“You Gotta Accentuate the Positive”: Japanese American Affirmation and Resilience in The Camp Dance: The Music and the Memories

Abstract

One evening in October 2004, about one hundred miles east of Fresno, California, 79-year-old Mary Kageyama Nomura returned to the concentration camp where she had been illegally imprisoned as a teenager, and to the stage where she had earned the moniker “the songbird of Manzanar.” Now an elder in the Japanese American community, Nomura had returned to the site of her imprisonment to perform the popular songs of her youth once more, this time as a cast member of the touring musical revue Camp Dance. For a few short hours, the auditorium at Manzanar was once again a dance hall.Manzanar National Historic Site, which is now a museum and national park, was constructed as a concentration camp where over 10,000 Japanese American people were illegally incarcerated by the United States government.1 It was one of ten such sites that, all told, imprisoned over 120,000 Japanese Americans from 1942 to 1945, most of them U.S. citizens.2 Nomura, who was born in Los Angeles and imprisoned at the age of sixteen, was one of those individuals. Playwright Soji Kashiwagi's The Camp Dance: The Music and the Memories, with which Nomura toured in the early 2000s, revisits this dark chapter of American history from the perspective of the nisei, the show's subject and primary audience, through the 1940s popular tunes that were frequently heard within the camps.3Camp Dance portrays the experiences of incarcerated nisei, or second-generation Japanese Americans, focusing particularly on those who, like Nomura, were in their teens and twenties during the war and in their seventies and eighties during the 2003–2005 tour. The show centers on the social dances that were an important part of camp life in the temporary assembly centers and, later, in the permanent camps. I argue that Camp Dance's intimate and nuanced portrayal of musicking in the camps both affirms the hybrid musical culture of the nisei and pays tribute to the sacrifices and the strength of spirit of the Japanese American community in the face of this unjust and illegal incarceration. For camp survivors in the twenty-first century, Camp Dance was, and is, a chance to remember and reclaim their younger selves. For younger generations of Japanese Americans, the show fosters common understanding and connection with their parents and grandparents and provides perspective on an often-taboo aspect of their heritage. Outside the Japanese American community, Camp Dance encourages its audience to connect the story of the Japanese American incarceration to more widely familiar narratives of American youth and immigrant experiences, giving an exceptionally human face to this painful chapter of American history.Camp Dance is formatted as a musical revue; instead of a single overarching plot, it has a series of scenes connected by a central idea (in this case, the musical culture of incarcerated Japanese American youth). Music is central to the show, and most of these scenes include presentations of Japanese and American popular songs from the time. Some of these songs appear diegetically, occurring within the sketches as performances at dances and talent shows. Others are non-diegetic and reveal the inner thoughts and emotions of characters in the sketches (such as “Skylark,” which expresses the character Mary's longing for love and the outside world after a disappointing prom). A third category of songs are performed as stand-alone numbers, and some of the dramatic and descriptive scenes do not include songs at all. Most revue shows are satirical in tone; however, the outlook and content of Camp Dance instead feels like a documentary for the stage. Interspersed with the musical numbers are descriptive scenes that portray the complexities and hardships of camp life and include a wide variety of illustrative details. The core performing cast are both actors and narrators; they transition fluidly between describing situations from the present and dwelling within them as teenagers in camp (Video Example 1).Camp Dance makes its research process and source materials visible within the show, weaving quotes from published primary and secondary sources into the narrative with verbal attribution. The most prominent way that Camp Dance showcases its source material, though, is in the scenes that portray individual camp survivors’ specific memories, taken from interviews conducted by Soji Kashiwagi. As actor Darrell Kunitomi remarked in my interview with him, “Soji [Kashiwagi] is a very journalistic writer for the theater, which is unusual, because he actually interviews the real people and then uses their stories to create dramas.”4 These interviews became scenes that range from one man's description of his first Christmas in camp as a ten-year-old boy to the story of servicemen from the 100th Infantry Battalion and 442nd Regimental Combat Team,5 but most are focused on or drawn from the experiences of teenagers who put on and attended the dances that give the show its name. Likewise, many of the songs were chosen because interviewees had named them as particular favorites. The use of these memories turns the show into a living museum, anchored in the actual lived experiences of the interviewed survivors, many of whom later came to see the show as audience members.Camp Dance toured primarily from 2004 to 2005 and was staged in more than twenty cities across the American West (mostly in California) in small theaters, community centers, and churches. These performances were intra-community events at which the vast majority of audience members were camp survivors and their families. This intra-community focus is reflected in the script of the show, which is written as though everyone in the audience is a camp survivor. In his opening monologue, Darrell Kunitomi invites the audience “on a sentimental journey back to 1942 to 1945, to a place you all remember: the camp dance.”6 Throughout the show, descriptions of camp activities are often written using the second person “you,” and the show's conclusion brings its camp-survivor audience back into direct focus with an extended address that begins, “For all those who dared to dance, this show is our tribute to you . . . By bringing back the music and some stories of the camp dance, we hope we've given you some good memories of those high school dances so long ago.”7 Although non-camp survivors, particularly the sansei children and yonsei grandchildren of camp survivors, have always been a part of the show's audience, the entire show is written for, and addressed to, the nisei who were children, teenagers, and young adults in camp. Consequently, much of the show is geared toward sparking recognition through old familiar songs and universally relatable skits of teenage awkwardness.A show written for a more general audience, or intended for wider distribution, could not do many of the things that Camp Dance does. The show's structure, song choices, and much of its humor are all built on the assumption that its audience already has a high degree of familiarity with the concept of the camps, and that most of that audience will have firsthand knowledge of those camps. By prioritizing their Japanese American camp-survivor audience in the show's production, the Grateful Crane production company and Soji Kashiwagi were able to create a richly detailed and culturally nuanced portrait of musical life within the camps. It is rare for Asian Americans to see ourselves portrayed in the media, let alone portrayed well. The care and specificity with which Camp Dance tells its story creates a space in which its camp-survivor audience members can literally see themselves; their lives are honored, and their memories are treated as important.The importance of the audience to Camp Dance's structure and tone is made visible in comparison to the much better-known musical Allegiance, which starred George Takei and ran on Broadway from October 2015 to February 2016. Allegiance deals with many similar themes to Camp Dance; the hardships of camp life are prominently featured, as are stereotypically American forms of entertainment, including swing dancing and baseball. Like Camp Dance, Allegiance also prominently features the painfully ironic circumstances of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, an all-Nisei segregated unit of the United States Army, many of whom volunteered for service directly out of the camps, even as their families remained incarcerated (see note 6). Unlike Camp Dance, however, Allegiance was written for a much broader, non-Japanese American audience and takes much greater pains to persuade its audience of the horrors and injustices of the camps, sometimes to the point of distorting the facts of camp life.8Camp Dance assumes an audience that experienced these hardships firsthand or sees the incarcerated Japanese Americans as family members and loved ones. Consequently, the broader injustice of the experience is often treated as a well-understood background, rather than a lesson that the show must teach.Camp Dance's more matter-of-fact treatment is expressive of both its intended audience and its own position as a distinctly post-reparations addition to the extant body of theatrical works. Plays and musicals about the incarceration, which are sometimes referred to as “camp plays,” have been written and produced since the 1950s. Densho Encyclopedia, a living online encyclopedia of the Japanese American World War II story, lists over fifty such works in its entry “Plays on Incarceration,” the earliest of which is the 1954 play Laughter and False Teeth, written by Hiroshi Kashiwagi (Soji Kashiwagi's father).9 The vast majority of these works are from the last forty years; although a few entries, notably Sook-tek Oh's Tondemonai—Never Happen! (1970) and Momoko Iko's Gold Watch (1972), were written earlier, the genre of camp plays can be understood as beginning in the 1980s. This beginning, and the genre as a whole, is closely tied to the movement for redress and reparations that began in the late 1970s and led to the passing of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which offered a national apology and individual payments of $20,000 to all living camp survivors. Partially inspired by the movement, the East-West Players and the Pan Asian Repertory Theater (prominent Asian American theater companies in Los Angeles and New York, respectively) devoted their entire 1981–1982 seasons to plays about the incarceration and premiered six new works. Since that pivotal year, many new plays and musicals about the incarceration have been produced. In addition to Camp Dance, the musicals include Christmas in Camp, A Jive Bomber's Christmas, and, of course, Allegiance. Many of these works, particularly those produced in the 1980s, contributed to the construction of the camps as an established cultural trauma (this is discussed in detail later in this article). Consequently, they are much more severe in tone. Camp Dance speaks into this already established narrative and into a cultural context in which the United States government has already admitted wrongdoing; perhaps for this reason, the hardships of camp, while certainly still present, are less prioritized.As a small community theater production, Camp Dance has rarely received attention from the academy; to my knowledge, there are only two published scholarly articles that discuss it: Eric Hung's “Sounds of Asian American Trauma and Cultural Trauma: Jazz Reflections on the Japanese Internment” from 2012 and Emily Colborn-Roxworthy's “‘Manzanar, the eyes of the world are upon you’: Performance and Archival Ambivalence at a Japanese American Internment Camp” from 2007.10 While Colborn-Roxworthy's article discusses Camp Dance only briefly, Hung's article (discussed later) goes into greater depth, placing Camp Dance into conversation with other Asian American jazz portrayals of the incarceration, as well as with Jeffrey Alexander's theorization of cultural trauma. My article builds on Hung's argument by incorporating more recent scholarship on cultural hybridity and resilience and by discussing the narrative and cultural function of Camp Dance's music in greater depth. My article is also the first to explore Camp Dance's non-Japanese American audience and its relationship to twenty-first-century American history.The intimate, community-focused nature of Camp Dance may have contributed to its relative scholarly neglect; the process by which individual works of community theater enter the academic discourse is somewhat random and often dependent on personal connections between specific academics and the works in question. The number of musicologists who are personally connected to the Japanese American community, let alone this show, is tiny. However, such neglect is a loss for musicology. As a subject of scholarly inquiry, Camp Dance offers new insights into the processes by which oppressed communities create and maintain identities and survive and remember cultural traumas, both of which are vital and necessary topics in post-Trump America.I saw Camp Dance in Seattle during the original tour when I was thirteen years old. I am not Japanese American (though I am Asian American), but I do have a close personal connection to the show: one of the cast members is my aunt by marriage, and my uncle traveled with the tour as a crewmember. When my family attended the 2004 Camp Dance performance in Seattle, we went to see my aunt and uncle. Though the Japanese American incarceration is not part of my ethnic heritage, both the incarceration and Camp Dance are part of my family history.11This article is informed by both my personal experience of the show and the interviews I conducted between November 2019 and January 2020 with the cast, crew, and production team of the original (and so far, only) production of the show. Through these interviews, my own memories, and the videorecording and soundtrack of the 2004 tour, I explore Camp Dance's legacy, both within and outside the Japanese American community, as a venue for engaging with the memory of incarceration and a document of the camp survivors’ enduring spirit.Camp Dance pays tribute to the unique musical world of the nisei. As Marta Robertson points out in her article “Ballad for Incarcerated Americans: Second Generation Japanese American Musicking in World War II Camps,” the specific cultural conditions of camp “created an unrepeatable musical phenomenon.”12 Incarceration artificially segregated the Japanese American population and, ironically, facilitated the transmission of Japanese heritage and culture from older to younger generations. Many young nisei had greater access to Japanese culture in camp than at any other time in their lives, and they took the opportunity to study traditional Japanese music. Simultaneously, however, the European and African American influences of American popular culture were everywhere, and young people in particular enjoyed playing, listening, and dancing to American popular songs. Both Robertson's reading of nisei musical culture within the camps and my reading of nisei musical culture as presented in Camp Dance are based on Christopher Small's concept of “musicking,” which he defines as any manner of taking part in, or paying attention to, a musical performance, including a recorded performance.13 In this article, I use this term to refer to the myriad ways in which the incarcerated nisei listened to, danced to, and performed music from both Japanese and American musical traditions, thereby creating a hybrid musical culture that was uniquely their own.Swing dancing, in particular, was a key feature of camp musicking, and indeed of camp life, in both the temporary assembly centers and the permanent camps. Trapped in the desert for an indefinite length of time with nowhere to go, many of the young incarcerated nisei turned to swing music and dancing as a way of passing the time and as a source of hope, comfort, and connection to the outside world. These dances were some of the first musical activities that the imprisoned community created for themselves; they occurred in the temporary assembly centers and, later, in all ten of the main permanent camps.14 George Yoshida, the author of Reminiscing in Swingtime: Japanese Americans in American Popular Music and himself a saxophonist in the Music Makers band in Poston Camp #1, remarks, “It is no wonder that in this physically and psychologically depressed ambience, dance bands spontaneously and swiftly came into being. The vacuum created by the need for sustenance of hope, for distraction and for the uplifting of wounded spirits was satisfied for many by music and dance.”15 However, the specific presence of swing music and dancing served a second cultural purpose, which spoke directly to the trauma of being incarcerated illegally within their own home country. Because of their racial identity, and despite their status as native-born citizens, the United States government treated the nisei as foreign insurgents. In the face of this direct assault on identity and citizenship, swing music became a means of asserting and re-affirming the nisei's Americanness in a show of defiance against their captors and their situation. As Yoshida asserts, “It was a matter of survival and a subconscious affirmation of self—a way to express through music, ‘I am an American!’”16The musical performances that make up the bulk of the show juxtapose American and Japanese popular songs as compatible parts of a coherent camp musical culture, thus documenting and validating a practice by which the incarcerated nisei expressed and affirmed their specific cultural identity. Most of the period songs used in the show were selected because camp survivors had named them as particular favorites during Kashiwagi's interviews. These are primarily well-known American swing tunes, such as Mercer and Carmichael's “Skylark” and Erskine Hawkins's “Tuxedo Junction,” both made famous by Glen Miller. Others are Japanese popular songs from just before the war, such as “Shina No Yoru,” “Tabi No Yokaze,” and “Tsuma Koi Douchu,” all of which are introduced in the context of the camp talent shows where they were frequently performed. Music director Scott Nagatani also included Japanese folk songs and children's songs as piano accompaniment for spoken scenes. He commented that including Japanese songs provoked a profound emotional reaction from nisei audience members, as these songs reminded them of their childhoods before the war. Soji Kashiwagi also spoke to this in his own interview; he noted that these songs remind many nisei audience members of their own issei parents. In this way, the use of Japanese and American popular music not only honors the experiences and musical culture of the nisei but pays tribute to the culture of the issei, offering a glimpse of Japanese American musical culture in the decades before the war and incarceration.In Camp Dance, the side-by-side performance of Japanese and American popular songs is presented as a matter of course, but the fusion of these elements into a single cultural whole is, in fact, a profound statement on the role of music in creating a hybrid nisei culture both during and after the war. Marta Robertson explores this practice in “Ballad for Incarcerated Americans” and asserts: “Whether as youth or today's adults, these nisei employed sound and movement to create a socially cohesive community, assert their bicultural affiliations, and contest sociopolitical identities forced on them. Nisei forged a cultural hybridity that honors the Japanese heritage of their first generation issei parents while advancing the American mainstream of jazz, popular, and art music.”17 By highlighting this dual engagement with Japanese and American music, Camp Dance's sansei cast members and production team validate the hybridity of nisei culture. They pay tribute to a musical practice that was both a means of survival for the nisei and a reassertion of their identity against the erasure of state classification.By embracing and validating the fullness of musical life in the camps, Camp Dance documents camp musical culture in intimate detail, including aspects of camp culture and life that other forms of media might neglect. Marta Robertson notes that the widespread engagement with both American popular music and Japanese heritage transmission in the segregated camp environment created a unique and unrepeatable musical phenomenon.18 That uniqueness is made visible and audible in Camp Dance. One short humorous show segment (shown in Video Example 2) recalls a conga line chant at the Rohwer, Arkansas, camp, where dancers would chant “gobo, gobo, daikon.”19 The chant refers to the Japanese expressions “daikon ashi” and “gobo ashi,” which describe the daikon radish shape of some women's legs and the “skinny, dark-skinned legs of many nisei country boys,” respectively.20 This joke is not particularly accessible outside of the Japanese American community, but it is extremely well received in the video-recorded July 2004 performance at the David Henry Hwang Theater in Los Angeles, which is available via YouTube. The scene opens with the line, “In Japanese, there is an expression known as ‘daikon ashi.’”21 After that, Kurt Kuniyoshi has to pause for seven seconds, due to the loud laughter of the audience, many of whom are clearly aware of the expression, regardless of whether they are aware of the conga line chant. Including this sort of specific detail portrays the nisei not only as consumers of American musical culture but also as participants and creators with agency. By creating their own version of the conga line chant, the nisei claim a casual, unquestioned ownership of the conga line, which suggests a defiantly free and confident relationship with American social dancing. This demonstration of a culturally independent relationship to the conga line resonates with Jason Herbeck's second reading of authenticity in the post-colonial Caribbean where, instead of indicating conformity to an original referent, authenticity designates “something that exists in its own right, independently, without requisite prior association or comparison.” In this second understanding, authenticity signifies that which cannot and does not attempt to conform to a pre-colonial past.22 While the process of cultural assimilation in the twentieth-century United States was, of course, different from that of the colonial French Caribbean, I argue that this interpretation of authenticity can be applied productively here. Thus, the creation of a Japanese-language conga line chant in the Rohwer, Arkansas, camp is an indication of a unique, authentic, hybrid musical culture. Camp Dance's thick, nuanced portrait of camp life in this scene and others like it honors and reaffirms the hybrid cultural identity of the nisei both during and after the war.This validation of nisei camp musical culture provides a strong affirmation of nisei cultural identity; in so doing, it supports resilience and healing in the nisei audience members. Similar strategies of using music to affirm identity and nurture resilience have been observed in other American musical contexts. For example, Alison Martin has written about the importance of cultural affirmation in fostering resilience in one present-day African American community in her article “Black Music Matters: Affirmation and Resilience in African American Musical Spaces in Washington, DC.” Martin's article explores go-go music, a Washington, D.C., subgenre of funk, and understands the D.C. go-go community as an activist space closely connected to the Black Lives Matter movement. She argues that, by centering and celebrating Blackness and Black life, go-go clubs affirm Black humanity and nurture healing and resilience within the Black community.23Although the go-go clubs of Washington, D.C., are geographically and historically removed from both the Camp Dance tour and the camp dances themselves and serve different populations, Martin's reading of go-go performances resonates strongly with my own reading of Camp Dance and the dances that it portrays. Through its intimate portrayal of the incarcerated nisei's lives and musicking, Camp Dance is a celebration of specifically nisei culture and an affirmation of their dual identity. Martin says that “to affirm black humanity is a radical act of self-care that is well within the realm of both resilience and resistance.”24 Likewise, Camp Dance's celebration of nisei youth musical culture is a radical act of care in its affirmation of identity and resistance to white supremacist scripts that construct Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners. As Camp Dance demonstrates, for the nisei, music and dancing were not only a means of comfort necessary for survival, but also a defiant assertion of their identity as bi-cultural Americans in the face of indefinite, unlawful incarceration and state-imposed erasure of their citizenship. Through the performance of nisei music, Camp Dance reaffirms this identity and the cultural practices that uphold it.Broadly speaking, the term resilience refers to processes of positive adaptation to profound adversity.25 While much of the literature on resilience focuses primarily on individual resilience to individual traumas, this definition can also be applied to responses to trauma on the community level. In Camp Dance, the question of resilience is closely tied to the idea of community musicking within the camps. In my reading of resilience in Camp Dance, I bring together Alison Martin's analysis of affirmation as resilience with Shirli Gilbert's construction of musical resilience in her book Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps. According to Gilbert's analysis, music performed a wide variety of functions within varied Holocaust contexts. In her introduction, she observes that music, specifically song, was a tool through which Jewish communities made sense of their circumstances, often by integrating their experiences into familiar narrative frameworks.26 Of particular relevance here, Gilbert points out that “hopeful messages frequently suggest a struggle to encourage resolve and perseverance, rather than merely to reflect their existence. Particularly in the ghettos, optimistic songs grew in number as conditions deteriorated. The less cause there was for hope, the more people needed to hope.”27I argue that Japanese American musicking during the World War II incarceration served similar functions to Jewish musicking in the European ghettos of the same era. The proliferation of dance bands and widespread youth participation in social dancing both in the temporary assembly centers and, later, in long-term concentration camps can be read as evidence of the need for hope and distraction, and as the imprisoned community's active practice of coping and fostering resilience. Camp Dance centers these practices in both its focus on musicking and its use of humor and lightheartedness throughout the show. By portraying resilience and resistance through musicking and humor within the camps, Camp Dance also creates a space of resilience and healing for its camp-survivor audience, as they laugh, dance, and remember their favorite songs and younger selves with fondness.The idea of resilience through musicking is explicitly addressed by Mary Kageyama Nomura's performance (Video Example 3), which is presented as an homage to music's role as a means of survival in camp. Nomura is the only Camp Dance performer who experienced the camps firsthand; she was incarcerated at Manzanar at the age of sixteen and is a graduate of Manzanar high school. She became known as “the songbird of Manzanar” for her frequent performances at camp talent shows and dances. After incarceration, she continued to perform at community events, particularly during and after the movement for reparations; within the California Japanese American community, she is both an elder and something of a local celebrity. In the July 2004 Los Angeles performance, she sang one song “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive,” which is also on the Original Cast Recording. Her performance is introduced by two female cast members, Susan Haruye Ioka and Keiko Kawashima, who say “for Japanese Americans living in camp, songs and music gave their souls nourishment and sustenance, and when spirits ran low, simple lyrics like ‘somewhere over the rainbow skies are blue’ or ‘I'll be seeing you in all the old familiar places’ spoke directly to them and let them face another day with hope, dreams, and smiles in their hearts. One such singer was known as ‘the songbird of Manzanar.’ Her voice and spirit brought smiles to so many hearts back then and continues to do so today.”28Nomura's singing is presented as a source of hope and encouragement within the camps; her performance in Camp Dance is a tribute to a practice of community resilience in which she herself participated as a teenager. This is highlighted by the song that she performs. “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive,” a popular song written in 1944 and performed by Bing Crosby, takes on a new significance in the context of the camps. The lyrics declare: You gotta accentuate the positive,Eliminate the negative, andLatch on to the affirmativeDon't mess with mister in-between.You gotta spread joy up to the maximumBring gloom down to the minimum, andHave faith or pandemonium'sLiable to walk up on the scene.29Although this song's origins are unconnected to Japanese American incarceration, in Camp Dance, these lyrics seem to function autobiographically for Nomura, and they read as an instructional guide for other detainees working to survive and maintain morale in camp. Producer Emily Kuroda noted that the song echoes the popular Japanese saying shikataganai, which roughly translates to “it can't be helped.” Karen Ishizuka explores this concept in her book Lost and Found: Reclaiming the Japan