Nobuko JoAnne Miyamoto | |
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Background information | |
Born | Los Angeles, California | November 14, 1939
Origin | Los Angeles, California |
Genres | Folk |
Formerly of | Yellow Pearl |
Website | https://www.nobukomiyamoto.org/ |
Nobuko JoAnne Miyamoto (born November 14, 1939) [1] is a Japanese American folk singer, songwriter, author, and activist in the Asian American Movement. [2] She was a member of the band Yellow Pearl along with Chris Kando Iijima and Charlie Chin. [3] They are known for co-creating the 1973 folk album A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America. [4] This album is considered the first Asian-American album in history. [5] She was a member of the band Warriors of the Rainbow during the late 1970s. [6] [4]
In 2021, Miyamoto released an album titled 120,000 Stories, named after the approximate number of Japanese Americans, Miyamoto included, who were incarcerated by the U.S. government during World War II. [4] She uses her music as a platform for her activism concerning issues stemming from climate change and of concern from the Asian American and the Black Lives Matter movements.
Miyamoto was born in Los Angeles, California, on November 14,1939. According to Miyamoto, her earliest memory is of Santa Anita Park racetrack, where she and her family were being temporarily held before being sent to the incarceration camps for Japanese Americans following President Franklin D. Roosevelt's signing of Executive Order 9066, which authorized this mass imprisonment. Miyamoto and her family were sent to Glasgow, Montana, after her father volunteered to work harvesting beets on a farm. [5] They were eventually released to live with Miyamoto's grandfather in Parker, Idaho, and later Ogden, Utah, until the end of World War II. [1]
Miyamoto started dancing in the years following the war and began appearing in films and productions, where she was known and credited as Joanne Miya. When she was 15, she appeared in the film version of The King and I (1956). [3]
She played Francisca, the girlfriend of one of the Sharks, in the 1961 film version of West Side Story , appearing in all of the Sharks' musical numbers. [3]
In 1978, Miyamoto founded the multicultural arts organization Great Leap. [5] [7] Great Leap hosts FandangObon, a festival that brings together Japanese, Mexican, and African American music and dance traditions [8] in Los Angeles. [9] The festival was founded by Miyamoto in collaboration with Chicano musician Quetzal Flores. [2]
During World War II, the United States forcibly relocated and incarcerated about 120,000 people of Japanese descent in ten concentration camps operated by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), mostly in the western interior of the country. Approximately two-thirds of the detainees were United States citizens. These actions were initiated by Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, following Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, Guam, the Philippines, and Wake Island in December 1941. Before the war, about 127,000 Japanese Americans lived in the continental United States, of which about 112,000 lived on the West Coast. About 80,000 were Nisei and Sansei. The rest were Issei immigrants born in Japan, who were ineligible for citizenship. In Hawaii, where more than 150,000 Japanese Americans comprised more than one-third of the territory's population, only 1,200 to 1,800 were incarcerated.
Miyamoto Yuriko was a Japanese novelist, short-story writer, social activist, and literary critic active during the Taishō and early Shōwa periods of Japan. She is best known for her autobiographical fiction and involvement in proletarian and women's liberation movements.
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Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga was a Japanese American political activist who played a major role in the Japanese American redress movement. She was the lead researcher of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), a bipartisan federal committee appointed by Congress in 1980 to review the causes and effects of the Japanese American incarceration during World War II. As a young woman, Herzig-Yoshinaga was confined in the Manzanar Concentration Camp in California, the Jerome War Relocation Center in Arkansas, and the Rohwer War Relocation Center, which is also in Arkansas. She later uncovered government documents that debunked the wartime administration's claims of "military necessity" and helped compile the CWRIC's final report, Personal Justice Denied, which led to the issuance of a formal apology and reparations for former camp inmates. She also contributed pivotal evidence and testimony to the Hirabayashi, Korematsu and Yasui coram nobis cases.
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Cherry Kinoshita was a Japanese American activist and leader in the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL). She helped found the Seattle Evacuation Redress Committee and fought for financial compensation for Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated during World War II.
Yvonne Wilder was an American actress, comedian, writer, and artist. She appeared in West Side Story on stage and in the 1961 film, and had a busy career in American television from the 1960s into the 1990s.
The Merced Assembly Center, located in Merced, California, was one of sixteen temporary assembly centers hastily constructed in the wake of Executive Order 9066 to incarcerate those of Japanese ancestry beginning in the spring of 1942, following the attack on Pearl Harbor and prior to the construction of more permanent concentration camps to house those forcibly removed from the West Coast. The Merced Assembly Center was located at the Merced County Fairgrounds and operated for 133 days, from May 6, 1942 to September 15, 1942, with a peak population of 4,508. 4,669 Japanese Americans were ultimately incarcerated at the Merced Assembly Center.
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