"You Gotta Accentuate the Positive": Japanese American Affirmation and Resilience in The Camp Dance: The Music and the Memories

Abstract

One evening in October 2004, about one hundred miles east of Fresno, California, 79yearold Mary Kageyama Nomura returned to the concentration camp where she had been illegally imprisoned as a teenager, and to the stage where she had earned the moniker “the songbird of Manzanar.” Now an elder in the Japanese American community, Nomura had returned to the site of her imprisonment to perform the popular songs of her youth once more, this time as a cast member of the touring musical revue Camp Dance. For a few short hours, the auditorium at Manzanar was once again a dance hall. Manzanar National Historic Site, which is now a museum and national park, was constructed as a concentration camp where over 10,000 Japanese American people were illegally incarcerated by the United States government.1 It was one of ten such sites that, all told, imprisoned over 120,000 Japanese Americans from 1942 to 1945, most of them U.S. citizens.2 Nomura, who was born in Los Angeles and imprisoned at the age of sixteen, was one of those individuals. Playwright Soji Kashiwagi’s The Camp Dance: The Music and the Memories, with which Nomura toured in the early 2000s, revisits this dark chapter of American history from the perspective of the nisei, the show’s subject and primary audience, through the 1940s popular tunes that were frequently heard within the camps.3