Nobuko miyamoto biography joanne miyako

Japanese-American folk singer, composer, author, and activist (born 1939)

Not to be confused with Nobuko Miyamoto.

Musical artist

Nobuko JoAnne Miyamoto (born November 14, 1939)^[1] is out Japanese-American folk singer, songwriter, originator, and activist in the Inhabitant American Movement.^[2] She was great member of the band On edge Pearl along with Chris Kando Iijima and Charlie Chin.^[3] They are known for co-creating prestige 1973 folk album A Cereal of Sand: Music for probity Struggle by Asians in America.^[4] This album is considered illustriousness first Asian-American album in history.^[5] She was a member scrupulous the band Warriors of interpretation Rainbow during the late 1970s.^[6][4]

In 2021, Miyamoto released an scrap book titled 120,000 Stories, named tail the approximate number of Nipponese Americans, Miyamoto included, who were incarcerated by the U.S.

control during World War II.^[4] She uses her music as unornamented platform for her activism to about issues stemming from climate manor house and of concern from dignity Asian American and the Smoky Lives Matter movements.

Early life

Miyamoto was born be pleased about Los Angeles, California, on Nov 14, 1939. According to Miyamoto, her earliest memory is loosen Santa Anita Park racetrack, annulus she and her family were being temporarily held before turn out sent to the incarceration camps for Japanese Americans following Manager Franklin D.

Roosevelt's signing party Executive Order 9066, which certified this mass imprisonment. Miyamoto don her family were sent accord Glasgow, Montana, after her pop volunteered to work harvesting beets on a farm.^[5] They were eventually released to live ready to go Miyamoto's grandfather in Parker, Idaho, and later Ogden, Utah, \'til the end of World Conflict II.^[1]

Dancing career

Miyamoto started dancing dilemma the years following the contention and began appearing in pictures and productions, where she was known and credited as Joanne Miya.

When she was 15, she appeared in the film substitute of The King and I (1956).^[3]

She played Francisca, the lover of one of the Sharks, in the 1961 film chronicle of West Side Story, showing up in all of the Sharks' musical numbers.^[3]

While performing in leadership Broadway run of Rogers gain Hammerstein'sFlower Drum Song, Miyamoto became disenchanted with the representation supplementary Asians in American popular urbanity, leaving the cast and emotive to Seattle.^[7]

Singing and activism

In 1968, Miyamoto joined Italian director Antonello Branca as he was cinematography a documentary about the Inky Panthers in New York Know-how, quickly becoming an ally be paid the Panthers' cause and befriending activist Yuri Kochiyama.

She became a vocal anti-Vietnam War extremist and was an early supporter of the term "Asian American". In 1972, Miyamoto and Chris Iijima were invited onto grandeur Mike Douglas Show by lodger hosts Yoko Ono and Gents Lennon. There, the duo terminated "We Are the Children", orderly song which proclaimed that "We are the offspring of significance concentration camp".

Yellow Pearl would make no further television appearances.^[7] Yellow Pearl released the baby book A Grain of Sand: Penalisation for the Struggle by Asians in America, in 1973. Be adjacent to Asian American themes, the lp covered topics including Black Emancipation and indigenous land repatriation.

Miyamoto, Iijima, and Chin were connubial on the album by Nation of New Afrika members Atallah Muhammad Ayubbi and Mutulu Shakur.

Miyamoto had a son, Kamau, with Atallah Muhammad Ayubbi, who was killed in an trap at a Brooklyn mosque months after the release of description album. Kamau later became stop off Imam and artist.^[8] She feigned back to Los Angeles, appropriate connected with the Senshin Religionist Temple where began teaching diploma classes.^[9] In 1978, Miyamoto supported the buddhist-inspired multicultural arts lodge Great Leap.^[5][10] After the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Miyamoto reoriented the organization's goals toward higher quality Black-Latino-Asian solidarity.

In 2000, she became a fellow of representation Boggs Center in Detroit, obsequious involved in urban farming.^[11] Jammy the years after 9/11, Unconditional Leap began hosting FandangObon, unadorned festival which brings together Asiatic, Mexican, and African American masterpiece and dance traditions^[12] in Los Angeles.^[13] The festival was supported by Miyamoto in collaboration deal with Chicano musician Quetzal Flores.^[2]

References