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BN: Was the entire family involved in the kabuki, you said your dad, but were your siblings?

JB: No.

BN: So just you and your dad?

JB: Yes. My brother and sisters were in high school, and I was still young, five years old. And I loved Japanese dancing and kabuki, so my parents got me into all the dancing and the kabuki plays because I loved it. Whereas my sister and my brother, they were busy with their high school friends. So they weren't interested in anything Japanese like that.

BN: What did you like about it?

JB: I guess I was always... I remember when I was even as young as maybe three or so, I would always carry a kimono wherever we went to visit anybody, and I would always wait for someone to ask me to dance. And I would sit there and sit there, and finally somebody would feel sorry for me and say, "Do you want to dance?" and then, of course, I put on my kimono and I would dance. I just loved Japanese dancing. My father, being the kabuki, they would narrate the kabuki play while we were doing the acting, and my father would tell me the stories. And I remember one play where it's called Awa no Naruto, where it's a two-person play, just a mother and a daughter. And I didn't know until I just saw it on the internet the other day, this play was first performed by the Bunraku puppets back in the 1700s. So it's been around, Bunraku and kabuki have been around for years and years in Japan. And I was so thrilled to find this because now I understand the story of what I was doing. And so many of the plays that I learned, they would give me a script and they would tell me what to say in Japanese, but I never understood what I was saying. So the same with the dances, too. It wasn't until I was much older, in fact, the age of the internet, then I could look up these stories on the internet to find out, oh, my father was telling me the truth. I thought he was just telling me stories, but these were actually kabuki stories from the 1700s. So that was fun. But I've always liked performing.

BN: At what age did you start taking the formal...

JB: I was five years old when Kansuma first came back from Japan. And my mother and father took me there to learn Japanese manners, cultural Japanese manners. And the dance was secondary, but I learned the dance, and we danced at the Hollywood Bowl. We would dance on Japanese ships that would come into Long Beach or San Pedro, and we would dance. There was once an airplane that was called Nippongo, and this plane was on a peace mission. And this article in the LA Times or the Rafu Shimpo which I haven't found yet, this plane when it landed here, Kansuma made a dance for it, and it was called Nippongo, for the airplane. And this was just before World War II started. So the fans were with the hinomaru, the red and white fans that would fly like an airplane and dance like this. And then when we got into camp, the same dance was turned into silver wings because we're now flying the air force planes. We were very flexible. But when we danced at the Hollywood Bowl, there was the sailor dance, and again, it was with the red and white flag and American flags, both.

BN: To back up, you mentioned Kansuma, can you tell us a little bit about her? She's very famous, of course.

JB: Right. Fujima Kansuma went to Japan when she was a young teenager about fourteen, fifteen, studied at the Fujima school. And she, being from America, she was treated as a foreigner in Japan. She had it very rough, they were very hard on her, because they kept saying, "She's Amerikan, Amerika-jin." So she said, "In Japan I was American, and I come here to the United States, I'm Japanese." But because she was not born in Japan, and she was from America, they were twice as hard on her. And so her training was really rigid. But she stuck with it, she persevered, and when she came back to Los Angeles she was only sixteen when she started teaching, and, of course, we all wanted to be her students. And so I was five, at the age of five I became her student.

BN: She was only... how much older?

JB: Six years older.

BN: That's all?

JB: No, sixteen, sixteen years older. She's sixteen years older than I am.

BN: But still, she's very young.

JB: Very young, and beautiful, she's absolutely beautiful, and her dancing was incredibly beautiful. She had so much passion in her dancing, and people were just in awe when she was onstage. She was like the Baryshnikov of ballet, you just didn't want them to stop dancing. And wherever she danced, people would just be in awe of her, mesmerized, she was so beautiful. So I feel very lucky that I got to see her dance like that. And as she's teaching her students, she's also dancing, so we just sit there and watch her perform. But not only was she a good dancer and a beautiful woman, but she was one of the kindest, most generous women I've ever met. She was just very, very kind and gentle, but very strict with us. She would not allow us to even speak English during our classes. We had to speak Japanese.

[Interruption]

BN: The next thing I want to ask you, because you were talking about the dance, how many students did Fujima Kansuma have at that point?

JB: Oh, she had a lot of students. She would go to Gardena to teach, she would go up to San Jose to teach. [Phone rings] Sorry. She had quite a few students.

BN: What was the age range?

JB: Anywhere from five on up to the girls that I was dancing with were about sixteen years old. And I still see some of them now. And unfortunately, many have passed on, lost their memory. So I feel very fortunate. But even her daughter has not seen her dance. And the new students that she has now have never seen her dance, so they always said how lucky I am that I got to see her perform. Like I say, she's like Baryshnikov, and once you see the best, everything else just... she set the bar, she was the bar. She not only set the bar, she was the bar. But like I said, she was very, very kind and very gentle, but she demanded the best and the highest. And so she wouldn't let you go out of that room until you did it right. So even if we were practicing, we'd be crying because we can't get it right, she wouldn't let us sit down until we got it right. She was very strict in that sense, but that was because she wanted us to be good dancers. But her emphasis was always, her teaching was not just being a good dancer, but being a good person, that was her ultimate. So we would get all these lectures from her on how you need to give back to your community, how you need to behave. And she was very, high standards.

BN: These lectures would be in Japanese?

JB: Yes.

BN: And then I know your paths cross again later in camp and later, so we'll go back to that.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2018 Densho. All Rights Reserved.