Japanese American Taiko and the Remaking of Tradition

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takeyuki Tsuda
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Ethnic Heritage ◽  
Active Recreation

This chapter analyzes how later-generation Japanese Americans have enthusiastically embraced taiko in an attempt to recover their cultural heritage, as well as how they have remade and reinvented the form for contemporary ethnic purposes in their local communities. It interrogates the nature of “tradition” by examining how Japanese American taiko differs from taiko as practiced in Japan. The chapter also points out that Japanese American taiko is highly performative, allowing for improvised modifications and spontaneous innovations. Therefore, the desire to reclaim ethnic heritage involves not just the reenactment of ancient cultural traditions but their active recreation in the present to reflect the contemporary social conditions under which Japanese Americans live.

scholarly journals TOURISM AND COMMUNITY. A STUDY OF COMMUNITY BASED TOURISM IN MANDALA WISATA WANARA WANA UBUD

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 122
Author(s):  
Ida Bagus Putu Puja ◽  
Putu Ayu Aryasih
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Community Level ◽  
Tourist Attraction ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Community Data ◽  
Tourism Activity

Community Based Tourism (CBT) is a tourism activity, a community that is owned and operated, and is managed or coordinated at the community level that contributes to community welfare through sustained livelihood support and protects socio-cultural traditions and resources valuable natural and cultural heritage. The analysis was conducted to analyse the results of interviews with local communities and Monkey Forest’s management regarding the management of tourist attraction based on community. Data is presented in the form of a description to see the community based tourism in managing Monkey Forest. This qualitative study aims to analyze the community in managing tourism attraction of Mandala Wisata Wanara Ubud (Monkey Forest) through community based tourism.

Diasporicity and Japanese Americans

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takeyuki Tsuda
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Relative Strength ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Social Connections ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Geographically Dispersed ◽  
Transnational Ties ◽  
National Differences ◽  
Transnational Connections ◽  
Japanese Descent

This chapter situates Japanese American cultural heritage and transnational ties to the ethnic homeland in a broader diasporic context and proposes the concept of diasporicity to address the relative strength of a geographically dispersed ethnic group’s transnational connections and identifications both with the ancestral homeland and to co-ethnics residing in other countries. Although Japanese Americans are members of the Japanese-descent (nikkei) diaspora, prominent national differences prevent them from identifying with other Japanese-descent nikkei as peoples with a common ethnic heritage. However, like other diasporic groups, they have much stronger social connections to their ethnic homeland than they do to other Japanese descent communities in the Americas.

Japanese American Ethnicity

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takeyuki Tsuda
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Bona Fide ◽  
Ethnic Heritage ◽  
Taiko Drumming ◽  
American Society ◽  
New Generation ◽  
American Ethnicity

This book explores the contemporary ethnic experiences of Japanese Americans from the second to the fourth generations and the extent to which they remain connected to their ancestral cultural heritage. As one of the oldest groups of Asian Americans in the United States, most Japanese Americans are culturally assimilated and well-integrated in mainstream American society. However, they continue to be racialized as culturally “Japanese” foreigners simply because of their Asian appearance in a multicultural America where racial minorities are expected to remain ethnically distinct. Different generations of Japanese Americans have responded to such pressures in ways that range from demands that their racial citizenship as bona fide Americans be recognized to a desire to maintain or recover their ethnic heritage and reconnect with their ancestral homeland. This ethnographic study argues that the ethnicity of immigrant-descent minorities does not simply follow a linear trajectory in which increasing assimilation gradually erodes the significance of ethnic heritage and identity over generations. While inheriting the assimilative patterns of previous generations, each new generation of Japanese Americans has also negotiated its own ethnic positionality in response to a confluence of various historical and contemporary factors. In addition, this book analyzes the performance of ethnic heritage through taiko drumming ensembles, as well as placing Japanese Americans in transnational and diasporic contexts.

Ethnic Revival among Fourth-Generation Japanese Americans

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takeyuki Tsuda
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Fourth Generation ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Transnational Ties ◽  
Ethnic Heritage

This chapter examines how fourth-generation yonsei youth are attempting to recover their lost ethnic heritage and reconnect with their ancestral homeland, despite their complete assimilation and Americanization. Indeed, for them, assimilation has not so much obliterated their cultural heritage, as it has instigated an ethnic revival under conditions of racialized multiculturalism. As a result, the yonsei study Japanese, major in Asian studies, and forge transnational ties. However, even as this return to ethnic roots represents more than a symbolic ethnicity, it is also a result of the pressures of multicultural racialization and indicates that ethnicity remains involuntary for racialized minorities, even after four generations.

scholarly journals Local Communities’ Perceptions of Archaeology and Cultural Heritage Resources in the Mtwara Region of Tanzania

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Festo W. Gabriel
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Intangible Cultural Heritage ◽  
Focus Group Discussions ◽  
Group Discussions ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Archaeological Ethnography

This paper examines local communities’ understanding of archaeology and cultural heritage resources. This study was conducted among the Makonde communities of the Mtwara Region of south-eastern Tanzania. The paper presents and critically discusses local communities’ views upon the meaning of archaeology and cultural heritage resources in general. The study used community-based methods by use of interviews, archaeological ethnography and focus group discussions. The results of this study reveal that the local communities in the Mtwara Region are not aware of the meaning of archaeology regardless of the number of archaeological researches that have been conducted in the region. Their understanding of the past is very much confined to intangible cultural traditions which are inherited and practised from one generation to another. Some conclusions are provided which undoubtedly indicate that according to the local communities’ perceptions cultural heritage resources are mainly characterized by intangible cultural practices and beliefs. As this study unveils, in this case tangible heritage resources have less importance to the local communities. This is contrary to the professional or academic conceptions which provide a dual focus on conservation and protection of tangible cultural heritage resources. It is only very recently that we see some studies being conducted focusing on intangible cultural heritage resources.

Conclusion

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takeyuki Tsuda
Keyword(s):  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Linear Processes ◽  
The Future ◽  
Ethnic Heritage

Returning to the various factors that cause some generations of Japanese Americans to emphasize ethnic heritage more than others, the concluding chapter reemphasizes that Japanese Americans have not experienced predictable, linear processes of progressive assimilation and loss of ethnic heritage over generations. Instead, each generation has negotiated its own ethnic positionality in response to a complex of historical and contemporary factors, which include racialization, the changing status of the ethnic homeland, and the prevalence of assimilation or multiculturalism. The concluding chapter ends with some thoughts about the future of the Japanese American community, including the experiences of biracial individuals, whose numbers will continue to increase in the coming decades.

Adventism in Ukraine: Attitude to national and cultural traditions, phenomena of the present

1997 ◽  
pp. 33-36
Author(s):  
Anatoliy Moskovchuk
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
National Minorities ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
Historical Contribution ◽  
Intellectual Environment

Ukraine is the motherland of not only Ukrainians but also of many national minorities with different cultures and traditions. Ukraine is a Christian country in general, with non-Christian and non-Christian religions and confessional currents, along with traditional churches - Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant - rooted and actively developing non-traditional Ukrainian culture and spirituality. In Ukraine there is a complex process of spiritual revival, especially in the intellectual environment. Many are written and talk about the preservation of cultural heritage. Everywhere, monuments of architecture, art, which testify to the generally recognized historical contribution of Christianity to the development of spirituality and morality of the Ukrainian people, are restored. In our eyes, there are changes in social and religious relations.

Jim and Jap Crow

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew M. Briones
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Atomic Bomb ◽  
Civil Liberty ◽  
Chicago School ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Internment Camps ◽  
The Military

Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government rounded up more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans and sent them to internment camps. One of those internees was Charles Kikuchi. In thousands of diary pages, he documented his experiences in the camps, his resettlement in Chicago and drafting into the army on the eve of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his postwar life as a social worker in New York City. Kikuchi's diaries bear witness to a watershed era in American race relations, and expose both the promise and the hypocrisy of American democracy. This book follows Kikuchi's personal odyssey among fellow Japanese American intellectuals, immigrant activists, Chicago School social scientists, everyday people on Chicago's South Side, and psychologically scarred veterans in the hospitals of New York. The book chronicles a remarkable moment in America's history in which interracial alliances challenged the limits of the elusive democratic ideal, and in which the nation was forced to choose between civil liberty and the fearful politics of racial hysteria. It was an era of world war and the atomic bomb, desegregation in the military but Jim and Jap Crow elsewhere in America, and a hopeful progressivism that gave way to Cold War paranoia. The book looks at Kikuchi's life and diaries as a lens through which to observe the possibilities, failures, and key conversations in a dynamic multiracial America.

Nature Behind Barbed Wire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Connie Y. Chiang
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
Us History ◽  
War Relocation Authority ◽  
The Social ◽  
Japanese Ancestry

The mass imprisonment of over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II was one of the most egregious violations of civil liberties in US history. Removed from their homes on the temperate Pacific Coast, Japanese Americans spent the war years in ten desolate camps in the nation’s interior. Although scholars and commentators acknowledge the harsh environmental conditions of these camps, they have turned their attention to the social, political, or legal dimensions of this story. Nature Behind Barbed Wire shifts the focus to the natural world and explores how it shaped the experiences of Japanese Americans and federal officials who worked for the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the civilian agency that administered the camps. The complexities of the natural world both enhanced and constrained the WRA’s power and provided Japanese Americans with opportunities to redefine the terms and conditions of their confinement. Even as the environment compounded their feelings of despair and outrage, they also learned that their willingness (or lack thereof) to transform and adapt to the natural world could help them endure and even contest their incarceration. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the Japanese American incarceration was fundamentally an environmental story. Japanese Americans and WRA officials negotiated the terms of confinement with each other and with a dynamic natural world.

Women’s Czech Folk Costume: Negotiating Ambivalence and White Ethnicity in the Midwest

2021 ◽  
pp. 0887302X2110275
Author(s):  
Erin French ◽  
Kelly L. Reddy-Best
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
White Ethnicity ◽  
Czech Population ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Ethnic Heritage

Folk costume is traditionally worn to represent and preserve ethnic heritage. Large numbers of Czechs emigrated to America from the 1870s to 1920s, but eventually, a generation was born that had little contact with their immigrant ancestors. The purpose of our research was to examine what role folk costume plays in the negotiation of Czech ethnic identity and how meaning is constructed and communicated through Czech folk costumes for modern-day wearers. We conducted 11 indepth, semi-structured interviews with descendants of Czech immigrants in a previously unexplored Czech population of the Midwest. We identified four major themes: feelings of connectedness; sense of pride and joy; importance of perceived authenticity; and variation, nuance, and meaning of costume construction and style. Through our work, we contribute to the preservation and documentation of modern-day Czech traditions, ongoing discussions surrounding defining cultural traditions, and business practices of retailers.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document