William Dart features the inspirational music of artist, activist and songwriter Nobuko Miyamoto, thanks to 120,000 Stories, a new 2-disc release from Smithsonian Folkways Records which combines new music with a retrospective.
Nobuko Miyamoto, 120,000 Stories cover image Photo: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
Aficionados of Japanese cinema and movies about food may well be familiar with an actor named Nobuko Miyamoto. She’s one of the central characters in the 1985 movie Tampopo, playing a not so wonderful noodle cook, determined to upscale her culinary skills.
There’s a strange and unexpected connection between these two women of the same name on the 120,000 Stories collection, when the singer Nobuko Miyamoto offers a song titled 'Tampopo', based on this being the Japanese word for “dandelion”.
The singer finds the flower deeply symbolic of the cultural flow of America’s Asian people. It may be reviled as an invasive weed, she says, but this pesky, unwanted yellow flower is a survivor, even in the harshest of environments.
"We are all dandelions", she writes in the CD's booklet.
Like most of the songs around it in this collection, this is very much a political statement on an issue that has flared up again recently in the States, with rallies protesting the discrimination experienced by Asian Americans.
You can hear the singer in a fascinating interview online on KPFA’s Letters and Politics show, in which she unfolds her rich and well-lived life story, starting with her family’s internment in a wartime concentration camp in California when she was two. She talks of her rigorous dance training, appearing in the films of The King and I and West Side Story. But eventually she realised that she was involved in stories that might use her body and her skills but were not her stories.
Spurred on by volatile times in the late sixties and 70s, issues such as the Vietnam War and Civil Rights brought American Asians alongside Afro Americans and Hispanics in protest.
She met up with Chris Iijima and, in her own words, stumbled into getting a song together. As the folksinging duo Yellow Pearl, they were famously introduced on TV by John Lennon to sing their song 'We are the Children' on The Mike Douglas Show.
120,000 Stories, released by Smithsonian Folkways, is a two-disc set. Miyamoto describes disc 2 as an "archeological excavation of old recordings from 1973 to 2013", while the first disc presents new songs and new interpretations recorded in 2020.
We're offered a fascinating overview of her quiet but significant contribution to a movement in which louder, better-known voices are not necessarily more powerful or effective.
Music Details
'Song title' (Composer) – Performers
Album title
(Label)
'We Are the Children' (Miyamoto, Iijima) – Nobuko Miyamoto
120,000 Stories
(Smithsonian Folkways)
'Tampopo (Dandelion)' (Miyamoto) – Nobuko Miyamoto
120,000 Stories
(Smithsonian Folkways)
'Yellow Pearl' (Miyamoto, Iijima) – Nobuko Miyamoto
120,000 Stories
(Smithsonian Folkways)
'American Made' (Miyamoto, Yee) – Nobuko Miyamoto
120,000 Stories
(Smithsonian Folkways)
'To All Relations' (Miyamoto) – Nobuko Miyamoto
120,000 Stories
(Smithsonian Folkways)
'To All Relations/Tala‘a 'l-badru ‘alaynā' (Miyamoto) – Nobuko Miyamoto
120,000 Stories
(Smithsonian Folkways)
'Bam Butsu, No Tsunagari' (Miyamoto et al) – Nobuko Miyamoto
120,000 Stories
(Smithsonian Folkways)
'Not Yo' Butterfly' (Miyamoto) – Nobuko Miyamoto
120,000 Stories
(Smithsonian Folkways)
'Gaman' (Miyamoto) – Nobuko Miyamoto
120,000 Stories
(Smithsonian Folkways)
'Black Lives Matter' (Miyamoto) – Nobuko Miyamoto
120,000 Stories
(Smithsonian Folkways)
'We Are the Children' (Miyamoto, Iijima) – Nobuko Miyamoto
120,000 Stories
(Smithsonian Folkways)
