An Interview by Alexander Yu and Chris Ike

No-No Boy: Julian Saporiti and Erin Aoyama

No-No Boy’s work might best be described as an audiovisual soundtrack of the Asian American experience.  This multi-media project of music and archival images, spearheaded by former indie rocker Julian Saporiti and vocalist Erin Aoyama, takes us on a journey to the stories of our parents, our ancestors and ourselves in ways that we haven’t yet experienced.  The two Brown University doctoral students busk their way through the minefields of personal and community history armed with scholarship and creativity to carry forward the discussion around loss, resilience and identity.

Saporiti’s use of folk music reflects his Nashville upbringing and creates nostalgia for a history that feels familiar yet is deeply personal, complicated and undiscovered by many.  Drawing from extensive scholarship and their own family histories of Japanese American internment, Vietnam War displacement and identity, Saporiti and Aoyama draw the listener in, create a space where Asian American stories are shared and make connections to issues of today that resonate far beyond the Asian American community.

No-No Boy brings expansive global history into a human scale, often focusing on an individual’s story to communicate a broader, sweeping narrative.  In the song “Boat People”, Saporiti sentimentally alludes to his own family’s refugee saga from Vietnam to the west and appeals for action in dealing with today’s refugee crisis.  Meanwhile, in “Two Candles Dancing in the Dark”, the duo captures the discrete intimacy of an internment camp romance while underscoring the injustice of Executive Order 9066 which resulted in the incarceration of some 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.

There is also recognition that history is complicated.  In their work, No-No Boy commemorates the Japanese Americans that served heroically in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II as well as those who refused to serve while their families remained incarcerated behind barbed wire.  In addition, No-No Boy acknowledges the stories of those who did not make it through their incarceration, especially those by their own hand.  Despite lingering debate within the Japanese American community to leave the past alone, the current political environment that propagates the persecution of “the other” has brought about a renewed urgency to make sure these stories of incarceration are remembered so that mistakes are not relived.

The term no-no boy was originally used to describe those who answered “no” to two questions on a “loyalty questionnaire” given to interned Japanese American men during World War II.  The two questions asked were if they were willing to serve in combat duty in the U.S. armed forces wherever ordered and if they were willing to swear allegiance to the U.S.  The term was later conflated to refer to Japanese American draft resisters regardless of the answers they gave on that questionnaire.

Last spring, No-No Boy traveled to Chicago to play a series of disparate venues that included Sanctuary Music and Aesthetics downtown, Casa Calle 20 in the Pilsen neighborhood and a Facing History And Ourselves educational conference on the north side.  We interviewed Julian and Erin in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood, where many Japanese Americans resettled after their release from internment camps in the 1940’s.  We discussed topics ranging from academia, appropriation, activism, touring, collaboration, community and reckoning with identity.

No-No Boy will perform at a sold out concert with singer, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Kishi Bashi, along with Chicago’s Ho Etsu Taiko Group, at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music on June 1, 2018.  No-No Boy will be back in Chicago for a performance at the Midwest Buddhist Temple on September 29, 2018.

Chris Ike: Have you guys been on a tour of sorts?  Or is this  just a stop?

Erin Aoyama: This Spring we’ve been mostly doing stand-alone things.  We did do two weeks of planned out touring. One in January with Kishi Bashi, a musician we collaborate with.  He lives in Athens, Georgia so we started there and then drove to Birmingham and Selma, Alabama.  Drove through Mississippi and stopped at one of the old Chinese grocery stores that’s in Greenville, Mississippi and has been there for over a hundred years.  Then we went to Rohwer and Jerome, the two (Japanese American internment) camps in Arkansas.

Julian Saporiti: Then we did my hometown of Nashville and then Chattanooga.  I actually don’t want to tour.  I don’t like touring.  I was a musician in a band for seven years and I quit doing that.  So this has to be a special project to get me on the road again, and it is.  It’s very special.

Alexander Yu: How is this touring different from the touring you did with Young Republic?

JS:  It was a rock band and it was cool.  It was my college band.  We were really lucky and got signed to a deal when we were sophomores and played all those big festivals in Europe and stuff, did that weird stuff you dream of when you’re a kid with a guitar in your basement growing up. But it was tiring.  Also, I went to music school so I hadn’t read any books.

The thing about this project is it’s so many things at once.  There’s no separation for me.  This is a thing I have to sometimes talk to Erin or other colleagues about.  We will do a tour in the fall, which is going to be more similar to the touring I did because we’re going to release an album.  Right now we’re trying to think about how to raise enough funds to do that and just connect enough gigs so we can eat.  That’s like the touring I used to do, except I used to have record label pay for it.  Now there’s no record label.

What we’ve been doing, and what I really like (is that) we’ll take more time to do community work, to do workshops with students in addition to the concerts which is usually how we roll whenever we come to a place like this weekend.  What’s (also) different is that we’re always doing research at the same time.  This is a vehicle that’s allowed me to get funding outside of Brown because people hire us to come to these places and whether it’s feedback from audiences, from conversations with leaders of different communities that we work with, that we speak on behalf of at times.  Getting that feedback, collaborating with them or whether it’s going on these trips to Heart Mountain or the camps in Arkansas.  We play concerts as a way to fund the research because it’s very hard to get these grants to do the travel if we’re not playing.

No-No Boy (Erin Aoyama and Julian Saporiti) in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood performing at Casa Calle 20, Spring 2018.

CI: The fact that your advisor agreed to make this your dissertation, that’s a really unique way to make that work?

JS: A lot of credit goes to Bob Lee because that is not the consensus around this project by any means.  It’s been really inspiring because a lot of younger people that just graduated college or in grad school have come up to me and been like “I might apply to get a PhD now because now I know I can be creative.”   I said “Whoa, whoa, whoa.  Slow down, slow down.”  I have two master’s (degrees), I did four years of course work, really put in the work and continue to put in the work and you have to do that.  This project is in many ways for my colleagues, to say “What we’re doing is not reaching the public and you guys are so brilliant and you are thinking the things that largely we need to be thinking and having the conversations that largely we need to have.”  Erin’s advisor, Naoko Shibusawa, works very closely with my advisor and was very surprised to find out this was my dissertation.  I think that’s going to be more the majority than not in academia but there are enough people who support it, especially younger scholars who have flown us out, who’ve asked us to speak to their grad students, that I know support it.  Not everyone needs to sing his or her dissertation. In fact I’d appreciate it if they didn’t unless they’re very good singers.  There’s other ways to disseminate knowledge.

CI:  Do you feel that this project could be a kind of proof of concept that challenges the typical academic model where the research is getting done, but then the knowledge doesn’t necessarily get disseminated afterwards?  In a live performance like this, you are actually bringing these stories to the public directly and get feedback immediately.

JS: We know you’re hearing it because we’re looking at you.

EA: For me at least and for my research, the most interesting part is the Q&A’s afterwards.  We’ll usually do 30 to 45 minutes hearing from whoever wants to stay, which is usually at least half the audience.  Just to hear how the stories and the songs and the project as a whole impacts them for people who have chosen to come or who are there for a Kishi Bashi concert and hear us open for him or something like that.  I think it’s so interesting both from an ethnographic standpoint but also just to see where the conversations are outside of the academy.  I sit in seminar classrooms and have amazing conversations with other classmates and colleagues but to hear how that impacts or connects with people who are not in grad school has been so interesting and really significant for the project.

CI: Beyond academia and the scholarly aspect of what germinated the whole thing, what are the future plans for the project?  I understand that you might not want to continue to tour so heavily, but are there plans to still do appearances that involves more Q&A, make it more interactive so the focus is more about the subject matter vs. the music.

JS: Let me just clarify about the touring thing.  It’s the tiring nature in touring to promote yourself that I don’t like.  That’s not what this project is.  I would be much happier if it wasn’t my face on it at this point.  But we sing the songs so we should have our face out there and stuff.  But the performance is to me the central piece.  The Q&A is part of that just like the thoughts people take a way.  It’s a collaboration but the seed of it is look at these visuals, listen to the lyrics, feel the music, listen to the stories we tell and in whatever combination that hits you, because some people don’t like the music we play but visuals might take them or vice versa. The performance is always central.

I’m talking about the 200 days a year promoting a record touring, which is what we won’t do and I won’t ever do again. I just have more and better things to do.  But these kinds of things where we get booked; at universities what we do is speak to classes a lot times, do a workshop.  We’ve done workshops that look at identity within art making or how identity informs your scholarship, the crossroads of arts, activism and scholarship and also just workshops that touch on specific historical moments. We can deliver a lecture on Japanese incarceration in a unique way because of the stories we as scholars have picked up, same thing with Vietnamese refugees in Southeast Asia. It is always performance based.  There always has to be a concert component.  I don’t think I’d come just to give a talk.  That’s the reason I sing because I really don’t want to talk to you.  I want you to take what I’m singing and do something with it. This is the best mode of analysis for me- I’m not a lecturer.  I’m a singer.

EA: Thinking about how this project continues to exist once we’re done touring and performing, we came out here this weekend to go to the Partner Schools Network Conference for this organization called Facing History And Ourselves that creates curriculum that will be used to supplement history curriculums.  So we performed for a group of about 30 teachers and then did a Q&A with them and we had a song that we gave annotated lyrics for and some context on the back.  Part of what my role in the project will be is developing curriculum in ways that these songs and videos can be used as modules in classrooms as ways of incorporating Asian American history.  This huge history that just does not really get taught at all but this is a way of inserting it in and helping students make connections to other forms of history and also a shift in methodology of how we teach history and what we should be learning. Showing kids that there are questions to be asked and histories to know beyond what’s in the textbooks.  That’s just one version of history.

JS: …And how to become a historian yourself.  Giving the method to the student.  Not (for the teacher) to just to teach history.  Here’s a lyric sheet and look up all the words you don’t know and that will teach you a lot, especially if they partner with our friends at Densho.  Go to the Densho Encyclopedia and look up what a No-No Boy is.  That will teach you a lot.

EA: …And whatever peaks your interest, follow that path of inquiry and who knows what that will lead you to.

AY: How did you start working with Jason Matsumoto of Ho Etsu Taiko?

JS: It’s through these connections.  I played this kind of “Happy Hour” at the Heart Mountain Pilgrimage last year when I was out there doing research.  They asked me to sing some songs when everyone was getting drunk before the final night and the staff was letting loose.  I met Mia Russell who runs Friends of Minidoka in Boise.  When Kishi Bashi was in Boise we got her on the list to see him play and they connected and then she connected us to Jason in Chicago because of the “Orange Story” film that he had made.  Jason is like “Oh, folk music…”.  The thing is we don’t have any records out or anything so people don’t know what we do really.  A lot of times they say, “This sounds kind of interesting…” but when they see it they’re like “That was actually pretty good”.  And it was kind of like that with Jason.  We connected with him because we were planning on doing a big show at the Old Town School of Folk Music with Kishi Bashi and Jason’s Taiko group – all of us to collaborate in some way.  That was planned for later and then we got this conference.  And we asked “Jason, we’re gonna be out there anyway, do you think we could set up a gig for us?” and he pulled all this together.  Going back to your point, that is why we go on tour.  That is why it is so important to go to these shows.  Even when we don’t want to or even when we don’t know what we’re supposed to be doing.

Inevitably, there will be some duds – that’s touring.  That’s the importance of putting yourself out there.  For me, I’m an ethnographer.  I go around and do a method of scholarship where you go talk to people.  You go live in a culture, live in a space and these shows are really the ethnography.  Everyone is different and brings new people to the table.  I don’t have this thing like “Erin, join because we have this project that we have to give to the people”.  It’s more like playing some songs, meeting people after the show and stories coming out.  I’ve written songs about those conversations or my thinking has changed.  After every show I take a page full of notes of just what people have told me.  There are all these stories that you never get from the one photo of some fucking railroad worker, or a laundry worker, or a kid behind barbed wire or Vietnamese refugee.  Who are these people within these larger historical contexts, but that cowboy means something and we don’t get that story unless we talk to Jasmine from Facing History who works in Toronto and break that legacy apart and (ask) “What does that mean?”

CI: Do you have an official release date for the album?

JS: It will be September I think. It’s all recorded.  It just has to be mastered.  So I think it’ll be the end of September.

CI: Is it all based on the material from No-No Boy, what you do in your shows or does it not necessarily stick to that.

JS: Yeah, it’s from the three parts of the No-No Boy Project – the Vietnamese part, the Japanese part and the just sort of contemporary messed up Asian kids like me and Erin part.  The larger project will be too big.  It’ll eventually be some sixty songs on Spotify that people can listen to, a crap ton of videos on YouTube and I’ll give my advisor four vinyl records, like a box set with a book.

EA: Bob, Julian’s advisor, is one of my professors too and is super supportive.  Generally, the professors in our American Studies department are really supportive of the project, which has been really nice.

JS: Our director of graduate studies came to the show.  My advisor came to the show.  Her advisor came to the show.  We did it in Providence, this sold out indie rock show.  We had these academics there.  It was really cool.  Whether they’ll pass me for the dissertation is different thing but they do see the merit of the public outreach.

AY: Brown University has just gone a little higher in my view. <laughs>

EA: You should tell them that.

JS: Yeah, please write the graduate school and tell them on our behalf “Don’t fail Julian out of school.” <laughs> Erin’s making the sacrifice of these first couple years of graduate school and doing this balancing act.  And for me, I can’t tell you how much I did not want to be a musician again before this project.  But because of that Trump shit and writing all these songs that I wanted to share with folks.  I just felt a need to do that. But these things, you got to take a risk and do this.  It’s not necessarily the easiest trip to fly to Chicago in the middle of the semester to do this but getting to meet y’all, meet all these other people, and also know that people were moved by at least by one tune at a concert, and it makes them, more importantly even if they didn’t like the music, think about something.  Or to memorialize John Yoshida, the guy who lost his head on the railroad track.  To me, just telling someone that story that they did not know is very worth it.  It’s definitely  a negotiation.  It can be exhausting to play this concert for people.  It’s an emotional work.  Sometimes you feel it more than other nights but when you really feel it, it’s like “Fuck!”

EA: Part of the reason why I came to grad school was because I grew up in Connecticut; never learning about Japanese internment and that really bothered me.  It wasn’t until junior year of college when I got to create my own syllabus for something that I could actually dive into learning about this part of my own family’s history as an American History major.  So I came to grad school to think about ways to shift that and shift the way that we teach American history in general.  Part of the American Studies program at Brown is a Master’s in Public Humanities.  There is a lot of museum work but it’s also just thinking about public facing history and public work and this project is a perfect encapsulation of what this program tries to do.  It’s been a pretty cool way for the Public Humanities Department at Brown to see what can be possible in combining scholarship, public facing work and music, which not everybody can do and not everybody needs to do but it really fits nicely into the program.

AY:  It seems that the both of you have come kind of late to your Asian American identity.  Can you tell us how that happened?

JS: No shit.  <laughs>

EA: I was just talking about this to my Mom about this the other day.  I think I’m in the process finding out my Asian American identity right now.  That’s been a cool part of this project too.  Talking to folks around our age or a little younger or a little older and hearing their process of coming to terms being Asian American.  I grew up in Connecticut, didn’t really know any other half-Asian kids except for my siblings.  It’s funny because now at Brown most of my friends are half-Asian so we’re all going through this process together.  It was growing up and loving American history.  I have memories of going to the library in my town.  I knew where all the historical fiction novels were and just went through them systematically.

JS: Nerd.

EA: Yeah. Total nerd.  That was in fourth and fifth grade, I just loved it.  By the time I was in high school and taking A.P. U.S. History, doing U.S. History for the third time, it really started to bug me that I didn’t see any stories like my family’s stories in there.  Not being able to learn about my grandparents and what they had gone through.  So it’s been a process since then of figuring out what it means to be half- Japanese, what it means to have this legacy of the 442^nd and the camps not that far removed from me.  Being able to have these conversations and conversations with our colleagues at Brown and with my parents, my roommate and my professors has been really meaningful.  It feels like a very important moment politically too to be thinking about my identity.  So it’s been an intense number of months.  But what better way to come to terms with things than be singing and then talking with folks about it and hearing from other people too.

JS: It’s very therapeutic.  So for me, my mom is from Saigon and ended up in Nashville through a series of quirky life things, some very traumatic and some just kind of funny.  My dad is a white guy, Italian-Swedish guy from Boston from a very working class family, in the music business so that’s why we ended up in Nashville.  He got a gig at Warner Brothers so we grew up really well off economically, even though he didn’t ever get a college degree and didn’t pay taxes until he was thirty.  He’s one of those very charismatic guys where eventually something clicks and someone says, “You should be Head of Marketing” or whatever.  So we had this really interesting lifestyle where I’d speak French to my mother at home.  We’d go to France once a year.  I’d visit my Italian family in Florida or Boston. And meanwhile I was living in Nashville going to a private school named after a confederate general, around confederate flags all the time, around all white kids except for minorities obviously tokenized and brought to school just to play basketball from the east side.  So that was my experience.

I had a lot of identity issues because it was assimilate to survive.  You just get so tired, and you don’t know you’re getting tired as a little kid, of kids calling you “Fucking Jackie Chan” or whatever on the playground constantly.  Or every time something Chinese or Japanese comes up, half the time it’s in a joke context.  Or people make these assumptions about your exoticism.  You defend yourself against that and inevitably the defense is going to be trying your best to buy into whiteness.  Of course, you can’t do that because you look this way.  And people might have varying opinions on that.  Maybe your dad (Erin) has a different opinion than I do on that or people of other generations or backgrounds.

I’ve talked to other musicians who are Asian American like Michelle from a band called Japanese Breakfast. She’s Korean hapa.  We were both talking about how we never dated anybody but white people growing up.  That was very much a defense mechanism – “I don’t want to date the Asian girl because that is what they expect of me.”  I started writing songs seriously when I was fifteen years old and my identity/ my narrator was always white.  That’s how I would envision myself.  It would never be an Asian guy in the song but that’s what you do.  That’s part of American project.  So you not only have this split Vietnamese-Italian identity but you’re growing up in Nashville, going to this private school and I would find way more solidarity with black civil rights movements, and once I became politically active, Chicano civil rights stories and did everything I could to shy away from my Asian heritage until I went to graduate school at the University of Wyoming.

It wasn’t until going through courses in queer theory, gender theory, race theory… I’d exhausted every marginalized community, I was like “Fuck, I’d better go to Heart Mountain and look at what’s been happening to these Asian folks.”  It’s very much not like any kind of return to roots or anything like that.  I took my mom back to Vietnam in 2013 and it was just weird.  It’s not our country.  We don’t have a country anymore.  My identity isn’t Asian American.  It’s not American.  It’s not Vietnamese.  It’s not Italian.  It is myself and being OK with myself.  Don’t try to fit me into that national stuff.  “I think I got screwed over by where I was born…”- all that kind of stuff growing up in the 80’s and 90’s.  But finding an identity that works for you, which is just singer, mountain climber, scholar… who is just OK with how he looks and feels.  It was very much grad school and now music that has led me back to this reckoning of identity.

AY: How has being hapa impacted your work and how it’s been received?

EA: One thing that is interesting about being hapa is a very clear memory of being in a car with my dad at one point and talking about standardized testing, and what box we were marking for our ethnicity and my dad turning to me and saying “Erin, you’re not white”.  But everyone I grew up around was white and that is what I saw day in and day out.  Growing up in Connecticut, far away from my Japanese side of the family, we were pretty isolated and didn’t grow up with a sense of Japanese cultural identity by any means so this research has been an interesting way back in.

But it’s also jarring sometimes for me as I’m learning a lot at the same time & coming to terms with the fact that because of what my grandparents went through during World War II, there is this kind of cleave in our family, a separation from what it meant to be Japanese and I think that’s something I find echoed in the people we meet at these shows and if there’s ever other half -Asian kids at the shows, they always come up and talk to us afterwards.  There’s a real sense of camaraderie there but there’s also a huge diversity of experiences.  Even where you grew up, colors so much your hapa identity.

Seeing the JA community in Chicago this weekend has been amazing because as far as I know, there were none of these organizations near where I grew up.  So it’s just been really cool to see these little pockets of hapa and Asian communities in different parts of the United States and seeing how people react to us telling our stories and the stories we found in the archives.  That it means so much.  The number of people that have come up to us, Asian or not, who said “I want to go and talk to my family, I want to get our family story, because I realize that if I don’t get it, no one will and then it gets lost and these stories are so valuable” has been meaningful.

JS: The short answer and she speaks for me and all of Hapa Nation, which you’re not even supposed to use, right?

EA: Well, I don’t know…I love the term hapa.

AY: Why is that?  I use it all the time.

EA:  I still use the word hapa.  Technically it’s a native Hawaiian word.  So there’s something about not taking the language of native Hawaiians, not appropriating it.

JS: I’d like to go to Hawaii and ask people what they think.

EA: When we spent time in Hawaii, everyone referred to us as hapa.  It’s such a common term. I don’t think it’s offensive…

JS: There’s a lot of good to PC culture obviously.  But when we’re on the same team, brother, I’m doing my best.  The hapa identity definitely works into the song.  There’s a song called Hapa Book Club, about being in Japantown.  I didn’t know what hapa meant until my late 20s, someone had to tell me.  The album, the project itself is very hapa.  I have a very fucked up history.  A lot of the Asian American histories are fucked up, because of these clashes of culture.  Also a lot of beautiful stuff that comes out of it – community here and community in other places we’ve been.  The museums and the memorializations of the incarceration or the fact that these boat people from Vietnam have been able to pick up at all after all these things, that my mother doesn’t live a crippled existence having lived through a war in Saigon.  To me that’s what it is: it’s a very hapa album because it’s really mixed.  I don’t prescribe to an Asian American or national identity.  I’m a singer and here’s some history and that makes me feel better.

AY: That’s a big debate…is there a cohesive Asian American identity?

JS: If that makes you feel good, I’ll be Asian American with you.  For myself, give me a journal, my voice and mountain to climb, that’s very much how I feel communed with myself and my identity.  It’s important politically.  Politically, I am very much Asian American.  I’m a marginalized person.  I’m a minority, an ally, an advocate, whatever, but at the end of the day that’s why I love this project because I can be a songwriter and you can take these songs and make them be Asian American resistance songs or whatever you want to call them…

EA:  We are also very thoughtful about how songs impact folks who very much identify as Asian American and it’s important to them to see two people who are Asian American singing onstage about Asian Americans.  That’s a big component too.

JS: The only other primarily Asian American gig we played before this weekend was in Chinatown in Boston.  There’s a woman who came up after, in her 70’s.  She’d been working hard in the community, she’d been a teacher, first teacher to implement the celebration of Lunar New Year in the Chinatown schools, doing a lot of work for the community, reaching back across the Pacific and saying “This culture is  OK, let’s celebrate it”.  She came up after in tears and said, “I’ve been waiting decades for these songs”, and I’m like “That’s amazing and here they are, they’re yours.”  That’s not a cynical way to be.  I’m not trying to voice anyone’s community or anything like that, but if you find voice through these songs and that helps your community, that’s amazing…

AY: That is something that needs to be brought up.  How do you navigate that potential cultural appropriation, another’s national identity…?

EA: I think that’s where some of the scholarship comes in and the fact that these songs are so rooted in the research that Julian and I have done, and the stories that we’ve heard, we don’t always talk about this but Julian spends so much time crafting all of these lyrics and making sure the stories behind them match the archives…we talk through all the stories we tell in the show so it seems like we’re just telling stories off the top of our heads but we’ve spent time talking and practice a lot.  That to me, as an aspiring scholar, is really important, that these are rooted in historical truth or the research that we’ve done.

JS: We got a good question the other day…

EA: “When you play with folks who were in the internment camps, what is their reaction to the some of the songs that you play?”  We always get questions about reactions which is interesting…

JS: These are just what I’ve been thinking. It has a lot of scholarship and craft behind it, but at the end of the day, they mean something to me.  They’re for different audiences.  Some songs are specifically for people, in tribute to them, people I’ve talked to, people from the archives.  It’s for those people.  It’s great if you can get something out of them.  And there are other songs for the same people, within the same catalogue, that would really upset them because that’s also happened in history and doesn’t align with the politics that people have taken away from Japanese incarceration or the Vietnamese refugee crisis.  There are so many sides to these stories.

Interviewing Jim Mizuta, returning to the site of the Heart Mountain Incarceration Camp in 2017 for the first time since he was incarcerated with his family 75 years earlier.

EA: That’s part of the beauty of doing the project the way that we do, in songs and stories, that we’re not telling one complete, authoritative history.  Here, this is how history works, there are stories that don’t make sense together and you can’t put them next to each other.

CI: Based on historical record versus your own opinion…

JS: Sometimes there’s a fiction, imaginings that come out of piles of newspaper articles, you craft a character to walk through all those different scenes.  So much of the record is lost, and that may or might not have happened.  There’s definitely songwriting within that. Imagination and speculation.  That’s history as well.  That’s a project of academic history; they just don’t like to admit they don’t know exactly what happened.

EA: Right, acknowledge the fictive part.

JS: That’s difficult.  To know that this woman, Joy Teraoka, this Japanese grandmother that I’ve acquired who sang in this band who has sent me emails checking on the weather, when she’s seen bad weather on the east coast.  To know that there are some songs that would hurt her feelings, because she’s so entrenched in the narrative of the 442^nd, of Japanese exceptionalism, Asian American exceptionalism, but that’s not Erin’s or my politics, and that hurts but that’s OK.  This is not necessarily a project to uplift as much as to go in and make you think.

EA: We probably won’t play those songs for her.  She’s in her 90’s at this point; those songs are not for her.

JS: Her legacy is her legacy.  How she wants to speak, I will quote her directly when I write anything about it.  Her words are her words.  How she feels is valid and true.  But that doesn’t mean that the people who did not survive or had so much bitterness and pain growing up that the JACL or other parts of the community didn’t want acknowledge fully, doesn’t mean it didn’t exist, even if it’s not convenient to master narrative.  Inevitably if you’re trying to capture many different sides of a story through songs, one song will contradict the song before it, and that’s okay.  That’s the hapa feeling.  There’s contradiction.  There is sadness and pain we all go through.  If you can, sit with these songs, listen to them together and see what you find.  If you’re upset, at least you’re feeling something.  And then tell me why.  I’ll publish why you’re upset.  There’s no bad view of the work.  It’s how people feel.

CI: Have you encountered that?

JS: Not enough.  People haven’t been able to hear the whole work yet.  So that will be years from now.

EA:  So we were supposed to play a gig in my hometown a couple of weeks ago which I was really excited about because my parents were going to be there.  A lot of these songs, I think my dad would have questions about it. He had a lot of pride about the 442^nd and being Japanese American and we were able to recover from this experience.  My grandfather didn’t go to college until after the war.  My grandmother, same deal.  And their parents had come over from Japan, so this huge amount of growth and success after two and three generations.  He has a real sense of pride and these songs push back on that narrative. I am curious to talk to him about it.  I played some of the demos before I was singing with Julian, to get his thoughts on it, I’m still very curious to get his thoughts as this has been a process for him and my siblings learning about our family history and the whole history of Japanese Americans more broadly and Asian Americans in general.  I’m excited to do that. It didn’t happen because I got the flu…

CI: Do you find that the other sides of your family create questions about immigration, Irish or Italian or has that stayed largely within the Asian American side of your families?

EA: That’s a good question.

JS: Couple things.  It’s funny because it has triggered things for my dad who was very aware that Italians had to become white people, just like the Irish had to become white and he brings that up…but also he was interviewed for this documentary that Kishi Bashi is working on and he said, “Julian had a good life.  What’s he complaining about?”  That’s true economically, absolutely, never wanted for anything.  But he doesn’t understand what it’s like for his own kid to grow up…he was blonde haired, blue eyed growing up.  He was oblivious to any kind of racial pain I would feel whereas my mom wasn’t because we’d be in the car together and a group of frat boys would berate her just driving down the highway, yelling horrible slurs and stuff.  It was revealing to me to realize that my dad didn’t actually know or was oblivious or couldn’t understand that.

We’re staying with my 7^th grade English teacher and after the concert, she said, “I never thought of you as brown when I was teaching you, just thought of you like everyone else”.  It’s really beautiful. It’s also really damaging.  As a white woman, she was not equipped to deal with anything that me, the two black kids or my brother, the minorities in the school, might have to deal with.  The same way if a male teacher doesn’t have any education or training on how to deal with female students, a lot of things will just pass by; they will remain oblivious and continue patriarchal practices.

That’s what I found from the white side.  There is a way in and that’s amazing.  We have an Irish American friend in Selma who was there who said “I’ve been looking into my family history, finding discrimination in the past as well and it helps me in solidarity with other communities.  There are people who it will dig a little deeper, like my mother, and there are people who will get it theoretically, musically, storytelling but that personal thing won’t be quite so direct.

AY: How does remembering stories and telling stories translate to actions today or actions you’d like to see as a result of this project?

JS: Collaboration.  I’d like to just see collaboration.  Like I said I feel best when I’m singing.  I don’t like to march in protests and stuff like that.  I don’t like to raise my voice unless it’s through song. I don’t feel comfortable.  But if that inspires people to do so…I’ll add my body because the optics are good when you see a lot of people protesting something.  I hope it’s collaboration through other people taking that and thinking about their scholarship, and then maybe doing more public facing scholarship as a method based on the project, reaching more people.  Collaboration across communities- that a Japanese American who is very well versed in Japanese internment will be like “Oh, why is he singing about Vietnamese people?  Oh, I didn’t even know that history.  Oh, if I call myself Asian American shouldn’t I understand that the Cambodian community in New York City is the worst off (Asian) community in the country?”

EA: We got a question from someone in Chattanooga.  The first time I heard this question it was challenging for both us to answer in the moment.  She was saying “You tell these stories about your families’ histories, these histories that aren’t told.   What do think of as your communities?  Your communities’ contribution?  Your communities’ importance to history now?  What should we be getting from these stories?”

We’ve talked about this a lot.  There ‘s something about hearing the stories of other communities that hopefully broadens your perspective and helps you listen.  I think that’s an important part of this project too.  The importance of slowing down your thinking and your judgments just to listen to other people’s stories but then also recognizing, tying this back to your last question about the white sides of our families, recognizing your histories are important to know but if you’re OK now, it’s important to look for where you can make a difference in communities that are not OK now, whether that’s within the Asian American community or just more broadly like the communities around you.  Learning their stories and doing something with the power, privilege and positionality that you have, you as the general you, to help those communities and not just stay within the stories of your own oppression or history of oppression.

To me, I think that’s really important.  I love telling these stories about Japanese folks who were interned because I think they’re really heartbreaking but beautiful stories and such an important part of history but then it’s important to move beyond that and think about the other communities that are facing very, very similar things and so what do we do to learn their stories and help them in some actual tangible way.  I don’t have an answer to yet but I think it’s an important piece of this project too – not just to marinate in these stories but to take them and use them to look outside our own communities.

No-No Boy performing at Sanctuary Music and Aesthetics in Chicago’s South Loop neighborhood, Spring 2018

JS: It’s a matter of people connecting those dots, through a concert like ours or a piece of work like ours that could happen.  I think that’s good. Right?

EA: That’s a big goal.

JS: At the end of the day it’s even more personal than that.  If I was ten years old after having been in the car with mom on White Ridge road with all these hick white boys are yelling these obscene, sexual, racist things.  I don’t have a way to process that when I’m ten years old growing up in Nashville, Tennessee with the background I’ve given you.  If I go to see myself in concert now, I might have that.  And we’ve seen that in the Q&A’s especially.  Not just Asian American kids- Palestinian American, people from the Caribbean, people whose mothers are also refugees or immigrants or might be detained by ICE have spoken to us and said maybe they don’t know how to articulate it but something about this song, something about having someone who has been through something within the ballpark means something.  I wish I could go back in time and the ten year old could get it because like I said there’s definitely some irrevocable damage done.

EA: But preventing that now hopefully for some people.

JS: We were just talking about big-scale activism and I’m so confused politically how our country got like this, right now it just feels so fucked up- I don’t even work on that level right now.  It’s more about that one person.  Can I give you a song?  Can we show you a picture?  Can your day be better?  And the next time you think about something, will you be able to think of it in a more nuanced way that allows you to feel better about life and humanity?

EA: I think about this gig we played in Selma, AL, at the Selma Center for Non-violence, Truth and Reconciliation as part of their racial day of healing around Martin Luther King Jr. day.  I was nervous about that gig because my research outside of this project looks at Rohwer and Jerome, the two camps that were in the Jim Crowe south and thinking about potential solidarities between African Americans and Japanese Americans and Asian Americans.  There was a moment we were playing for a predominantly black audience at this civil rights center, these songs about Asian folks.  This is the moment where we see if the theories hold up, which is what a lot of this project is about.  Are the theories we talk about in the classroom holding up outside?

JS: We read all these books…

EA: And we talk about all these things…

JS: We imagine solidarity between Afro-Asian communities, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah…and maybe some people have done case studies.  But we have to go sing.

EA: In front of this audience and it might go terribly.  But afterward it was amazing.  The longest Q&A we ever did.  Probably will ever do.

JS: Because it was a conversation.

EA: Talking with these folks, we were just sitting basically all of us in a big circle.  To hear this woman Ainka Jackson who the Executive Director of the center and the child of civil rights lawyers, just this amazing, amazing person say “I see echoes in these stories to my own family’s stories and to what we talk about in Selma as we’re trying to rejuvenate and turnaround this community.  I see the importance of hearing these stories about Asian Americans and understanding where we can connect and where we can form these coalitional solidarities.”  That was so inspiring and energizing to hear that these stories are really important to hear because the more you know about another community the more you can find those moments of connection and collaborate.  Not saying that Asian Americans have faced the same or similar histories as African Americans because they are vastly different but that there’s a value to hearing both sides was very powerful.

CI: Collaboration seems to a big theme cross culturally.  What future collaborations do you have in the works right now?

JS: It’s hard to explain because of the world of we live in, but I have different view of authorship than most people, especially academics.  Erin and I butt heads on this.  The idea that as a songwriter the songs are mine is a very misconstrued idea to me, or even as an academic, that the research is mine.  It a very selfish thing to get jobs and money and this is where authorship comes from historically.  And even in a lot of Asian cultures it’s a much different idea as far as citations and research and authorship go.  To me, at least half the songs are cribbed from people like Erin’s research, my friend Diego’s research, conversations that I have with our friend Nicole, or Yoon or Juan.  All these people whom I get drunk with and yell out about politics and research and stuff.  That’s the foundation for the stuff and that’s a continued collaboration.

This project is very much the graduate students at Brown University who I surround myself with, who Erin surrounds herself with, our roommates, my girlfriend, my mom, my family and then the archives as well.  I didn’t write the archive. I found it and then put it into a song.  That’s not authorship.  That’s not just like writing a novel necessarily.  Collaboration to me is the project.  Inevitably people have to advertise who is playing so they’ll say Julian Saporiti and Erin Aoyama or they’ll say No-No Boy or whatever and that’s fine because we want to sell tickets and be able to do this, put out records and have people listen to it.

It’s really hard to explain that collaboration is key to this project.  When we perform it’s also a collaboration with the audience.  This talk, maybe it’s formed in interviewer/interviewee traditional journalistic way but what are your thoughts?  That’s what I would want out of a piece.  What did this show do for you?

How does talking to us more support your thoughts? What is your collaboration with the No-No Boy Project as a thinker, as writer, as an Asian American, as a Japanese American, as whatever? That’s to me what it is and that’s another reason why Erin’s so great to have on board because obviously the different perspectives she brings to the project as an Asian American woman, someone who grew up in New England, all these different things but also having constant feedback. After the shows: “What did you think of that question?” “What did you think of those collaborations we got?”.  We’re mixing all of that together which in turn goes back into the songs and so can you say that there’s this sole authorship to that style of songwriting.  I’m glad you brought that up because that’s a very hard thing to explain.  Ultimately I have no desire to be the sole author.  This is not a project that’s going to make a shit ton of money or anything like that.  I’m not going to get a shit ton of royalties or placements from, as our friend Diego says, “Play that old one about the Asian dudes”- there’s not a great market for that.

EA: Diego says it though.

JS: Diego wants it, so he’ll give me ten bucks.  Ultimately, as Erin was saying earlier, the legs of the project lie in the media that comes out of it- the records that are made, the curriculum modules that we can hopefully put together and all this kind stuff.  And I hope Cynthia in Chinatown does take those songs as hers.  I hope they are her songs.  I have my use for them but OK; I’m done with it.  Collaboration.

EA: Collaboration.  It’s again testing the theory of collaboration that we talk about in academia and that we don’t do.  We do bump heads about this question a lot but I think it’s important and as a younger scholar to have someone like Julian- (to JS) Don’t let this go to your head too much. Cover your ears.  But to have someone like Julian as a mentor and partner in this project has been amazing and will shape whatever my dissertation and research ends up looking like in the next four or five years.  It’s shifting the way we talk about things at Brown too, which is really important- to have better conversations there.

JS:  At least in our small community -the class I get to teach, our gang of grad students.

EA: It’s the places you can touch.

JS: You have to liberate yourself from that way of doing scholarship at some point because it just doesn’t work.   Half the country doesn’t believe in us anymore.  Literally, Republicans don’t give a shit about PhD’s or anything like that, there’s no credentials you need to be President, and they think what we say is just elitist and bullshit and they’re 90% right. <laughter>  Take a song seriously- that’s what I have to say.  I’m doing all the research, all the training- one of the best schools in the world but I’m going to come to you in a total folk music kind of way.  What I grew up with.  What people have been playing forever.  Take that seriously.  This is something that reaches at least YouTube but that’s more than if I had written it would.  “Oh, a 300-page dissertation on jazz bands in the Japanese incarceration camps. OK, pass.”

It’s our fault for acquiescing to an advisor who’s miserable because he had to write a 300-page PhD dissertation.  You’re telling me about this amazing thing.  Make into a fucking YouTube video or something bro, or do documentary or comic book or anything.  Give me all the notes, I’ll read through scholarship and cite you sources.  We could footnote all these songs for you and show you who said what, where the archive is.  People need stuff.  They need to think.

CI: Do you guys collaborate more on the songwriting end now that you have been working together longer?

JS: I steal stuff from her research sometimes.

EA: I’m not a songwriter

JS: So it’s mostly that Erin’s there consistently talking to me, some of our other friends are to a lesser degree, thinking through things and then I go to my cave and come back with a song.  But we have been doing more collaborative stuff.  I’m not terribly happy with the lyrics that I wrote to that live “Orange Story” score we performed Friday night because I wrote it that day so maybe she’ll help write that.  I’ve been telling her “Would you try and write some lyrics and I’ll help fix it?”

EA: I have it floating around in the back of my head, but it’s not a natural format for me.

JS: I’ve had 30 years of training.  It’s also a very mercurial, alchemy, kind of art form.  I might be the engine but there are a lot of different parts that go into building an engine.  Just because you’re the guy you that can put it all together doesn’t mean someone else didn’t make all those parts.

EA: hmm, that’s a good way of putting it.

JS: I have a couple good things to say. <laughs>  But actually that’s one of the most annoying parts of the project to be honest with you.  Whether it’s from Erin or from other people, the idea that “This is YOUR project”, because the way I write songs is that they just come out.  I sit down with work in the melody in the words come out at the same time and there’s a lot of editing and craft that goes into it but you have to be a lucky person to be able sit down and come up with songs.  It’s a very magical thing there’s no way to teach it. Even though I do teach a workshop. <laughs>

EA: You’re sounding like Kishi Bashi. <laughter>

JS: There’s a lot of craft, especially with the historical aspect.  At the same time it goes back to that authorship thing, for people that say this is YOUR project or this is YOUR dissertation… Part of the intervention here is say “Why don’t we all work on this stuff together.  PhD students, why don’t we all work together?”   This definitely won’t work but I have this crazy idea to let a couple my friends just talk about what the project means and write that down as my dissertation.  Your subjectivity is just as important.  Whatever you guys got out of whatever song might’ve touched you; that’s the meaning of the song- end of story.  Now, it’s different for each one of you and it’s different for me.

CI: Have you always had that kind of perspective on authorship from the music side?

JS: No.

CI: So is it exclusive to the project or did the project bring this out?

JS: It’s been an evolving thought because I was raised in a world of copyrights and intellectual property and that stuff’s important on a practical level, especially when you’re a musician trying to make a living. But now that “Brown University Records” is funding this project <laughter>, I have the luxury to just sit literally surrounded by screens of old photos archives and films, whether it’s the Japanese internment or Vietnamese refugees, or old Chinese family home movies and just letting the soak in.  There’s this one video we show some times of this little Chinese girl on roller skates, which I think is the best metaphor for the Asian-American experience <laughs> slipping around on roller skates in the suburban backyard.  It’s that girl’s song, or that girl’s mom’s song as much as it is anyone else’s.

EA: There’s a way that the songs kind of evolve and our set list evolves.  We change the set list every single gig because it’s a different audience, it’s a different community and environment.  We shift what we talk about, how much context we give so the songs pretty much stay the same when we sing them.  But the whole story that we’re telling changes a lot as we go because we’re trying to be aware of who is our audience.

JS: Yeah, sometimes it’s more effective sometimes it’s less effective.  It depends on the vibe of the audience.  What do you bring to the show?

AY: I think your authorship thought kind of has roots in your public performance work too.  When you’re doing your public performance on the street corners or wherever, basically the authorship is everyone chipping in.

JS:  You’re talking about the work I did on busking and that stuff?  So yeah, I spent years of my life doing two different master’s degrees focusing on street music and stuff.  That very much shaped my idea of public space and what belongs to whom, and I wish there was a way to do this easier busking.   It’s hard to project video.  I have an idea about getting one of those… I don’t even know if they have stores like this anymore.  Do you remember in the 80’s and 90’s television stores had all those TVs in the storefront windows?  Projecting our videos and in us busking in front of it!  So if you can figure that out in Chicago for us let us know!

So you’re exactly right to pick up on that.  I spent four years, five years just going to parks around the world in North America and Europe just busking and all this music was together and there was no ownership of it.  It was just, if you like it, you put in a tip, you sang along sometimes and at times, the audience became a musician.  That’s a big part of why it’s so easy for me to understand that whenever someone sings, it’s not necessarily his or her project.  If they believe it is, then it is.  But for me, I like to get on stage and almost let go of these songs each time.  It’s more of just like breathing life into them and hope other people take that air and do something with it.

CI: It’s interesting that you take such an interest in how your work is received by not only by the audience, but also by the press.

JS: What did it do for you?  Because if it moves the author in some way and they bring new thought to it- what new thoughts did you get that I haven’t thought?  Like you recapitulating the busking scholarship that I’ve done and tying that into my denial of authorship.  It’s completely a right connection as a person who did both of those things.  But I needed you to articulate that to me.  So what does your voice say?  What is your impression of this?  Even how do you see us?

Because it’s not the way we see ourselves- like the background and stuff like that.  How do you craft a poetic moment if you’re into that stuff where I’m writing at mom’s kitchen table or whatever?  What does that mean you?  Why was it important?  I don’t know why.  It’s not my job to know why it’s important.  I just did it.  That’s what I’m very interested in.  That’s what I mean by collaboration.  It’s a relay, right?  You give your piece.  The next guy can take it on. The next girl can take it on from there and some else can take it on from there.  There’s no one answer to these questions.  I remember after the election I went to see Tricia Rose who’s a really great scholar.  I was like “Hey Tricia, what do I do?  I can’t protest everyday because I’ll drop out of school.  I’ll just be really angry.  I’ll be more and more angry.  I’ll lose my voice. It’s physically a problem.”  She said “Julian, just be the best scholar you can.  There are many levels to fight the fight on.  You’re a scholar, take that seriously and be unimpeachable in your scholarship.”  That’s what led me to “Well, I better start writing songs” because that’s the way I scholar.

End.