The Davis Cherry Blossom Festival

The Davis Cherry Blossom Festival has been my primary creative and community-based project since the Spring of 2016. At the time of its inception, I worked in the Department of Anthropology with my friend KB. I was a museum scientist moonlighting as a musician, and she was an osteologist who also managed the tap room at Sudwerk Brewery in Davis. After work, we’d sometimes have long conversations over beers about our passions and incidentally about the Asian American experience.

I told KB about how sometimes after we performed, audience members would relate to our performance in ways that felt colonial, racist, or trivializing. To some audience members, our performance reminded them of samurai or made them want to “cut something in half with a katana.” Others saw it as anime-adjacent, part of a global consumer culture of Japanophilia, and its worth or authenticity were measured against these standards. Perhaps the worst form of viewership was the unabashed fetishization of young Asian American women, who were the majority of our college team. I loved playing taiko, and taiko meant the world to me, but this viewership was so completely different than the way I experienced performing taiko and being in a taiko ensemble. I wanted to do something about that.

For working in an anthropology department, too, the environment could be surprisingly unwelcoming. I stopped by another graduate student’s birthday party after a show and was scoffed at for wearing the attire of that “weird, Chinese drumming.” (It’s not the misattribution here that is particularly problematic - I really felt quite flattered when a young girl once identified me to her father as the guy from the “Chinese Apple Flower Festival” at a local barbershop.) In the Ivory Tower, I was surprised to find temporary access to white spaces, rather than spaces rejecting whiteness. A professor, my boss at the time, told me that it was a funny coincidence that my Japanese grandparents were “interned” while my major professor’s grandparents were made prisoners of war by the Japanese. This is literally the level of whataboutism used to “refute” my family remembrance of Incarceration in high school US History classes. This same professor later told me that they were the “senior archaeologist at a major California institution” and that if I wanted to succeed, it would be wise to not get on their bad side. (I did not succeed in academic archaeology.)

I am a yonsei Japanese American. My grandmother was born to a farming family on the Sacramento Delta and incarcerated in Rohr, Arkansas. She did not get to finish high school. While some audiences saw otherness or exoticness in our Japanese-coded dress, music, or movement, I saw a connection to the land and people of the Central Valley. Grandma knew I started playing taiko, but did not get to see me perform before she passed. The first song I wrote was in her memory and we played it at San Jose Obon in her honor. Taiko, to me, had this potential to take stories like mine, as well as stories from across the diverse Asian American diasporas, and weave them together into a sense of belonging.

As I told KB these stories and listened to hers, we had an idea that maybe we could share these narratives more fully by having our own stage in which to tell them. We decided to host a festival - she worked out a deal with the brewery in which we could use the space and receive proceeds from beer sales and I gathered the performers and produced the show. There was a raw energy to willing the festival into existence that I’ll never forget. We brewed a special beer for the event and threw actual cherry blossoms into the mix. (The professional brewers have since taken over the recipe, and while they have politely asked for my input, I leave it to them.) We put flyer up all over, even on the side of a delivery truck. (We now know the proper procedure for posting.) Between acts, I climbed up the brewing equipment ladders to announce the next group of performers to the crowded brew floor. (This can never, never happen again.)

In the following years, the festival continued to grow and we included more performers and types of music. That first year, we raised money for the Intercollegiate Taiko Invitational that Bakuhatsu Taiko Dan was hosting at UC Davis that year, but in subsequent years we began making the event a charity concert for organizations that were doing meaningful social or environmental justice work. We raised money for victims of Hurricanes Irma and Maria while the federal government was throwing paper towels on the problem. We raised money for a domestic shelter in the hight of the Me Too Movement. We raised money to fight immigrant detention and deportation in a time when kids were being kept in cages. We didn’t raise a huge amount of money, but it was our way of using music as resistance.

Around 2018, KB left for Portland and the festival was primarily produced by Bakuhatsu Taiko Dan. In 2019, we incorporated as a 501(c)3, which allowed us to better receive public grants. We owe a lot of the festival’s growth to the City of Davis Arts and Cultural Affairs Program and we have also received money from Visit Yolo, the UC Davis Council on Student Affairs and Fees, and UC Davis Global Affairs. The pandemic was hard for live festivals and taking down the 2020 festival was an endeavor of its own, but we adapted to an online festival format that I believe stands merit. Today, the organization is primarily staffed by current and former members of Bakuhatsu Taiko Dan and has settled into a more structured process with mentorship and community building baked into its operations.

What I see the festival doing today is providing a place for different communities to come together and build a shared future together. I am particularly happy that the festival can be a locus for UC Davis student groups to meet, working to build a broader Asian American solidarity movement on campus. I am also happy to see it grow into a space that services the greater collegiate and North American Taiko communities. Having other collegiate teams participate goes back to our first festival, where Stanford Taiko were performers, but the scope has grown to include even teams from Southern California. In 2022, we hosted professional workshops for taiko players by Isaku Kageyama, Tiffany Tamaribuchi, Sascha Molina, Roy Hirabayashi, and PJ Hirabayashi. Near to my heart, we participated in Bon Odori together, moving in community to taiko music. For some participants, it brought back excited memories of Obon, most festivals having been suspended for two years due to the pandemic. For others, it was a new experience that danced on the edge of something magic, a cultural moment bigger than ourselves.