On February 19th, , a little over two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed Executive order , which resulted in the evacuation and internment of nearly , West Coast Japanese; many were American citizens. Within the camps, Japanese were confronted with barbed wire fences, guard towers, various American inculturation tactics, and American nationalism.
Among those tactics was music, which as Chris Waller notes, is an oft welcomed means of keeping tensions low within incarceration facilities. In other cases, traditional Japanese musicking flourished in the internment camps, as kabuki plays, shakuhachi music, and Japanese dance were enjoyed, particularly by the first-generation Japanese internees. In the case of the Internment Camp at Tule Lake, CA, the internees pushed a movement for Japanese nationalism, which took the form of more resistant styles of musicking and daily life.
In this paper, I argue that musical practice played a vital role in the formation and maintenance of identity during the Japanese incarceration of World War II. I also engage historical-musical scholarship of the incarceration, including the work of Robertson and Waseda. Over the course of this paper, I will provide a look into the experience of the incarceration of Japanese people by the American government and examine how the conflict between Japanese and American identities was both pronounced in and perpetuated by internment camp musical practice.
For this opportunity, it will be performed with Quipus a pre-Columbian notation system with colored strings and knots. It also allows me to elaborate on my fascination with these pre-Columbian artifacts which challenge the established history that says that my Andean ancestors did not have a notation system.
This performance portrays principles of Andean storytelling in which music is a wholesome experience in that englobes singing, poetry, dance, and costume. Still, the group remains reluctant to explicitly claim any association with jazz or jazz fusion. However, their wider incorporation of diverse musical styles such as various kinds of pop, soul, gospel, hip-hop, and others previously excluded from fusion discourse; their ability to emphasize musical characteristics beyond virtuosity; and their ambivalence towards being categorized stylistically ultimately sets them apart from their predecessors.
