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Solidarity in Action • Bill Lann Lee, Former Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights • Akiyu Hatano, Educator • Frank Wu, Law Profesor • Butch Wing, Activist • Nobuko Miyamoto, Artist • The Struggle for Justice: A Timeline of Asian American and African American history • Washington Journal: Black Like Us

Art as a Bridge

Nobuko Miyamoto, intercultural artist

By Joseph Hong

Nobuko Miyamoto for 21 years has used art to cross cultural boundaries and create coalitions through her performance group, Great Leap.

Great Leap has various shows tailored to specific age groups that tour throughout the country. One show called “A Slice of Rice, Frijoles and Greens” is performed by three or four artists who reflect on their backgrounds, using such mediums as song, humor, dance, mime, and even puppetry to express themselves and tell their story. The children’s version of this show reaches 50,000 students each year in the Los Angeles school district.

Miyamoto grew up performing, and trained as a dancer and a singer. During the late 1950s, while she was still a teenager, she performed on Broadway in musicals such as Flower Drum Song, and was a dancer in the Hollywood productions of The King and I and West Side Story.

However, her career as a performer abruptly changed in 1968 when Italian filmmaker Antonello Branca asked her to help make a docu-drama about the Black Panthers.

Miyamoto and the film crew traveled across the United States, chronicling demonstrations and interviewing activists within the Black Power movement.

“It was voyeur almost … we were everywhere, where there were any kind of demonstrations happening,” said Miyamoto.

Through her interactions with the Black Panther Party and her immersion into the African American community, Miyamoto began to see intrinsic similarities with the Asian American community.

“I really saw the system work against people of color,” Miyamoto said.

She also felt the warmth and hospitality that the other communities of color showed her, and was inspired to help create a similar movement within the Asian American community.

“The Panthers were very open. They would call me ‘sister’ and they considered people of color like brothers and sisters. I felt more at home there than I did anywhere else,” Miyamoto said. “When I saw the Panthers feeding children breakfast and trying to improve the living conditions for people of color, I thought that was a really worthy and noble cause.”

Up to this point, Miyamoto had not met any other Asians in the movement until the film crew started filming at the Young Lords Church which, according to Miyamoto, was sort of a Puerto Rican version of the Black Panther Party.

“They were doing a breakfast for children program at this church in East Harlem, and Yuri Kochiyama came up to me and introduced herself, and said, ‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’ and she invited me to come to a meeting for Asian Americans for Action, and that’s how I came into the Asian American movement,” said Miyamoto.

At the time, Miyamoto was living in a mostly Puerto Rican and Dominican neighborhood in the Upper West Side in Manhattan. According to Miyamoto, there was a lot of coalition work being done at that time. The Asian American movement worked closely with the Latinos in their squatter movement, where they would take over old empty buildings and fix them up so that low-income people could live there rent-free. She recalled how she worked with Puerto Ricans and Dominicans to take over an abandoned store front and start an Asian American drop-in and resource center.

After making her base in New York for four years, Miyamoto moved back to her hometown of Los Angeles in 1973. In 1978 she founded Great Leap which, at first, was mainly an Asian American art performance group that toured diverse communities.

The 1992 riots in Los Angeles, which happened close to Miyamoto’s home, deeply affected her and what she wanted to do with Great Leap.

“It was a sense of ‘Why is this going on? Why are people going crazy?’ Driving the car the next few days after, there was a lot of tension in the streets where blacks would look at us as Asians and think of us as the enemy because of the Black/Korean conflict,” said Miyamoto. “I decided to make Great Leap performances more multicultural to try and understand the commonalties that we had and not just our differences.”

Recently, Miyamoto finished a piece that was done at the Skirball Museum in Los Angeles. It was a spiritual piece that included Japanese Buddhist monks, Jewish Rabbis, an African American Christian gospel choir, and others who were interested in bridging these communities together, according to Miyamoto.

“Sometimes it feels uncomfortable or strange to really put yourself in a social situation where you cross that border on a social level or on a real working relationship,” Miyamoto said. “I think people who never done it have to do it just once to realize it opens a whole lot of doors, our own doors. Our own limitations begin melting away when we take that step to work with or make relationships with people from other communities. Taking that step is a very important thing to do right now, not only for society but for ones personal growth.”