Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto Transcript
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman. Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto is a California-based koto performer and teacher, and she also created "Hidden Legacy, the Story of the Japanese Traditional Performing Arts in the American World War II Internment Camps". In this episode, she performs some incredibly beautiful koto music, and there are wonderful stories with each composition. Like all my episodes, this is available as both video and podcast. And for those of you watching the video, you'll notice that Shirley generously rerecorded one of her performances of a very special piece. If you want to jump straight to some music or different topics in our conversation, you can use the timestamps. However, I encourage you to listen to the whole episode with Shirley's engaging insights about family and identity. You can also read the transcript. Everything is linked in the description to my website, leahroseman.com, where you can sign up for my newsletter and get exclusive sneak peeks of upcoming episodes. Hi, Shirley. Thanks so much for being here today.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Oh, thank you, Leah, for inviting me to be here.
Leah Roseman:
Now you're sitting there with your koto, and not everybody listening to this can see. Some people are listening to the podcast, so if you could just describe briefly the instrument and play a little bit for us before we get into our conversation, that would be wonderful.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Oh, all right. Well, the koto is the national instrument of Japan. It came from China in about the 8th century, and then it went through Korea and Okinawa and went through different changes. But basically the traditional koto that we play in Japan these days has remained unchanged. So it's pretty much the way it's been for all those centuries. It has 13 strings, and I don't know if you can see it, but it's kind of like this, and it resembles a dragon. The dragon is a very auspicious creature in Asian culture, so it's looked upon as a good luck thing. So even the parts of the koto are named after dragon parts. The part over here is the head. The inside section they call the dragon's tongue. This back section is the spine of the dragon. It looks like it with these tuning bridges. And the very end is the tail. It's hollow. If you want to see, there's sound holes here. There's one on the top, and then there is one at the end.
So it's pretty resonant. And of course, just like the harp, the strings resonate, so it has this quality that just keeps on ringing. And these strings originally were made of silk, but since silk nowadays, it's a little bit difficult to have silk strings on for any long period of time, they've made a nylon version called tetron, and these last longer. For more modern pieces now that require the strings to be strung tighter, these are much better for holding up to that.
So I think that's generally about the koto instrument itself. I use three finger picks here on my right hand, and even these fingers sometimes without picks. And then I also use my left hand without picks. So you get (music) different textures. If I use either hand, I can bend notes (music) or, (music) let's see, that's by pressing on the other side of the bridges. The bridges are tunable (music) by moving them back and forth. And because of the finger picks, I can get a myriad of different tonalities. I can (music) swish them on the strings because the strings are actually wound. It's not just one piece. So I do a rap (music) kind of thing, because you can slip your finger picks underneath the strings and do a lot of different techniques. Scraping (music), scraping, that kind of scraping technique. We generally don't play (music) the other side of the koto between the right side of the koto, but nowadays there's many other uses for also the other side of the koto. So that's a little brief overview of things that you can play on the koto.
Leah Roseman:
Wonderful. If we could start with some music, and then we can get into some interesting conversation and come back to music later, that would be great.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Can we take a moment then? Because I'm going to put this-
Leah Roseman:
Of course.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
... thing on my picks. I wanted to play something a little bit active, and if you don't put something sticky on your fingers, it'll fall off. My mom was a teacher, and so the traditional thing is to use egg whites. And then I thought after a while, the egg whites get a little icky, so actually I'm using fake eyelash glue.
Leah Roseman:
Tricks of the trade.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Yeah. People use different things now. The Chinese version of this is called the guzheng. They tape their finger picks on. They also use finger picks, and they tape it on with some, it's like an adhesive. What do you call it? It's like surgical tape or something like that. Tape it onto their fingers every time. There's various types of zithers in Asia that are pretty similar to each other. The Chinese version has steel strings, usually more strings, like 20-something strings. The Korean is kayagum. The Vietnamese is dan tranh, and the Korean version, they don't use any finger picks. It's all your bare fingers. The koto actually has other versions as well. They have a bass koto that's 17 strings. Nowadays, the more modern version of koto has 20-some-odd strings. And at one time, the famous blind composer, Michio Miyagi made a 88-string koto to try to mimic the piano. It wasn't played too often.
So I thought I'd play a version of Sakura, which is the most traditional song from Japan. It means cherry blossoms. And so you'll hear many versions of Sakura if you go to Japan. And this version is by Kimio Eto. He was also a blind musician. And I'm sure a lot of people don't remember him, but he came over here in the late '50s, and before that, he would perform with American GIs after World War II. So he started getting some Western influence in his music, and he even somehow met some pretty auspicious musicians like Harry Belafonte. He was on one of his albums. There was a composer named Henry Cowell. He's a California composer that liked to incorporate ethnic instruments in his compositions. So he struck up a friendship with him for a bit, and Henry Cowell wrote a piece called Something for Koto and Orchestra, the First Concerto or something. And Kimio Eto had to learn his part in Braille because he's blind.
So he was on a couple of variety shows back in the day, The Danny Kaye Show, which maybe people don't remember. Danny Kaye, he was a entertainer during that time, and I actually met him when I was about nine years old. And I tagged along on a lesson that my mom was having with him in San Jose, California when he came to perform, and I was just really influenced by his playing and his compositions. I told my mom I wanted to take a lesson too. And she said, "You're too young." So I just went on this lifelong journey to try to find him in Japan. After I think about in the early '70s, he went back to Japan and never came back to the United States.
So I loved his music so much that every time I went to Japan, I tried to get anything that was written by him. And this piece that I'm going to play is one of the pieces on something like maybe three or four albums that he did in the United States. What I didn't realize, they've come out with some printed books of his compositions now. It seems like that was something that was not really worked on as much, but now people are starting to realize and notice him more that he's passed away.
So this is a version of Sakura I've been looking for most of my life. I loved it so much. I actually transcribed it from one of his records. So when I saw the printed version, it's a little bit different from the recording. And after I was researching whatever he played, I noticed that every time he played even his own compositions, he changed them up a little bit. So I told his son that I wanted to record it the way I heard it on his LP. And so this is the way I've learned it and I perform it these days.
Leah Roseman:
Wow. So beautiful. Thank you, Shirley.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Oh, thank you.
Leah Roseman:
I was just thinking that arrangement has so much interest and so much texture, and it must have been so much work and really a work of love and dedication to do that transcription.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Oh, yeah, it was. Every time I went to Japan, I looked for him, and maybe he was an eccentric person. What I heard about later on was because he did these maybe outside-of-the-box things for the tradition, that he might have been kicked out of the school. And so that's why he made his own school in Japan. He got into some trouble, I think, when he was in the States, which is why he couldn't come back, I think. I don't know all the details, but he was a genius composer, performer.
A lot of these techniques are not traditional koto techniques. And even my mother would say, "Well, he's blind so he can do all those things." But I said, "That's no excuse. We should be able to also work hard enough to be able to play these techniques." So it took a long time to figure out. Even the tuning is a little bit of a hybrid tuning. It's part of the traditional scale, but he changed it up, and so he's able to do some different things with the composition. So a lot of his works are just incredibly beautiful and difficult.
Leah Roseman:
Well, I had discovered you through actually Destiny Muhammad, the jazz harpist, because she's a guest. And her episode will be released before yours, so people hopefully will have heard that episode. And then I saw it was a jazz koto, so I was completely fascinated. And I had it in my mind to definitely find a koto player, so I was delighted when you agreed to come and do this today. You got into playing in different styles. Was that early on or with your son, Brian? How did that happen for you?
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
I grew up playing the koto because my mother's a koto teacher, and I think the way koto is taught, you basically learn a certain style, or whatever school you're with, that school usually nowadays has works by a main composer. And the main composer of my mother's koto school was Chikushi Katsuko, who was for a long time, the only woman composer on the koto. And so when I grew up with it, I learned, of course, the traditions, which is basically you only play the music of your school. You don't play music from other people's schools, and it's even frowned upon to perform with them or do things together with people from other schools.
So the tradition used to be very strict, and it didn't really encourage creativity. If you wanted to compose your own music, then if it's going to be a lot of music, they would tell you to form your own school, that kind of thing. Teachers weren't really encouraged to do anything outside of the box, per se. And I'm a fourth-generation American, and I was growing up playing all this Japanese music and thinking like, wow, I wish I could do something else with it. And even from my koto school, new music was coming out. The son of the headmaster was a guitarist. His name was Ichiro Sakamoto. And he started writing music for the koto pretty much based on his guitar, his guitar techniques, his understanding of Western music. And we started getting pieces like tangos, Persian Market, Third Man Theme, things like this.
And so I thought, wow, this is really cool, and I'm going to start my own band with this music. So in high school I started to gravitate toward trying something different with the music we were getting from him. And I'm growing up in Oakland, California. I'm exposed to actually mostly rhythm and blues and soul, but rock and all these other types of music. And I thought, there's got to be a way I can play that music on the koto. So it's pretty much been a long journey trying to figure this out, because I didn't want to change the koto too much. I wanted to keep being able to play the techniques and work around playing in these genres without changing my tuning so much. Because I realized that I can change my tuning to Western scales, and we do that sometimes, but to me, the soul of the koto comes from the Asian tunings that we use.
It brings out the best tone because the strings resonate. I feel like they resonate harmoniously in the Asian pentatonic scales. So my goal was to try to stay with those scales while I was playing different genres of music. So that was a skill that I have developed through the years, but at first, I had no clue. And everybody told me, "If you want to learn how to improvise in jazz or whatever, just listen to a lot of jazz." And that's it. You have to listen to a lot of jazz, listen to a lot of different music and musicians to start to get this feel for it and how you want it to come out from you instead of copying people too much. And I really couldn't copy too many people, because I only have 13 strings. I don't have all the notes. If I tuned it to a Western scale, and I just played, basically, on those scales, I felt like I sounded too much like a harp or a guitar. And so whenever anybody asked me to collaborate with them, and I wouldn't need more notes, or something like this, I would just tell them, why don't you get a harpist or a guitarist? Because you're not going to... They have more notes than I'm going to have. I didn't want to get into any projects where I didn't feel like you couldn't hear the personality of the koto.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I was just trying to remember if it was Alice Coltrane or Dorothy Ashby that had some koto on their album.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Yeah, Dorothy Ashby. It was like-
Leah Roseman:
Dorothy. Okay.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Oh, actually, both of them. Yeah. I think Destiny brought that out.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
And we even did one of Dorothy Ashby's Moving Finger. I even asked Destiny if we could do a video, and that's on YouTube now.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I saw that.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Oh, you saw it?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Right. So she experimented on the koto as well. I hadn't heard anything about that until Destiny told me about that. Because I've become more used to my... Trying to adapt to whatever the project is. When I heard that piece of Moving Finger, I could hear a pentatonic scale. So I thought, okay. We can do this together.
Leah Roseman:
So for your Game of Thrones arrangement, for example, was that a request or are you a Game of Thrones fan? Had you heard the music?
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
I'm not a Game of Thrones fan. I had never seen it before. A lot of the arrangements that I do, or... It's something that comes to me. Game of Thrones came to me because my students were watching it. And my students were going, "Oh, you have to see this Game of Thrones." And I didn't have Netflix, so I couldn't watch it. Everybody kept talking about it. So sometimes, I make arrangements so that they can have more fun with the music. I thought, okay, I'll make an arrangement of Game of Thrones. And that's what came out of that video. I have students that are multicultural these days.
I had a student who was half Guatemalan and half African American. And so I asked their Guatemalan mother, do you have any Guatemalan songs that you might like your daughters to learn? They were sisters that were learn learning from me. And so she gave me a few songs that I could listen to., and I chose one that I thought would work for the koto. And I asked her if she could teach them the song, and she just went to town with it. She made her daughters sing that song every night before they went to bed. They learned the words. I'm pretty sure they'll never forget it. And so when we played it, they sang the song as we played it on the koto. And I wish I could remember what the title is, but I can't, right now.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I'm an independent podcaster who does all the many jobs required to produce the series, and there are a lot of costs I bear as well. Please consider either buying me a virtual coffee as a tip, or becoming a monthly supporter, starting at $3 Canadian, which is close to $2 us or two euros, and getting access to unique perks. The link is in the description. Now, back to the episode.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
So this piece is my mom's favorite piece. It's called [Japanese]. That means memories. It's a shorter piece, and it's very nice, has more... To me, it has a Latin flavor to it. And it's very expressive. It was interesting to me, that... She taught it to me in a certain way. And recently, I think the school is changing the style of it, but I like the way she taught it to me. And so I kind of play it like that. Okay. So this is Maboroshi o Oute by Chikushi Katsuko .
Leah Roseman:
Thank you so much for that.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
Your middle name, Kazuyo, is your koto name?
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
That's my koto name.
Leah Roseman:
So who gave that to you?
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Of course, my parents gave me that name.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Yeah. Music names in Japan are based on your headmaster. The headmaster of my school is Katsuko. So you take part of their name... Katsuko. I can't remember all the kanji, which is the Chinese characters, but the first character is "Uta," which is "Song." Okay. So my mother's professional name is Kazuko. And when she attained her professional name, her father told her, maybe you should have the name "Kasu," which was the first, "Ka," "Uta," song, and the second character represented state. And in the old days, they used to call California "Kashu." With a different character, but the pronunciation was "Kashu." So he said, "Yeah, I think your name should be "Kashu." Sorry. And then, when she came to the United States... At that time, they were in Japan. She came to the United States when she was 18. This is after the war. She was born in Palo Alto, but went to camp. They went to Japan after the camp, and then came back here. And she married my dad.
And when she went playing koto for different functions and events, the name "Kashu" sounded more masculine than feminine. So she decided to add the character "Ko." A lot of women's names are "Keiko," or "Hanako," or something like that. They end in the character "Ko," which actually means "Child." I don't know. So that would made her name "Kazuko." And when she got married... They also count the number of strokes in the characters. And they said that when they put the "Ko" on her name, the number of strokes became more fortunate. So it was a better thing for her. And she and I are both spiritual people. And she believes that when she changed her name to... Added the "Ko" to "Kazuko," that her studio started getting bigger, and she had more students, and things like this. So my name is part of her name, "Kazhu." It's the same thing, song, state. And then, "Yo" means that you're going to carry on a branch of...
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
So that's why my professional name is Kazuyo.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So your mom... When she was interned in the camp during the second World War, how old was she?
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
She was about nine when they went into camp. They went to an assembly center, her parents, and her younger sister was about three years old. And they went to a assembly center, Tanforan, California, which is near San Mateo. I don't know if anybody knows this area. And then, they were sent to Topaz, Utah, which is a desert area. And they spent about a year and a half there. And then, they were transferred to Tule Lake, California, which is in Northern California. I don't know how much of the history you want to talk about there, but...
Leah Roseman:
I think it's very important to talk about it. Now, I'm Canadian, so we had a similar history in Canada. People not from North America may have never heard of this history and... Oh, yeah, if you want to talk to how the Japanese Americans were treated at that time.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Oh, Canadian Japanese were treated... I hate to say it, but a lot worse than the American Japanese were, I believe. Yeah. I'm not a historian, so I don't want to say the wrong things, but I know that they suffered a lot more than, I think, the American Japanese did. In fact, a lot of them were deported pretty quickly, to Japan. And I have a feeling that, maybe, because of that, they were... They were deported, pretty much, but American Japanese were not deported. They were... A year and a half after being incarcerated, they put out this loyalty questionnaire that was supposed to be used to find out which of the young men would fight in the war. But they decided to give it to everybody who was age 17 and older, even the first generation, the older people. And there were two hot button questions on it that said something like, "Would you fight for the United States?" And "Would you give up your allegiance to the emperor?" That type of thing, which assumed that everybody was from Japan.
Two thirds of those incarcerated in the United States were American citizens. The other one, third, were the first generation. And if they gave up their allegiance to the emperor, they would be without a state, without a country. So that was, of course, a very personal, very heart-wrenching decision to make on those questions. And it came down to thinking that if you said no to those questions, that you didn't want to be in the United States anymore, and they were going to deport you to Japan. My grandparents were among those people. Actually, my grandparents were second generation. So they gave up their citizenship in order to leave the United States. But not everybody who signed the questionnaire, "No-no," went to Japan. And they were not deported. So a lot of them stayed here, but of course, a lot of them went to Japan.
Leah Roseman:
Now, I can't remember... So we'll talk about your beautiful documentary, Hidden Legacy, but I'm not sure if it was in that, that I learned this, or separate reading, that in Hawaii, Japanese Americans were not interned, but they had very strict rules about culture, that they weren't allowed to practice Japanese culture. It was just a different hardship. Was that in your film? I can't remember if that came out-
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
We touched on it. It was different in Hawaii, because there were a lot more Japanese who were working in Hawaii, in the government, in companies, and such. So they couldn't really take all those people and put them in camps, because otherwise, everything would shut down. They did have some camps, not as many as we did in the United States, but... Because they weren't put in a different place, in a prison, far away in the deserts and remote areas. They were still among the cities, or towns. And if they practiced anything Japanese, sometimes, people would shoot into their house, or whatever, because they're still there. So they pretty much had to stop doing whatever they were doing as far as Japanese cultural arts. The flip side of American Japanese being in these remote areas was that they could continue to practice traditional arts, because nobody else could hear them or see them.
Leah Roseman:
And the government actually paid the teachers, because they realized it was keeping people from uprising, basically. It was keeping them calm because they had something to do.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Right. They were looked at as... Oh, there was a title for them, and I can't remember now. And they were, actually, paid on the same scale as a doctor, so $19 a month. Because they were helping to keep people occupied and doing something so that they wouldn't be thinking about causing riots or pandemonium.
Leah Roseman:
So when you were growing up, your mom didn't talk to you about this time in her life?
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
My mother was a child when she went into camp. So she talked about camp, but she only talked about it like "Camp." She was like, "I learned in camp." I didn't know anything about that history, so I just assumed that she was talking about summer camp. That's the only camp I knew. And I didn't hear about what that camp was until later. In the community, everybody talked about "Camp." They didn't say, "I was in this prison camp in Arizona." What was it? Yeah. Arizona, Colorado, Utah, all these places where the camps were.
Leah Roseman:
So how did it work with the instruments? I understand some people were able to bring instruments. But in other cases, they were incomplete, or they had to be made. How did that work?
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Smaller instruments, like the bamboo flute, shakuhachi, or shamisen, which looks like a banjo, a little bit, those can be taken apart and transported pretty portably, but not the... The koto is six feet long. When I started learning the history, I heard these phrases, like, "They could only take what they could carry." And since my mom was saying, "I learned in camp," I thought she brought her koto to camp with her. And I said, "How did you do that? I thought you could only take what you could carry, unless you stuffed it..." It's hollow. Maybe you stuffed it with clothes. We learned after interviewing some of the musicians that were there, that... One person had friends who stored their kotos for them and said, "Wherever you end up, just let us know, and we'll bring it to you."
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
I'm guessing, this one teacher that my mom took lessons from, in San Francisco... She was a teacher, and she... When music is your thing, you'll find a way to bring your instrument with you. So I have a feeling she, somehow, was able to bring it with her. Somebody else said that... This gentleman made a koto for his wife, in camp. It wasn't, really, wonderful, but it was something she could practice on. And when my mom's family went to Tulelake, it became the place, because all the "No-nos," the people who said "No" on the loyalty questionnaire, were sent to Tule Lake. And a lot of them thought they were going to be deported, of course. So two-thirds of them were thinking, oh, I don't know the language, I don't know anything about Japan, so I better start learning. So there's a anthropologist, I think his name was... I know his last name was Marvin Opler, who said that there was a resurgence of Japanese culture at Tule Lake.
This is because everybody thought they better know some Japanese things if they were going to be sent to Japan. So all the language classes were filled up, Japanese language, and of course, cultural arts. So my mom was able to... Actually, I think my grandpa got one of the kotos for my mother, so she's able to practice on something. And it had no strings and no bridges. So he got some raffia and tied it, end to end. So it was long enough to stretch over six feet. And then, he made little bridges out of pieces of wood and toothbrush handles. So she had something to practice on. People were very creative. They made finger picks out of cow bones or chicken bones, and pieces of wood, sometimes. Henry Cowell, who I mentioned before, was a very good friend of a shakuhachi player in Manzanar, and his name was Kitaro Tamada. His letters to Mr.Cowell are the only he says is the first generation voice that we had in the film, but you know I don't know if that letter got in. There was one letter that asks Mr. Cowell if he can get some strings for the Koto players, and they were gut strings. So I thought, wow, that's a long piece of gut. Did they really have, I mean, I guess our bass string basses made of that kind of string?
Leah Roseman:
Well, they used to be. So people who play like viola de gamba and original instrument style violins, they use gut strings, made from sheep gut. So I imagine intestines are quite long. So yes, bass would have been made. I think out of gut. What was the process of making that film like for you?
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
It was really an eye-opening experience to me because I just had this little bit of information from my mother, and then when I tried to find more information from other people, it was just like nonexistent. And even when I went to some of the institutions that had grant funding and such, they thought I just didn't do enough research. But to that somebody must have done it by now kind of thing, because after there were reparations, I think it was 1988, that Ronald Reagan signed the reparations for Japanese Americans, and then it sort of put a spotlight on that history and wanting to know more about it. That's kind of why I think reparations for African Americans are also something that needs to happen because of what happened, after Japanese Americans received reparations, it received the attention it needed on that history.
But it was interesting to me that this history was being shaped too, because Japanese Americans, of course, they were upset to find out that even if you were born here, they didn't receive the same protections as other people born in United States so they wanted to make sure that they were accepted into the society.
Leah Roseman:
When I was reading about the No-no questionnaire in an article, from what I understood, for those people who were born in Japan, who were not born in the United States, that they were not eligible for American citizenship. So if they said, we're not loyal to the emperor of Japan, they were stateless because they could not get American citizenship.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
That's right. That's right.
Leah Roseman:
Which is shocking.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Yeah. And devastating.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
See, what were we talking about before that?
Leah Roseman:
Well, the process of making the film. Because you hadn't made a film before that.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
No.
Leah Roseman:
Or had you?
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
I'm not a filmmaker. I mean, I guess now I am, but I had thought about if I was going to put something together that people could see and understand, it would have to be, to me, if I could find survivors of the camp who experienced the arts when they were there, then they can tell their stories. Because of course that's different. To hear it from people who experienced it, even though I felt like I was kind of on the later edge of capturing those stories, it had to be gathered by, at that time, people I went to try to get funding to try and explore that a little bit more. Didn't think that was important because they wanted the message to that went out to be that we are Americans, we have no foot in another country because we are loyal Americans.
Leah Roseman:
Did you get funding from the American Civil Liberties Union for the film?
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Well, I got it from National Park Service. What do they call it? (Japanese American)Confinement sites Grant. I tried the California, what is it called? California Library Civil Liberties, something like that. They have these sessions that you can go to so that you can put your grant together in such a way that they want to see it in a certain voice. And one of them told me, oh, we don't fund any music like that.
I was just looking for koto music at the time. And then I'd look at the people who were granted funding and it would be new works about the camp. Oh, this is a new composition about camp, or something like this. But maybe they didn't want the information to go out there that people did Japanese things at camp. I mean, I think that's kind of what it was that, because that's why you saw a lot of history about, oh, they did swing music and they had orchestras and they had anything that was more western, but not the Japanese arts. So I started to think that there's a part of them that were starting to feel ashamed of being, having Japanese heritage.
And I know that immigrant communities that come to whatever country they go to, they start to assimilate into that culture, that main culture. But we found that Japanese Americans actually assimilated two generations faster than everybody else because of the camp war experience.
Leah Roseman:
In terms of your Japanese language, how much did you know when you went to Japan to spend six months there to get your teaching certification?
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Well, I didn't know too much. My parents are kind of interesting because they're both, see, one is second generation Japanese (American) who was educated in Japan. So my dad's Japanese was pretty good, and his English was not as good, he had a thick accent. My mom is third generation and born here and spent some time in Japan after the war, so I heard Japanese growing up. I could understand it better than I could speak it. I went to Japanese school every Saturday, I wanted to speak Japanese.
So when I went to college, I majored in Japanese, but I went to UC Berkeley, and it was like the beginning of the early seventies. So it was right after the civil rights unrest and the formulation of ethnic studies programs it was a brand new department at Berkeley. And the ethnic studies had conversational Japanese as one of the classes. They had conversational, Cantonese, things like that. But since they were a new department, they didn't assign much credit for it, you know, might get one unit. So I majored in Japanese because I wanted to learn Japanese and the Japanese that was taught at Berkeley was under a department called Oriental Language.
It was mostly classical Japanese so at that time I thought, oh, this is terrible because classical Japanese is great, but I won't be able to talk to anybody. Even Japanese people I met from Japan would say, wow, you're learning poetry, MAN’YŌSHŪ Collection 万葉集 Tales of Genji. We don't even do that in Japan. So that made me think even more, I'm not going to be able to speak to anybody, but after I graduated, I took my first trip to Japan for my degree, and I wanted to speak in Japanese to try my Japanese, but I didn't realize that the Japanese I was hearing when I was growing up was my dad's Japanese, that's a man's Japanese and it's a little more masculine, it's more your dad talking to the daughter, which is more kind of looking down. There's different levels of speaking.
So I get these really strange looks, like, oh my gosh, who is that? She talks like a man. So when I started to realize my Japanese wasn't kosher, I shut up for the next two or three months. I didn't want to offend anybody else so it took me a while to get into the language. I don't speak fluently still.
When I was taking lessons at the headquarters, of course, they all speak of Japanese, and it's pretty much the language of music. You don't really need words.
Leah Roseman:
Where there elements of culture shock living there?
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Oh, definitely, since I grew up with all this Japanese around me, my dad peddled Japanese food on a panel truck that he would drive to Japanese family's homes and sell that. So I thought I was totally Japanese and then I got to Japan and realized how American I was, because of the way the culture was. I mean, one of the stories was about this one police officer that was living with this elderly couple, and the elderly couple were friends of my grandparents.
So when I went to Japan, I also stayed with them, and he told me that one of his best friends was becoming friendly with the police chief's daughter. They were dating actually, and then her mother came in and said, oh, you must stop this relationship right now because she is of higher status that kind of a thing, and I thought, oh my gosh! I mean, what more perfect couple would be to have the police chief's daughter go with a police officer because she would understand the life of a police officer but then there it's like, if you're the different status, you cannot be together and I thought, no, that's not right.
As an American, I was thinking, well, that doesn't make sense to me.
Leah Roseman:
Now you mentioned you were at Berkeley. You were playing classical guitar then as well?
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Oh, I didn't learn classical guitar at Berkeley. Actually, when I went to Japan, I got a letter saying, you need one more class to graduate. So I said, oh my gosh, I have to go back. So I asked my counselor if I needed to go back to Berkeley to do that one more class and she said, no, you can go to any four year college. So I decided to go to Cal State Hayward. Well, they call it Cal State East Bay nowadays, because they had a great music department and I decided to not only take the one more class, I needed to make sure that I satisfied all the requirements, but I decided to have fun with it. So I took classical guitar, I took voice, I took tennis. I said, wow, this is going to be fun. So that's when I took guitar it kind of turned out to be a good thing because I could get a little more training on other things.
Leah Roseman:
And you played violin in school when you were a kid?
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
I did, from about third grade to my senior year in high school and you know how you get rebellious with your parents and since everything was Koto in my family, I said, I'm not playing Koto, I am going to play the violin. And I was in young people symphony orchestras, and I was really thinking, I'm going to be a violinist until I heard other violinists that were a thousand times better than me because I thought the Koto was easy. I didn't realize it was easy because it was coming easy to me since I grew up with it so for a while I was looking toward violin being my instrument of choice.
Leah Roseman:
Would you be prepared to play another piece for us?
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Oh yeah. I forgot about that. Okay, let me retune this here. Let's see.
Yeah, so this piece is that I'm going to play is called, Tsubasa ni Notte by Sawai Tadao, which means on the wings of a bird. My son is also an excellent Koto of player. I'm happy to say, Koto was actually played by mostly women and I kept thinking I had two sons so too bad I didn't think my sons would be interested. Although I wanted them to learn some kind of instrument, of course, since I'm a musician so when they got to be about third grade, something like that, I took him to a music shop and I said, Hey, what do you want to play? And so my older son, Brian said, I want to play saxophone. My friend was working at the House of Woodwinds in Berkeley, and he told Brian, he said, don't play the saxophone, everybody plays the saxophone, you'll never get a job right now. But he goes, I want to play the saxophone, so he played the saxophone, and my second son decided to take drums. I knew that Brian was musical. He had a really good ear from very young so I taught both of them a little bit of Koto, but Brian is the one that kind of stuck to it. I'm a little, of course, as an American, I'm outside the box, I think. Right? And a lot of this Koto players who practice and teach in the United States are a little more open-minded about how we share our music, because there are very few of us, number one, and number two, we don't think that we should be so regulated to one school or whatever. And this way we can share our music and we like each other's music from different schools, and we don't have to be so strict about that.
So my colleague who was teaching in San Francisco, her name is, Shoko Hikage was a of a different Koto school, the Sawai school, that is based in Tokyo and the headmaster of that school,Tadao Sawai, was composing some very interesting rhythmic music, modern music, young people just loved it. And then his wife, Kazue also played Koto, they played different styles of music, which was just incredible, they were an incredible couple and she would just mesmerize people with her improvisation.
She even invited us to come and perform with her in concert in San Francisco. Now, I thought it was really unusual for a headmaster to say, I want you to invite every Koto player in your area to come and join us, kind of thing and I just loved their philosophy and how they were very, very open. So, I got to play with Kazue Sawai performed with her and other people from other schools actually too. I brought Brian to this concert, and he was just overwhelmed by Kazue Sawai. So he started taking lessons from her, she invited him to come to their school in Tokyo, and they had a dormitory, they had a workshop, they had all this stuff. He became a living student it's called a Uchi-deshi, which means it's not just, you learn how to play the Koto, you have to help clean the house, help bring the kids to school, do these little chores whenever there's a concert, you have to bring all the instruments.
So he got a really interesting training from the Sawai School and to me, we were able to learn and able to share our different music with each other. There was one piece I just absolutely fell in love with Tsubasa ni Notte and I looked all over for the music, but this is a piece that they were keeping for their advanced students so it wasn't published for everybody else to play. Brian loved it so much that he transcribed it from a recording and he listened to both Kazue and Tadao's recording, and then figured it out. Now I believe it's been some years since that time, and I think it's published now, and people are playing it from other schools it's just a beautiful piece. Brian actually taught me this piece. I'm happy to say so I hope you like this piece,
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
I'm playing Tsubasa ni NotteWhich means on the wings of a bird by Sawai Tadao.
Leah Roseman:
Thank you, absolutely mesmerizing, and really inspiring. What is the notation like? How is this notated?
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Notation. I can show you a book here, this is one of the first books, see it like that.
Leah Roseman:
Wow, okay. So that looks, for those people who aren't seeing it, it's nothing like I've ever seen before.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Oh, okay. So basically Western music is you're playing notes, but because the koto has to be tuned before you play it, it's really numbers. So each string has a number, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, to 10, and then 11, 12, and 13, because in general writing, you write 11 like 10 plus one, and 10 plus two, and 10 plus three, there's three different symbols for those three streams. It's read just like Chinese and Japanese, which is basically you open it the opposite way that we open a book, and then you read downward instead of horizontally from right to left. Each box, if you can see it, is one beat, a double line means a measure, so it's kind of like that, basically.
Leah Roseman:
So you obviously learned Western notation as a violinist. When you write your arrangements, are you writing in the traditional Japanese notation?
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
For Koto, yeah. Sometimes I do write Western arrangements, because we play with Western instruments. Sometimes if I'm transcribing I'll buy some sheet music so I can take a look at what it, actually it makes it easier for me to arrange, because I can read the music and then figure out, the main thing would be for Koto is to figure out what your tuning is going to be. So sometimes, since I'm restricted to 13 strings, I look at the scale and think, okay, if I need more notes I can get, by bending notes, getting a little more range that way. Sometimes if there's a note that keeps popping up that I'm pressing all the time, all the time, I'll tune it to that, instead of having to bend a note to get up to it all the time.
Leah Roseman:
And do you improvise?
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Oh yeah. But it's just like I was mentioning before, one of the things I tried to do, since I was in a jazz band before, was to try to find tunings that fit whatever piece it was, whatever song it was, and to be able to pretty much play whatever on that tuning with that tune.
Leah Roseman:
I guess what I meant, yeah, I was aware that you played some jazz in ensembles, I was curious as, just as an individual, if you just improvised in different styles, or even in a traditional Japanese style, just to make stuff up, and if you do that as a creative practice.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Oh, a creative practice? I don't really do it as a practice, per se, but I do tell my students to practice doing improvisation because then they'll be more freer about it. A lot of people are scared of improvisation, I was scared of improvisation, because just like many classical musicians, when you're book learned, it's hard to go away from the book in a way. So one nice thing about koto tunings is that you could pretty much play them in any order and it sounds nice.(music)
So it's a nice instrument to improvise with because, I think if I was playing violin I'd be thinking, of course, thinking about what scales I'm in, what key signatures and what, I can flat or sharp, or whatever, but you can't do that too much with the koto. I mean, it's good to be aware of what your notes are so that you can do those things, and you can do more with it then, because you understand what works with whatever key signatures or chordal things.
Leah Roseman:
Now when Brian went to Japan to study, I understand your mom wasn't too happy about that, which I found interesting.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Oh yeah, she wasn't. Yeah, remember I was mentioning about the school system, and how they're pretty strict about trying to keep you within your school. So when Brian received his credentials from a different koto school, to me, in my American mind, I'm thinking, third generation, he's a young person who's going to continue playing koto, and I know a million other practitioners of Japanese traditional arts that would love to have their grandchild be continuing what they do. But my mother, on the other hand, was very upset because he didn't get his teaching credential under the Chikushi Kai school. So I put a little article in the Japanese paper to announce that so that he can maybe start his own studio and get some students, and people congratulated my mother, and she just went, "He is not third generation, because he didn't get it from my koto school."
So since Brian felt bad about that, making grandma mad, he went and got his degree from the Chikushi school as well, under his grandmother. So she was happy about that. The weird thing is here if you get a degree in one university and get another degree from another university and everybody says, "Oh, wow, that person is very well-rounded because they've had education from different places," but that's not looked upon as a good thing in the Japanese traditional world. They want you in their school, only that, and it looks like you're disloyal if you go from one school to the others. So those are different cultural things, I think.
Leah Roseman:
Well, we talked about your cultural shock when you went to Japan to study. What was it like for him? He was only 17.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Well, I'm not sure if I can speak for him, but it was difficult for him because he spoke less Japanese than I did. He actually told me that he didn't eat for the first two or three days because he didn't know how to ask for food. And when he went into town, in Japan the restaurants sometimes have these wax models of their food, so he went to one of the restaurants and said, "I want that," and he was finally able to eat.
So it was pretty difficult at first, and it was funny because there was a TV show that did a little spot on that school while he was there. They interviewed, of course, the headmaster and another student, and then they went to Brian and said, "Oh, he's from America." But Brian insisted on trying to speak in Japanese, which was pretty limited. I admire Brian because he's very brave about that. If I'm not feeling shy and stuff I'm not going to try and do the most difficult thing, and he actually tries to, in any situation, if we're with someone from Japan, even though our Japanese is not as polished, he'll still try and speak to them in the language as much as he can and stuff.
Leah Roseman:
And you made an album with him in 2010?
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Yes, yeah, we did one together called Oyako Don. That's actually a rice dish that has chicken and egg. Oya means parent and child, oyako, so that's why that dish is called the chicken and the egg, is in the rice.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. I've seen some of your videos together on YouTube, which are great, but I haven't heard the album. Are you going to maybe put it on Bandcamp or something? Or where can people listen to it?
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Which album? Oh, that album?
Leah Roseman:
This album, yeah.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Oh, we did it so long ago, it's over 10 years ago. I guess maybe because I'm older now I feel like I'm not very up on the technology these days, and Brian is not a person that is actually worried about getting his name out there or trying to do that type of thing, so we're pretty laid back about our approach to doing things. The strange thing is that since there were fewer and fewer koto teachers, especially in the Bay Area, it's almost like we don't have to advertise, because there aren't that many of us left. And that's why my goal has been to make sure that there will be other people after me, so I'm training another very bright student right now to go for her teaching credential next month, so hopefully I'll have another person out there to help keep this music going in this area.
Leah Roseman:
And online, you're all teaching online a little bit as well?
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Yes, I'm teaching online. I have students in Utah and North Carolina. Actually, I have a new student in Bangkok, I can't believe that one. Because generally speaking, the traditional way of teaching is in person, and for a long time I said I will never teach virtually. But unfortunately, the pandemic forced us to learn new skills. And even then, when people approached me about learning, I still would like to see them learn in person from somebody, so I tried to scout out and see if there's teachers in their area that I could introduce them to and they could learn from that person who's close by.
But yeah, it was interesting, the student I have from Bangkok was interesting because she understood that tradition. She was saying, "Is it okay for you to teach somebody who," I don't know, I think she had an instrument herself already, she had all the equipment she needed, and she said that if she had learned from some other person from another school, something like this, there's the etiquette of going to that teacher and saying, "I would like to learn from this teacher instead," there has to be some consent to that, these kind of things.
She plays the guzheng actually, the Chinese version of the koto. And so I said, "Well, what is it that you really want to do?" And she likes my jazz koto music, and she wanted to be able to do something like that on the koto. And I said, "Hey, I think you could do that on the guzheng, since you already know how to play the guzheng." So I tried to encourage her to maybe, "I'll give you some pointers and you do what I do, except for on the guzheng." But she said she loves the sound of the koto, and that's why she bought a koto. She was on a homestay thing, high school, so she bought a koto while she was there and brought it back with her to Bangkok, including finger picks and everything, and she's been dying to learn the koto. So there you go.
Leah Roseman:
Wonderful. Well, I just want to thank you for today, sharing your family history, your love of music, and the important history of the music and the interment camps as well, and I encourage everyone to watch that Hidden Legacy, it'll be linked, of course, in the description.
Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto:
Oh, thanks so much.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Thanks for following the series on your favorite podcast player and sharing your favorite episodes with your friends, all of which help find new listeners. I have lots more episodes coming in this season three, with a fascinating diversity of musicians and their stories and music. Have a great week.
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