The Art And Activism of Nobuko Miyamoto: How She Became One Of LA's Most Enduring Performers

In 1972, something unheard of happened on national television. An Asian American singer-songwriter duo was invited to perform on the widely-watched The Mike Douglas Show by guest hosts John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

“They’re beautiful singers,” Lennon said in his introduction. “And they have a story to tell.”

Cut to Nobuko Miyamoto and Chris Iijima sitting on stools on a dark stage.

“Usually people know very little about Asians, and this is a song about our movement, our people’s plight in America,” Miyamoto said, as Iijima strummed the opening chords to “We Are The Children.”

We are the children of the migrant worker. We are the offspring of the concentration camp.

 Sons and daughters of the railroad builder who leave their stamp on America.

Behind the scenes, Miyamoto had battled to perform that song over the protests of a show producer, who worried it would be too subversive for housewives in the midwest, and the conciliatory overtures of Lennon, who asked them to soften the lyrics.

 Watching war movies with the next door neighbor. Secretly rooting for the other side.

Miyamoto’s lifelong quest to tell Asian American stories is chronicled in a documentary film premiering Saturday in Los Angeles at the VC Film Festival: Nobuko Miyamoto: A Song in Movement.

The film, directed by Quyên Nguyen-Le and Tadashi Nakamura, chronicles Miyamoto’s creative journey as a third-generation Japanese American born in Los Angeles at the start of World War II to her run as a performer on Broadway and in films such as West Side Story.

She walked away from it all to focus her energies on the Asian American movement that emerged in the late 1960s.

With Iijima and another activist, Charlie Chin, Miyamoto recorded A Grain of Sand, an album with songs written with an Asian American consciousness like “We Are The Children” that has earned it the title of being one of the first “Asian American” albums.

In the years since, Miyamoto has devoted herself to making community art in L.A. with her multicultural arts organization Great Leap. The group’s collaborations with other artists of color across the city have birthed theater productions, music videos, workshops and the FandangObon festival, which fuses Mexican, Japanese and West African musical traditions.

Nobuko Miyamoto leads dancers outside the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Little Tokyo for the 2014 FangdanObon festival.

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"A lot of people see what I did with West Side Story," et cetera, as a pinnacle, and I don't see that," Miyamoto said. "The major part of my life and my work and my dedication has been in the community. That's what I'm proudest of."

Her path to Hollywood

After World War II broke out, Miyamoto’s family was detained with other Japanese Americans at the Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia.

Miyamoto, then a toddler, slept in a horse stall with her family for several months before her father volunteered to harvest sugar beets in Montana as part of the war effort. Workers lived in barracks. Because her dad had a family, they lived in a cabin.

Nobuko Miyamoto is flanked by both parents in a 1945 photo with relatives.

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Courtesy Harry Hayashida

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The family moved to Idaho then Utah before making it back to L.A. It was in Boyle Heights where Miyamoto discovered ballet.

“Dance gave me a sense of rootedness because I felt I had some control over my body and what my place was in the world,” Miyamoto said.

Nobuko Miyamoto, pictured here at age 5 or 6, had discovered her love of dancing and movement at a young age.

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Courtesy Harry Hayashida

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She excelled and Hollywood casting directors took notice. Starting in her teen years, she was booking roles in film productions of The King and I and later, West Side Story, in which she played Francisca, one of the “Shark Girls.”

But the high from mainstream success quickly wore off. Miyamoto recalls being on Broadway performing in a 1958 hit production of the Flower Drum Song about a family from San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Nobuko Miyamoto chronicles her seven decades of performing in her memoir "Not Yo' Butterfly."

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Josie Huang

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“I felt really uncomfortable and I was confused,” Miyamoto said. “What am I feeling? And later I thought about it, and I realized, 'Oh, we're chop suey. We're Chinese food for white people.' And that started me thinking what, how can we tell our own stories?”

An Asian American album

Miyamoto, who had traveled to New York in the 1960s to help a friend make a film about the Black Panthers, drew inspiration from the Black Power movement. And she found solidarity with Asian Americans of all ethnicities, guided by civil rights leaders such as Yuri Kochiyama.

They protested the Vietnam War — “the third war that I had seen the U.S. killing people who looked like me” — and fought to have Asian American history taught in college.

“In numbers we weren’t that many but together we had more of a force,” Miyamoto said.

In New York, Nobuko Miyamoto wrote and performed with fellow activist Chris Iijima.

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Courtesy Maximo Colon

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Miyamoto teamed up with N.Y.-based activists Iijima and Chin to write folk songs with a defiantly Asian American perspective, and toured the country like troubadours, playing to cities with concentrations of Asian Americans such as L.A., Oakland, Chicago, Boston.

“They made music to help inspire the people they were working with,” said Sojin Kim, a curator at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. "It was so deeply ingrained in this practice of community.”

In 1973, the trio recorded A Grain of Sand in New York with Paredon Records. It’s since been added to the Smithsonian’s folk catalog.

Writer and activist Phil Tajitsu Nash would later describe the album as “the soundtrack for the political and personal awareness taking place in their lives.”

Now an elder

Not only after the release of A Grain of Sand, Miyamoto moved back to L.A. where she raised her son, Kamau, as a single parent and founded her arts organization Great Leap.

Fifty-some years later, Miyamoto hasn’t stopped telling stories. In the last several years, she’s published a memoir "Not ‘Yo Butterfly" and released an album of new and old songs through Smithsonian’s Folkway called "120,000 Stories," referring to the number of those incarcerated during World War II because of their Japanese heritage.

Residing in Mid-City with her filmmaker husband Tarabu Betserai Kirkland, she continues to make visual art like through this video she filmed during the pandemic:

And she serves as a mentor and inspiration to newer artists like the Nobuko Miyamoto: A Song in Movement filmmakers who marveled at her commitment and stamina as they pored over archival footage of her and interviewed her many collaborators.

“As an artist myself, I'm always wondering, what can art do, if anything, for society, right?" Nguyen-Le knew said. “Nobuko gives us sort of a map for what it can do and how she's done it over decades of her life.”

Nakamura, whose filmmaker parents were part of the Asian American movement with Miyamoto, grew up knowing her as one of his “aunties.” He took dance workshops that she gave at L.A.'s Senshin Buddhist Temple, where Miyamoto would often bring her son as she taught.

Nobuko Miyamoto with her son, Kamau Ayubbi.

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Courtesy Nobuko Miyamoto

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But now Nakamura understands Miyamoto the artist and it's only reaffirmed his belief in making films that are unapologetically for Asian Americans.

“We know that mainstream media, mainstream education, usually will not include our stories as Asian Americans or if they do, they usually get it wrong,” said Nakamura, who also made a film about Iijima after he died in 2005 called A Song for Ourselves. “So we take inspiration from artists like Nobuko. We're going to have to do it ourselves because no one else will. We have to really literally fight for our own storytelling.”

Quyên Nguyen-Le and Tadashi Nakamura co-directed Nobuko Miyamoto: A Song in Movement.

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Josie Huang

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LAist

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Miyamoto has been working on a new recording of We Are The Children with producer Chucky Kim and singers Treya Lam and Taiyo Na.

The timbre of her voice is different. Her collaborators are from another generation. But her fight for recognition and justice is unchanged.

“I’m here as an elder now to say, ‘Remember, there was an Asian American movement,'” Miyamoto said. “We did stand up. We marched in the streets. We fought for what we wanted. And it's still happening.”