How Nobuko Miyamoto Set the Asian American Movement in Motion

I belong to a village called Asian America. This village felt much smaller when I was growing up. Only a few of us had lived here for more than a generation and it seemed we were all connected by a degree or two. We rarely appeared in the media projected back onto us, and anytime we did was an occasion—someone in my family would interrupt whatever movie or show we were watching to announce a fellow villager on the screen along with the lore and gossip that bound us.

I was ten when I saw West Side Story for the first time. As I watched, entranced by the saturated colors and baroque drama of this immigrant world that was both like and not like my family’s , my dad exclaimed: “There’s Nobuko!” I scanned the three women dancing with Maria as she gets ready for her date—women helping Maria feel pretty and glowing—and saw Nobuko Miyamoto.

It would take me years of wandering outside the village to understand why this moment mattered, to name the things Nobuko was for us, all the threads of the village that flowed through her: Broadway dancer, folk singer, nonprofit arts director, choreographer, internment camp survivor, mother, activist icon, community teacher, artist.

A new documentary about Miyamoto’s life and work, Nobuko Miyamoto: A Song in Movement, follows a life lived largely on screen; a rarity for her generation of Asian Americans, particularly women. Born in 1939, she’s the missing link between the generations before—like Anna May Wong and Miyoshi Umeki—and the baby boomers who would come a few years later. Written and directed by Tadashi Nakamura and Quyên Nguyen-Le, the documentary captures Miyamoto’s many onscreen transformations, from ballet to folk music and from activism to spirituality.

I spoke with Miyamoto about those life transformations, and the village she’s helped build for so long. In A Song in Movement, we see archival footage of a young Miyamoto in tutus doing extensions and on pointe, having trained in ballet from a young age. “I was very westernized,” she told me, “my body was westernized.” While she soon moved on in order to pursue theater, the rigor and discipline of her ballet training stuck with her. “It helps you to face into these hard times and uncertain times,” she explained.

Miyamoto first appeared on screen as a dancer in the 1956 film adaptation of The King & I, where she’s credited as “Joanne Miya.” She would go by the same name to play the role of Francisca in the 1961 West Side Story that I’d come to see over thirty years later on a rented VHS.

Miyamoto awakened to her identity during her time in the Broadway run of Roger and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song. Though the production was a landmark with its mostly Asian cast and based on a novel by the Chinese American writer C.Y. Lee, the show’s lyrics and book played into stereotypes and the exotification of Asians. In A Song in Movement, Miyamoto recalls being on stage singing the tune “Chop Suey” and realizing “[the audience] was looking at us a certain way. We were the chop suey—Chinese food for white people… They were using our bodies as an exotic touch.” Miyamoto decided to leave the cast.

After a stint singing jazz in Seattle, she joined a documentary crew following the Black Panthers. This in turn led her to meeting the legendary activist Yuri Kochiyama and the burgeoning movement of Asian American activists in New York who inspired Nobuko to join the organizing and meetings cropping up around the country. “It was the first time I was exposed to activists who were Asian American,” she says.

During one late-night meeting in Chicago, organizer Chris Iijima pulled out his guitar and began a jam session that would spark a body of songs that helped define a political identity only a few years old. During these early years of the Asian American Movement, Miyamoto and Iijima toured the country as “Chris and Jo,” singing for student clubs, churches, and street festivals, creating songs that they recorded with Charlie Chin in 1973 as A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America—the first Asian American album.

The eleven songs on that record are stunning in their breadth and prescience: Chris and Jo sing about Indigenous land repatriation, the links between imperialism, poverty, and mass incarceration, the Black Panther Jonathan Jackson, and untold histories of Asian migration and internment and exclusion. They sing in English and Spanish, and play on guitar, conga, and dizi.

“The first conversations with Nobuko were more about culture,” remarks civil rights attorney Rocky Chin. “We didn’t have our own music; we didn’t have our own songs. There was something missing.”

In the documentary, we see footage of Chris and Jo’s most famous on-screen break: being introduced by John Lennon on the nationally syndicated Mike Douglas Show. “Usually people know very little about Asians, and this is a song about our movement,” says Miyamoto before she and Iijima launch into their best-known song, “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 / Sing a song for ourselves / What have we got to lose?

In an interview following the performance, a baffled Lennon exclaims, “Coming from abroad, you don’t even know that there’s a lot of Japanese people here!” as Yoko Ono stands silently to the side. Despite being introduced earlier on as Japanese American, Douglas butts in to ask Iijima, “Did you grow up in the Chinatown community?,” to which Iijima drolly replies, “No, I grew up in Manhattan.” Douglas then turns to Miyamoto, “Hm, and you?” “L.A.,” she says curtly. With Douglas at a loss, Miyamoto takes the opportunity to explain the effects of internalized racism on Asian Americans: “There is a kind of psychological destruction of a people coming from being in concentration camps, being ashamed growing up, always wanting to be white, wanting to be something that you’re not.” Douglas and Lennon both frown.

Miyamoto’s next transformation happened out of necessity. She gave birth to her son Kamau just ten weeks before his father, Miyamoto’s partner and bandmate Atallah Muhammad Ayubbi, was killed. “I didn’t really have time to grieve,” says Miyamoto. “I had to figure out how to be a mother.”

“I was a cultural border crosser,” she told me of her work both raising a Black son and building cross-racial community. Her own mixed-race heritage gave her a sensitivity to otherness—her grandfather was Japanese and her grandmother white. “I grew up feeling like sometimes I didn’t totally fit into the Japanese community, and certainly I didn’t fit into the white community.”

In need of stability, Miyamoto moved back to Los Angeles and met Rev. Masao Kodani of Senshin Buddhist Temple, who offered her free space to teach dance classes. Out of that class grew her own nonprofit arts organization, Great Leap, with a mission to bring dance and storytelling to communities without access to the arts. For her, the temple was “my training ground, my experimental space to gather people together who have never told their stories and get them to tell them.” She spoke of literally raising Kamau in that church space, how that both offered him a family, while “stretching the community of the temple.”

One year, Kodani invited her to choreograph a dance for Obon, the annual Japanese Buddhist ceremony honoring ancestors through ritual, food, and large group dance. Miyamoto took it on, though it wasn’t her training, and created the first Obon songs in English. In partnership with the Chicano musician Quetzal Flores, Miyamoto fused two forms, the Obon circle and Fandango, leading to a new art called FandangObon. It was a world away from ballet or Broadway, and that was liberatory: “For me to go back into the community and retrain, to allow my body and my music to be part of my ancestral heritage—that opened my life up.”

Part of one’s charge as a villager is to continue to tell the stories of our village elders. Nobuko Miyamoto: A Song in Movement joins two recent documentaries from our village: Photographic Justice: The Corky Lee Story (2024) on the dogged photographer of Asian American New York and Free Chol Soo Lee (2022) on the movement that gathered to free a wrongfully incarcerated and traumatized Korean immigrant.

These villagers, of course, crossed paths. Corky photographed Iijima and Miyamoto when they performed in New York. Corky was also part of Basement Workshop, which published an artist book, Yellow Pearl, that set Iijima and Miyamoto’s music to page along with the collective’s art and poetry. My mother, as one of the organizers to free Chol Soo Lee from prison, put on a major fundraising concert that reunited Iijima and Miyamoto almost a decade after the heady days of the movement.