Songs of Protest: Nobuko Miyamoto Looks to Her Past to Sing for the Future
In 1973, Nobuko Miyamoto, alongside Chris Iijima and Charlie Chin, released the first Asian American album, dedicated to showcasing their perspectives of prominent social issues of their time. Several decades later, she has lived up to the precedent she helped set by releasing a fearless album devoted to highlighting just how little the U.S. has changed since then.
Music is one of society’s best teachers. In Songs of Protest, writers analyze some of music’s greatest hits, using their findings to make sense of the world around them.
Written by Arundhati Ghosh
Photos courtesy of Nobuko Miyamoto
Following the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established Executive Order 9066, ordering the isolation of Japanese Americans from the rest of American society in concentration camps. As retribution against Japan, the United States chose to punish their own countrymen by holding approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans in government-mandated internment camps during World War II. Nobuko Miyamoto, a toddler at the time, was among the thousands that experienced this forced removal and relocation from their homes. Though she could not fully grasp what she was experiencing at the time, this early introduction to xenophobic discrimination set the stage for Miyamoto’s future dedication to shedding light on the experiences of marginalized people and her perceptions of world problems through music.
This commitment to social consciousness is evident in her most recent album, 120,000 Stories, released on Jan. 29. The album is full of songs that speak to the urgency with which we must work to stop the proliferation of climate change and combat systemic racism. Miyamoto makes her positions on current issues clear, asking rhetorical questions and echoing the answers back to listeners with her timeless, folksy vocals.
The song “What Time is It on the Clock of the World” concerns global warming and the speed with which we as inhabitants of this planet must act in order to preserve the Earth. The lyrics do not mince words and are pithy in nature: Miyamoto breaks each line up by actions. She sings of “Temperatures climbing / Glaciers melting / Water rising / Islands drowning.” Directly following her list of global warming-related issues, she pointedly asks, “What time is it? / What time is it?” As the song continues, this pattern of succinct phrases followed by asking the audience a simple yet rhetorical question (“What time is it on the clock of the world?”) also stays, with Miyamoto laying out the problems she sees rather than masking them in metaphor.
The entire song is backed by traditional folk instruments, such as strings and the harmonica. The rawness of the background instrumental allows Miyamoto’s voice to pierce through the music, allowing her to make her points without fear of being overwhelmed by the beat or melodies. “What Time is It on the Clock of the World” emphasizes a focus on the lyrics presented, making the song an appeal to listeners to do their part in preserving their environments.
Released a month after George Floyd’s death, “Black Lives Matter” sees her ask, “How many lives have been taken? / How many names we don’t know? / How many locked in cages? With dreams nowhere to go.” The song elucidates that, although lives continue to be lost solely due to racism-caused brutality and incarceration, nothing seems to change. This is further proven in that Miyamoto originally wrote “Black Lives Matter” in 2015, two years after the establishment of the movement of the same name. She recognizes that the racism pervading today’s society is the same racism that has existed for decades.
Though much of the album is new music that tells new stories — stories of injustice that Miyamoto had not made music about before — a quick glance through the tracklist reveals a couple songs with writing credits by fellow musicians and prominent Asian American activists Chris Iijima and William “Charlie” Chin, namely “Yellow Pearl” and “Free The Land.” With rawer vocals and repeated riffs, these songs, originally released in 1973, feature the voices of Iijima and Chin alongside Miyamoto’s.
The three met and became close due to their shared interests in activism and, later, music. The trio’s combined efforts led to the release of the album A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America. In putting songs from a 1973 joint album on her 2021 folk album’s tracklist, Miyamoto emphasizes how the world has not changed since her days as a young activist. The urgent delivery of the songs’ lyrics is indicative of the social turmoil the lyricists were experiencing at the time: The Vietnam War and related protests were still raging at the time of A Grain of Sand’s release.
This is evident in how the lyrics of “Free the Land” speak to the persisting property-related beliefs of Miyamoto, who is the only surviving member of the trio; it is easy to know where she stands considering the straightforwardness of the words: “Now this land was watered with our sweat / And paid for with our grief / Now this man says he owns it / Who’s the righteous, who’s the thief? / Free the land…” Though her new songs are primarily focused on sharing the stories of minority groups, Miyamoto does not leave behind the beliefs she marched for as a young woman in ‘70s America.
Miyamoto, in conjunction with Iijima and Chin, began centering her music around stories of being a minority in America in A Grain of Sand. Touted by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings as the first Asian American album, the project intersperses Miyamoto, Iijima, and Chin’s specific struggles with the issues felt by many people of color at the time.
Songs like “Wandering Chinaman” tell a fictionalized account of a man who leaves China to begin a new life in the U.S., while “Imperialism is Another Word for Hungry” uses unrefined vocals and stark lyricism to emphasize the trio’s belief that imperialism only harms the people by breaking it down to the easily digestible concept of taking more than necessary at the detriment of others. Just as their singing is not sugar-coated, their lyrics’ meanings are not either.
The concept for A Grain of Sand was born after Miyamoto’s experiences with internment and typecasting in the entertainment industry, Chin’s experiences with the Bay Area’s Asian American Movement, and Chris Iijima’s experiences with forming Asian Americans for Action and anti-war protests. As the three began moving from Asian American activism to “[crossing] the color line,” as Miyamoto put on her personal website, they began to learn of people’s struggles across the country through interaction with members of the Black Panther Party and of El Comité, a Puerto Rican activist group. By 1973, they were well-versed in the marginalization they and others experienced and continued speaking up about the injustices they continued to face.
Today, Miyamoto continues to sing about the injustices she and others have experienced. She does not mince words when singing about oppression, instead shedding light on the harsh truths related to being non-white in America. In 120,000 Stories, an album about lives lived and lives lost, Miyamoto calls back to her life’s experiences to ask for change in the future, a call-to-action she has been rallying for since 1973. The precedent she helped establish is one she still follows.