Davis Cherry Blossom Festival Extended Interview
The Davis Cherry Blossom Festival is a grassroots community project I developed and have run since 2016, though it has grown and evolved greatly over the years.
This post is an extended email interview I did for the Davis Dirt on March 13th, 2023 leading up to this year’s festival.
Image: Bon Dancing at the 2022 Davis Cherry Blossom Festival (Alex Fisher-Wagner, Sudwerk)
When something came up and the reporter had to cancel our scheduled phone interview, I agreed to an email interview. This is my full response to the questions asked in the interview. Understandably, it is more material than could be used in the short going-ons article, but I wanted to share here should anyone else be interested.
When the article made press, it claimed that no one would take credit for the festival - that it was a complete collaboration. I can totally see where this came from - I tried hard to put the reporter in touch with my other board members to get a fuller picture of the team who work so hard to produce it. The other board members who were interviewed also stressed the importance of the collaboration.
But the festival is also not an author-less. In the scope of my adult life, it has been a major artistic endeavor - this is not something that I ever was trained in or in a position where I could model it off an existing structure. In my journey in taiko, it was the logical next step in being a performer - to make space for my community to share a stage, to dig for a deeper meaning of performance. In recent years, I have grown to see the importance of this program in mentoring other young artists and facilitating their journeys. I am trying to uplift their stories, and our festival has grown because of the collaboration.
Like kumidaiko, this work is necessarily collaborative and asks us to put the community before the self - echoed in the Buddhist practice of letting go of the ego. But like kumidaiko, the communitarian ethic doesn’t mean that it is unowned or faceless. I think there’s some nuance there that can be missed, but which might disservice some communitarian-players in the prestige economies of art and academics.
The team that produced this year’s festival are: Ashley Shen, Katie Chun, Jon Gong, Lisa Shigenaga, Madeline Do, Victoria Nishikawa, Sophia Loo, David Gee, and Gregory Wada. The planners are a completely volunteer team of young people, of taiko players, of Asian Americans. I think that’s the story.
Extended Interview
1. Please write out your name and title (i.e., position at the festival and/or any other titles you go by).
Name: Gregory Wada
Titles: Executive Director, Director, Founder
2. How did the Cherry Blossom Festival get its start in Davis? How has it changed throughout the years, especially the last three?
As a student at UC Davis, I was a member of Bakuhatsu Taiko Dan, a collegiate taiko performing ensemble. We would play gigs throughout the Davis-Sacramento region and sometimes the San Francisco Bay Area. One thing I love about performance are the connections that are made between audiences and performers. But while the art can speak for itself in certain aesthetic and emotional qualities, it alone doesn't really provide a cultural context for the style of music we perform. I think taiko, to many American audiences, is something quintessentially Japanese, a celebration of a different time and place - it becomes something that can be aesthetically consumed as foreign, like anime or sushi. For Asian America, however, taiko functions as a statement of American identity or identity formation, a mode of resistance to models of assimilation and subservience, and as a point of connection between different Asian American diasporas and immigration histories. My grandmother grew up in a farming family on the Sacramento Delta, for instance, and the Japanese inaka (countryside) that she remembered when listening to music was not exactly across the ocean - it was somewhere around Stockton. I think this is one of the fundamental paradoxes of American diversity - we have yet to really articulate how diversity grows in American soil; it is not just a foreign import. We should not accept Euroamerican settler colonialism as a default or end state of assimilation, of belonging.
In 2016, I had a fellow anthropology student, KB Brandl, who worked as the Dock Store Manager at Sudwerk Brewing Co., and we decided to host a taiko festival at the brewery to address these sorts of representational issues. KB arranged with Sudwerk to make this possible and arranged a seasonal beer release. I produced the lineup of events, which included taiko lessons to the public, taiko performances, shamisen and koto music, Chinese lion dance, and a jam session.
The initial goals of the festival were to create a place for taiko players and Asian American artists to share stories and build community with each other, as well as to provide a venue to share our stories with the broader Davis community. In the Spring of 2016, when we started the festival, it was also a time of heightened political polarization and rhetoric. I saw what we did as taiko players as relevant to the broader American conversation about diversity and belonging - myself and many other taiko players are descendents of survivors of the Japanese American Incarceration. I think that sharing space together is an important tool in building social trust and compassion, and this serves as the basis for the big picture goal of the Festival. I think we are fortunate that the Davis community is very receptive to this messaging, but I think even well-educated and well-meaning people still have much to learn about each other.
We have had the festival every year since, adding a charity fundraiser as a way for artists to rally about important social justice causes. After hurricanes Irma and Maria and the lack of federal support, we raised money for hurricane relief. During the #metoo movement, we raised money for an AAPI womens' shelter and featured women-led bands and artists. As migrants were being detained, we raised money for advocacy and legal support of those detained. Since it's a free festival, our fundraising wasn't huge, but it also gave a platform for artists to connect their work to important issues and develop awareness and develop new relationships within activist spaces.
2019 was a big year for us in that we received public support from the City of Davis Arts and Cultural Affairs Program. This really allowed us to expand our programming and hire professional stage and sound support. It also allowed us to expand the family-friendly activities programming. Since our festival specifically rejects the commodification of culture, it remains important to us to have a free, public festival that everyone can participate in without cost. Our activities like shibori dying and lantern painting sometimes have suggested donations to help us cover costs, but they are free for anyone to do without payment. This year we also applied for and received 501(c)3 status from the IRS under an organization under the same name - "Davis Cherry Blossom Festival." This name has been slightly confusing, though, as it is the name of our flagship program and because we also produce a Fall Tsukimi festival. Our board of directors are also the planners and producers of the festival, and are a group of young Asian American organizers, many students and currently all with some background in taiko. Through the process of incorporating as a non-profit and producing larger festivals, our program has also become a site for mentorship and AAPI leadership development.
The pandemic in 2020 was particularly difficult - for me, it was as hard to take down a festival about a month out as it is to produce one. However, through a partnership with the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, we were able to carry on programming in a webinar format. We did a special webinar called "A Change is Going to Come" in November 2020 and produced a two-day online Cherry Blossom Festival broadcast live from the Manetti Shrem in April of 2021. Looking back, it's hard to believe we produced multiple full-day programs online during this time. I'm incredibly proud of our team of young students who found ways to make community online during this time. During one webinar, we were zoom-bombed by online trolls with Anti-Asian rhetoric, but the Museum staff quickly and professionally removed them and the program went on without delay. I think it shows, though, that the need for these types of programs is very and just how literally the support we get from the City and University gives voice to communities who regularly deal with forces that would silence or belittle them.
Coming back to in-person festivals has been an amazing way to connect with the community again, and our festival last year in 2022 was the largest yet, giving a venue to many local and visiting artists, including taiko players as far as Los Angeles. As the festival grows, it is a continuous process of trying to find ways to share our core mission through the vehicle of a festival. Ultimately, a festival should be fun, and we hope that we can build a stronger community through moments of shared joy. I want this to be a locus for Asian American solidarity and third space, which is often happening behind the scenes in the planning for the festival, but regardless of your background, I hope participants can come out and have a fun, meaningful time at the festival. Both can be true together, connected in shared joy.
3. How did you first get involved? What is your role and what has it meant to you?
As a student taiko performer, we performed with Seiichi Tanaka and the San Francisco Taiko Dojo at the Northern California Cherry Blossom Festival, a storied Nikkei (Japanese American) festival in the San Francisco Bay Area. Performing taiko both in centers of Japanese American culture and in occasional gigs with no cultural context, I wanted to create a festival in Davis where we could share more of the culture and history of taiko and Japanese Americans. I had the idea for the "Davis Cherry Blossom Festival" with this in mind. Occasionally, people ask us where the cherry blossoms are, which is fair - but it is more of a reference to extant Japanese American celebrations and history, including the Buddhist observance of Hanamatsuri. In conversation with a good friend, KB Brandl, who worked at Sudwerk, we started the festival very grassroots, without external funding or support. It was a portion of beer sales fundraiser that initially funded our activities, though we have since gained public and private support.
Since the beginning, my role has been as the producer or director of the festival, though initially as part of my collegiate taiko group, Bakuhatsu Taiko Dan. As the festival grew into a larger project, beyond the operational scope of the performance group, we incorporated as an independent non-profit organization, though we still work closely with Bakuhatsu Taiko Dan. I am now the Executive Director of the non-profit, but am assisted by an excellent team of young leaders. This is the first year that I am not chairing the board, either - that responsibility belongs to Ashley Shen.
The mission has always driven me in this work - I haven't reflected much on what the role has meant to me. Though we have different titles on the board, it's highly collaborative work. I am still largely involved in operations, but lately the role has evolved into more of a mentorship one. I want to empower young leaders in my community with chances to develop skills as organizers and share their artistic visions. In this manner, a new side of this project has become clear to me - that the festival is not just what we produce for the community to attend, but the community of people who work together to produce it.
4. How have Davisites responded to the festival? What makes it such an integral event to the Davis community?
I am incredibly grateful to the Davis community for showing up at the festival and bringing such wonderful energy. I hope that the grassroots nature of this festival resonates with people in Davis, who I think are largely open to exploring anti-capitalist ways of being in community. This isn't an Americana pop-up tent festival, and sometimes the glue is barely dry, but I think Davis in particular can appreciate the authenticity in that. When you look around the festival, I hope you notice that there are both familiar faces from the Davis scene, but also many more who are not. We take pride in giving opportunities to young and upcoming artists, and making space for makers of all sorts. I think this is very in the spirit of Davis. As for the audience, too, I think our festival celebrates and represents a demographic that doesn't always have its own festival - it is a celebration of Asian America, not Asia the International.
If it's an integral part? It may be impostor syndrome or some internalized self as a "perpetual foreigner," but I feel as if the festival could disappear in a heartbeat. I think third-space projects can be incredibly fleeting, especially when led by a team of young adults who have to move on to develop careers. Neither our funding or venue is guaranteed, but like delicate spring blossoms, they somehow show up every year, not always the same but beautiful in their own way. The City of Davis has been incredibly supportive of us in this regard, though, and I hope in turn we provide something of value to this community.
5. What are you most excited about for the upcoming festival? What do you enjoy most about the festival as a whole and why?
There's a lot of things to be excited for, but I'm most excited about the ways this festival will create new connections between people. We'll have taiko players from Northern and Southern California able to spend time together, from collegiate, community, and Buddhist groups. We'll be able to feature some great up-and-coming bands, and I hope this festival is a way for them to connect with each other - I always love seeing future collaboratives born out of groups who interact at the festival. One of my favorite moments is a portion of the night where we invite the community to dance Bon Odori with us, a Buddhist circle dance that requires no previous training, and that moment, to me, is perfectly reflective of the type of music-as-community ethos that I hope this festival can be at large.
6. Is there anything else you'd like people to know about you, your work, the festival, etc.?
I think it's all covered here!
Here's our website: https://davischerryblossomfestival.weebly.com
If you need or want to talk to anyone else, let me know. This is the team of people organizing: https://davischerryblossomfestival.weebly.com/board-of-directors.html
Thanks,
Gregory
