generation Japanese migrant) parents, Inada in fact spent a portion of her childhood in Japan, where she lived with her grandparents near Osaka while her mother and father worked to establish a more stable footing for the family in the United States. After developing a keen interest in jazz and popular music in Osaka—the epicenter of Japan's budding world of jazz and revue entertainment in the mid-1920s—Inada returned to Sacramento shortly before high school and fixed her sights on a career in stage performance.As Yoshida recounts, Inada entered high school in Sacramento at the height of America's 1920s jazz boom and quickly “embraced the exciting new lifestyle” with other Nisei “flapper pals, who wore their hair short, enhanced by celluloid barrettes covered with bright red and green stones,” and learned the steps to the “Black Bottom, the Charleston, the Big Apple and the Lindy Hop.” With broader ambitions for the vaudeville stage, Inada traveled to Los Angeles and joined the Fanchon & Marco revue troupe shortly thereafter. While this arrangement furnished Inada with opportunities to hone her performance chops with a touring company, she quickly grew frustrated with the stereotypical orientalism of the revue's exotic costumes and acrobatics. Consequently, when Inada learned that her friend and fellow Fanchon & Marco performer Fumiko “Alice” Kawahata (1916–2007) had found remarkable success as a headline performer in Japan in the fall of 1932, she endeavored to follow in her wake. Returning to Sacramento, Inada implored her parents to let her join Kawahata in Tokyo, and “after much dogged persistence,” they finally granted their permission. With the Los Angeles-based photographer Tōyō Miyatake acting as her chaperone, Inada left San Francisco for the Port of Yokohama in the spring of 1933.12Once in Tokyo, Inada managed with Kawahata's help to secure a raft of headline bookings at such prominent venues as the Shōchiku Theater and the Florida Ballroom. Yet unlike Kawahata, who drew early accolades mainly for her skill as a dancer, Inada brandished a mature and confident singing voice that earned glowing reviews in the Japanese press. Critics praised her vocal chops as highly polished yet exuberant and “brimming with vitality” (iki wo komete), often highlighting the charming disparity between her outsize vocal personality and her slight figure (she was roughly 4’10”).13 Meanwhile, her proficiency in Japanese allowed her to perform convincing bilingual renditions of the latest Tin Pan Alley hits. On her 1935 recording of “Take a Number from One to Ten” (Columbia JPN 28360b), for instance, she moves deftly between languages, sliding effortlessly from the Japanese verse into the English chorus without altering her phrasing or intonation in any way that might color the transition as jarring or inelegant.14 Through Inada's seamless delivery, the then-novel pairing of Japanese words and jazz rhythms comes across as a natural union.Over the next two years, Inada parlayed these skills as a performer into several national tours of Japan, a string of popular singles with Japan's Columbia Records imprint, and a starring role in the 1936 film Hodō no sasayaki [Whispering Sidewalks], a fictionalized retelling of her own experience as a Nisei singer in Japan. Unfortunately, the film was shelved prior to its anticipated release in Japan after its independent producer, Kaga Shirō, failed to secure a domestic distributor. Yet it was successfully screened for Japanese American audiences in Hawai'i and California over the course of 1936 and 1937, owing to a robust network of Japanese American theater owners, film exchange companies, and community associations that facilitated the importation and exhibition of first-run Japanese films for Nikkei (ethnic Japanese) communities in the United States.15 As with Inada's earlier career in Los Angeles, the problem of the film's domestic immobility found its most evident solution in the increasingly accessible routes of circulation, travel, and capital exchange forming throughout the interwar Pacific.These transpacific paths of capital and media circulation meant that Inada's success in Japan earned her a certain degree of celebrity among Japanese American audiences in Hawai'i and California. But while the escalation of the West Coast anti-Japanese movement in the late 1930s foreclosed the possibility of translating such achievements into renewed mobility in the US entertainment industry, the concurrent intensification of fascist rule in Japan meant that Inada also faced significant hurdles in Tokyo. Yoshida quotes the writer Jin Hayashi's recollection that Inada's hula performances were the topic of particular scandal: “Most . . . thought the hula was very immodest and sexy, a shiri furi dansu (butt-shaking dance).” Consequently, on one occasion the Tokyo Special Higher Police (dutifully in attendance at public concerts in the mid-to-late 1930s) detained Inada on charges of obscenity after a performance with the popular group the Hilo Collegians. Recalling the incident, the Hilo Collegians's ukulele player, Okami Kiyonao, noted that it was only after “much negotiation and explanation about traditional Hawaiian dancing” that they released her.16In turn, the escalation of the Sino-Japanese War and the state's tightening of domestic strictures led to the shuttering of dance halls in Tokyo at the end of 1940, followed by a series of formal decrees against the importation, sale, and performance of “enemy music” (tekisei ongaku) over the course of the Pacific War.17 Yet even with many public venues closed under “emergency” ordinances and Anglo-American jazz and popular music formally proscribed, Inada managed to sustain her career in Japan by joining the popular singer Dick Mine (1908–1991) on official “comfort tours” performing for Japanese troops stationed throughout the empire. Despite the fact that the overt performance of “jazz” was severely circumscribed on the home front, soldiers and officials on the continent enjoyed certain regulatory exemptions, and thus continued to request concerts by many leading Japanese jazz players of the day. Because of this loophole, state-sponsored tours of the empire ironically served as a means for Inada and her peers to continue performing with a degree of creative mobility unavailable to them in the home islands. And though these tour opportunities dwindled in the later war years, Inada's decision to remain in Japan for the duration of the war—and to weather the repressive constraints of fascist rule—meant that she would avoid the experience of forced relocation and imprisonment that her family in California underwent after Pearl Harbor.In a 2017 interview for the Tessaku oral history project, Betty's younger brother Masao “Tom” Inada described his family's incarceration in Tule Lake, the concentration camp on the California–Oregon state border known for serving as a “segregation center” for those who answered “no/no” on the War Relocation Authority's (WRA's) infamous loyalty questionnaire.18 Tom's father, Yoshimatsu, had resolutely answered “no/no” and urged him to do the same. Against his father's wishes, however, Tom chose to answer “yes/yes” to the questionnaire. “I said I don't know anything about Japan and all I know is the United States,” he recalled, noting that the decision prompted the first real argument that he could remember having with his father.19 As a compromise, he promised that he would not volunteer but would serve only if drafted.Tom managed to secure a form of work-release from Tule Lake and worked briefly at an animation studio in New York before being drafted and deployed to the Philippines in the final month of the war. With Japan's surrender and subsequent occupation by the Allied forces, he was then sent to Tokyo to work as a translator in the Dai-ichi building, the general headquarters for the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP). Tom was aware of his sister's fame in the country and inquired about Betty's whereabouts shortly after his arrival. The very next day, he recalled, Betty arrived at his office with Dick Mine in tow. Explaining that she lived nearby, she invited Tom to visit her apartment whenever he was “off-duty and [had] free time,” and Tom readily obliged. Such visits became a regular evening routine, and over the course of his time in Tokyo, Tom avowed that he came to know his older sister much better than he had as a child; having departed for Japan in 1933, Betty was by this time better-known to the Japanese public than to her own brother, though by the vagaries of the war and its aftermath—and through many unplanned and often unwelcome transits—they managed to form a new and fortuitous bond.For Inada, then, the prospects of public success and personal welfare alike demanded that she remain in a near-constant state of movement and motion. In this way, the transnational jazz and performance circuit of the 1930s became a kind of “dwelling in mobility” while neither Japan nor the United States could reliably serve as home or haven. Listening to Inada's recordings across this period, one senses the extent to which she adopted this mobile dwelling as both a home and a space of invention. Slipping nimbly between languages and stylistic idioms, Inada's vocal performances (indebted in style and spirit to so many Black female jazz and blues vocalists of the era) evince a talent and zeal for fugitivity—a knack for translating the ever-present contingency of her circumstances into exuberant displays of phonic and gestural mobility. Nowhere does she seem more at home than in the spaces of translation and transition between verses, over bridges, or in each perilous leap from one language to the next.Inada's case was far from typical, however. Alongside Inada, a number of Nisei singers, dancers, and musicians ventured into Japanese show business in the mid-1930s, with varying levels of success. Among this cohort were Helen Sumida, Tib Kamayatsu, Helen Honda, Taft Beppu, and Rickey Miyagawa. Born in Seattle in 1907, Shin'ichirō “Rickey” Miyagawa came from a relatively affluent family of some status in the city's Japanese community, and by 1931 he had garnered his own reputation as a charismatic stage singer and director of local variety show productions. Already a seasoned performer upon his 1934 arrival in Tokyo, Miyagawa swiftly endeared himself to Japanese audiences as a handsome, sweet-voiced crooner. Despite this promising early reception, however, Miyagawa seemed to grow rapidly disillusioned with his role in the industry. Roughly a year after his Japanese debut, Miyagawa confessed his general distaste for crooners and “how hard [he tried] to croon,” lamenting in a feature article for the Taihoku Nippō that “moaning into mikes and from stages” was “very wearing on the nerves, especially if you hate crooners.” The article dutifully observed the irony that “Japan's one and only crooner” would “disapprove of his work so thoroughly,” though it concurred with Miyagawa's dim assessment of crooning (or “moaning low”) as a comparatively low form of musical expression.20Proving such remarks to be genuine, Miyagawa brought his tenure in Japanese show business to a close shortly thereafter. According to Yoshida, Miyagawa renounced his US citizenship after the outbreak of the Pacific War and traded his career as a crooner in Tokyo for a position as a translator in the Imperial Japanese Army. Meanwhile, his younger sister Chizuko (going by the stage name “Harumi”) pursued a similarly brief career as a singer in Japan and recorded ten singles (including a well-received cover of “Sing, Sing, Sing” with the Columbia Jazz Band in 1939) before retiring from performance and later returning to the West Coast in the early 1950s. Similar trajectories followed for performers like Taft Beppu and Helen Honda, both of whom enjoyed effusive write-ups in the Japanese press before stepping away from both the limelight and Japan after a few years. As the Nisei reporter Goro Murata noted in a 1935 article for the Rafu shimpo, Honda had grown “somewhat tired of Japan” by 1935, citing poor management and promotion practices, as well as the general difficulty of receiving anything approaching “honest criticism” from Japanese fans.21A number of other Nisei performers echoed Honda's general sense of discomfort with working and living conditions in Japan. In addition to facing the censorial intrusions of an increasingly totalitarian state regime, many cited difficulty in adjusting to the patterns of Japanese daily life; where virulent racism had impeded advancement in the United States, such barriers seemed to have been replaced, in Japan, by a pervasive sense of cultural and linguistic immobility. In this respect, these performers shared common ground with the roughly 40,000 Nisei who came to reside in Japan in the 1930s—a population that the journalist Larry Tajiri described in 1935 as an “unhappy spawn of the Pacific era. . . . unable to slip smoothly into the current of everyday existence in Nippon.” In the same article, Tajiri did cite performers like Fumiko Kawahata, Rickey Miyagawa, and Helen Sumida as outstanding exceptions, alongside a handful of other prominent Nisei expatriates in journalism, banking, and international trade. He noted that on the whole, however, “pitifully few of the second generation who go to Nippon can ever hope to survive the competition of the other 90 million,” and would therefore likely fail to translate their geographical movements into any meaningful form of socioeconomic mobility in Japan.22Despite serving as one of Tajiri's exceptional cases, the singer Sumiko “Helen” Sumida (1916–2008) encountered a similar set of challenges as a Nisei expat in Japan. Born and raised in Fresno County, California, Sumida seemed destined for success from a young age. As a high school student, she attracted attention in Northern California's Nikkei press for her prodigious talents both onstage and in the classroom. Newspaper write-ups effused over her versatile skills as singer (conversant in “blues songs and Japanese songs”), dancer (adept at “toe, tap, soft shoe, eccentric rhumba”), and instrumentalist (piano and accordion), as well as her proficiency in English, Japanese, and Spanish.23 In 1932, Sumida entered a talent show at San Francisco's Golden Gate Theater (cosponsored by the San Francisco Chronicle and RKO Radio Pictures) and was selected as one of seventeen winners out of more than two thousand participants. This accolade led to a contract offer with RKO's West Coast Orpheum theater circuit, and after graduating with honors from Fresno High School, Sumida moved to Los Angeles to study theater and pursue further bookings on stage and screen.24Upon relocating to Los Angeles, Sumida balanced acting classes at the Paul Gerson Dramatic School with dance lessons from the venerated choreographer Michio Itō. In turn, she managed to secure small credits in several feature-length motion pictures, including a role as a maid in the 1934 Spanish-language film La ciudad de cartón (The Cardboard City) and an uncredited, nonspeaking appearance in the 1934 Michael Curtiz film Mandalay. But while these minor roles were reported as illustrious achievements in the Japanese American press, they simultaneously bespoke the inequitable prospects of im/mobility that even the most talented Asian performers would face in America's prewar entertainment industry. Like Inada and others of her generation, the paradoxical reward for Sumida's stunning upward trajectory within the Japanese American community was a regressive and probably short-lived stint in Hollywood. Likely sensing brighter prospects in Tokyo, the seventeen-year-old Sumida set off on a three-month trip to Japan with her parents in the spring of 1934.Japan's leading entertainment companies courted Sumida with contract offers almost immediately upon her arrival.25 She ultimately signed an exclusive contract with Japan's Victor Records imprint and commenced what would become a three-year stay in the country, during which time she plied many of the same industry routes that Betty Inada and Fumiko Kawahata had charted over the previous two years. Within the first twelve months of her sojourn, Sumida toured Japanese-occupied Manchuria, performed at Tokyo's Hibiya Amphitheatre (Hibiya yagi ongakudō), and recorded a series of bilingual singles for Victor. Among her most successful early recordings were a series of comic duets with the popular vocalist and matinee idol Fujiyama Ichirō, with whom she appeared (alongside Kobayashi Chiyoko, Katsutarō, and a cast of other popular Victor recording artists) in the 1935 film Hyaku mannin no gassho [A Chorus of a Million Voices]. During this period, Sumida's salary with Victor reportedly averaged the equivalent of five- to six-hundred dollars a month—an impressive rate that she and her fellow Nisei entertainers were able to justify through their purportedly unique aptitude for American song and dance. Yoshida notes that Victor Records likely viewed Sumida (along with Rickey Miyagawa) as their best hope of rivaling Columbia Records's exclusive deals with Fumiko Kawahata and Betty Inada.26As a singer, Sumida set herself apart from Inada's mature and skillful delivery by adopting a youthful and often comedic vocal sensibility. In her 1934 recording of “Setsunai watashi” [“Miserable Me”] (Victor VI004909), a Japanese-language version of the 1930 Tin Pan Alley hit “My Baby Just Cares for Me,” Sumida's vaudeville-style vocal delivery is gleefully overwrought; between faux-emoting the vocables “Yooo, oooh” during the verse and drawing short, simpering breaths between phrases, her voice seems to parody the melodramatic weeping of a lovestruck woman, as if to dramatize the irony that the song's Japanese lyricist had replaced the original version's humorous ode to a committed lover with a desperate plea for a lover's acceptance (setsunai watashi / aishite hoshii / kono mu ne na no yo; “Oh miserable me / I want you to love me / to love this heart”).27 Meanwhile, her enunciation of the song's Japanese lyrics betrays only passing regard for the language's standard intonational contours. In contrast to Inada's more convincing fusion of jazz syncopation with Japanese pitch-accent patterns, Sumida's phrasing—with each word strung together in a coyly affected drawl—seems to argue for the comic strangeness of their juxtaposition. Still, if Sumida's voice on the recording edges close to caricature at certain points, her prominent accordion playing on the introductory and concluding choruses lends the song a winsome streak of originality that prevents it from lapsing into pure parody.For their part, Japan's media outlets seemed to find Sumida's “cute voice” and playful sensibility charming enough to warrant frequent and positive publicity. According to the Nisei reporter Wally Shibata, however, some phonograph dealers averred that her records were “not making a great ado” in the capital and had yet to seriously rival the success of recordings by Inada and her other Nisei peers.28 Moreover, in spite of finding greater success with the ironically titled single Nippon musume [“Japanese Gal”] in the summer of 1936, Sumida professed to the Nichibei shinbun in December that she had yet to adjust comfortably to life in Japan. Given that her Japanese remained avowedly limited, she struggled to make Japanese friends and likewise found the expat population in Tokyo to offer less than a sustainable sense of community. While Inada continued to pursue a life and career in Japan, then, Sumida returned to California in the summer of 1937, effectively retiring from entertainment at age twenty-one.29Most articles in the Japanese and Nikkei press attributed Sumida's departure to imminent wedding plans with Irobe Ichiyu, the son of the director of the South Seas Development Company (Nan'yō kōhatsu kabushiki gaisha), while others claimed that Sumida planned to attend college upon her return.30 In fact, it seems that both Sumida and Irobe attended college after leaving Japan—at the University of Chicago and nearby Knox College, respectively—though any further plans upon returning to California were cut short by the outbreak of the Pacific War and Franklin D. Roosevelt's subsequent issuance of Executive Order 9066, which resulted in Sumida and her family being “evacuated” from their home and placed in the nearby Fresno Assembly Center, a temporary detention facility erected on the site of the Fresno County Fairgrounds.31One of many makeshift “assembly
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