Art, Community & Advocacy: Rob Buscher's Creative Journey

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The Truth In This Art
Only a couple months down, I think I recognize.

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Rob Lee
Welcome to the truth in this art. I'm your host, Rob Lee. And once again, we're back in Philadelphia. And today, I am just excited to welcome my next guests. They are the associate director of organizational culture at the Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia. They're also a film and media specialist, educator, arts administrator and published author who is held various leadership roles in the nonprofit arts organizations for over a decade.

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Rob Lee
As a person of biracial Japanese-American heritage who deeply involved in this community. He's also had an expertize in cultural sensitivity training, community organizing and advocacy issues related to Asian-American and Pacific Islander community. Please welcome Rob Butcher. Thank you for for coming on to the podcast. And before we get like to deep and embedded into it, much like a tech thing, that's the thing.

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Rob Lee
Right takes get embedded into the skin. Could you share your story? What is the Rob Butcher story?

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Rob Buscher
Yeah. So I'm a mixed race Japanese-American, born and raised in rural suburban Connecticut, in a community where my mom and sister were the only other Japanese Americans. And then when I went to college, I moved abroad to the United Kingdom. I lived in London for about five, five and a half years in between, spent some time living, studying in Japan as well, and then moved here to Philadelphia at the end of 2010.

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Rob Buscher
I've spent most of my career since then organizing film festivals. I also curate a lot of visual art gallery shows and musical performances. And I'm a musician myself. A guitarist and vocalist.

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Rob Lee
Nice. Nice. I like what people are doing, the creative thing, and then being in the kind of a facilitating and supporting community sort of side of things as well. And I can only imagine, you know, because whenever I think of London, I just think of Sweet London. I think of. I listen to a lot of old, like, eighties music.

00;02;19;08 - 00;02;36;16
Rob Lee
It's like, oh, he's the cure is Morrissey. Here we go. And my partner keeps telling me, because of the way my face looks and the fact that it's always just teeth and me smiling, she's like, Where's your eyeliner? Where yet? Now I can only imagine you wearing eyeliner now because of the whole London and the ruffled shirts and all of that.

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Rob Buscher
Well, it's funny you mention that I did buy a ruffled shirt to wear on stage when I lived out there, was playing in bands. But yeah, I mean, London's music scene was incredible. I was there from 2005 until about 2000 end of 2010. And so that was kind of the era of like Arctic Monkeys and, you know, a lot of these very hip like Sheffield based, like British indie rock bands who of course, you know, made the move to London, as we all did.

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Rob Buscher
But it was interesting. I had a chance to visit recently over the holidays. I was in London for a couple of nights, and it's one of those timeless cities. It just it remains so cool. It's changed so much, of course, even in the ten years that I've been gone. But you see the kind of remnants of that music scene of of like the sixties and the seventies, when British Rock became really relevant here.

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Rob Buscher
But even in terms of like punk rock and the influence that that had total aside. But one of the things that really fascinated me, living in Hammersmith, which was historically a West Indies like Afro-Caribbean community, as well as like a poor working class, white English neighborhood. And oftentimes that's where the music came from. So in like the seventies, when you have an influx of the West Indies migration, all of those folks bringing reggae and roots music into the British consciousness.

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Rob Buscher
And of course, that's where you get things like ska and that it's just totally natural to see like punkers and street punks, you know, brushing shoulders with the Rastafari and all part of London's musical economy.

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Rob Lee
That's that's really that's really cool. And I like to really, like, tap back in to some of the music stuff where, you know, it's like, oh, go through and listen to like the specials. And I had to put my brother on because my brother's name is Rudy and I'm like, Hey, this is literally a theme song for you.

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Rob Lee
You should listen to it. He's like, What is this? He's like, Oh, shit. They say my name on it. And because the only reference point he had was for a very long time, he's going to find us hilarious. For a very long time, we used to go to like the flea markets swap meet saying we would get like knock off whatever.

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Rob Lee
And for the longest time he had these I don't know if they were Iceberg or FUBU, but it was these jeans that had like the Cosby kids on there's like Fat Albert and all. And it was one character named Rudy and he would wear those. It was like, that's a patch of a character name after you on your butt.

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Rob Lee
I was like, Is that would you want to go with? So talking about being being younger, that's almost a Segway, talking about being younger. What were some of the things you were into creatively? Obviously film was it was a part of that. And you know, I would imagine, you know, watching film growing up. Talk about that a bit and you know, like what type of movies were you into?

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Rob Lee
What type of creative things were you into as a young person?

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Rob Buscher
Yeah. So I grew up, as I mentioned, in a fairly mono cultural mono racial environment. The town of Bethel, Connecticut. It was like 98% white, you know, so pretty sheltered from diversity of any kind except for the fact that, you know, my family is mixed race. And we had family all over the country who came from the Japanese-American diaspora and one of the really important, I think, cultural influences, especially in childhood, my great grandmother, who was a Japanese immigrant, she lived until 2006 when I was a college freshman, and she introduced me to Japanese cinema in an era when I'm sure she acknowledged, looking at American popular film and television.

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Rob Buscher
The only times you saw Japanese faces on screen were like Pat Morita as like Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid, or maybe also Pat Morita in Happy Days. Right, right. And he plays like a short order cook with, like a bad Chinese accent. And so not having any sort of positive role models, especially as a young boy, that idea of what it is to have Japanese masculinity, she was able to introduce me at at probably age seven or eight to Toshiro Mifune, sort of like the epitome of the cool, masculine Japanese martial arts samurai gangster.

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Rob Buscher
In all of his films from the 1940s until like the eighties and I just fell in love with him and his his film, the style of cinematography from Japan. And it eventually led me to kind of pursue that in my career. And I think then the other very strong influence on in terms of my music. My dad's a blues harmonica player and, you know, I grew up around blues music and listening and playing blues music on my guitar.

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Rob Buscher
Although I was more into hardcore and punk when I was living in the States, it wasn't until living overseas that it sort of struck that chord and I guess missing the familiarity of of American music. Blues, to me is really the epitome of that and kind of delving into that further in my own career as a musician was kind of exciting to do in the context of being an American abroad, and especially in London, having these influences from so many parts of the world.

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Rob Buscher
I mean, London is such an international city, at least when I lived there, four out of five residents of London were born outside of the UK and a lot of my friends were Middle Eastern Arab and also the Muslim British folks who I met and some were also immigrants. But just kind of looking at where things like the pentatonic scale, for example, like the five tones that are used within blues music, are the same tones that are used within Middle Eastern music, which are the same tones that are used in Japanese music and the sort of wavelengths that connect us sonically across communities, across continents, across time periods where things that, you know, I think

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Rob Buscher
became more evident to me the more that I traveled and the more that I experimented, playing music with other people around the world music.

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Rob Lee
Food, those things, jazz and maybe, maybe call them. I'm sure I'm thinking of other ones that come to mind, but those are the two that pop out music and food. That's where those points of fusion are and that sort of overlap. It's like we use this, you use that, let's figure out how these things go together. And sometimes it could be really bad fusion.

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Rob Lee
You're like, I don't think I want that. And other times it's magic. So that's what I'm kind of hearing. Like sonically when you're describing like the scales that are there.

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Rob Buscher
Yeah, well, the scales and the tones and you know, so for example, this is something that you wouldn't imagine in a million years would work, but I was the lead guitarist in and around the an alternative rock band in London, our singer sung in Farsi and a lot of the scales that our music was in, the chord progressions were kind of a mix between blues based American rock and Middle Eastern sounds.

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Rob Buscher
But in particular, we started to fuze the sound of like slide guitar, you know, the epitome of like blues, like down home country folk blues with these really interesting sounding Middle Eastern scale and chord progressions. And and it worked.

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Rob Lee
Yeah, that's do you have time these days to actually play and kind of dip back into music?

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Rob Buscher
Yeah. Most recently during the pandemic, I guess in 2020 and 2021, I hosted and produced my own podcast series called Look Towards the Mountain Stories from Heart Mountain Incarceration Camp. And we explored kind of the daily life within American concentration camp and World War Two, where the Japanese-Americans were placed in Hart Mountain, Wyoming. And music plays a big role in that and the kind of approach to the podcast series, since it was set in the mid 1940s, my mind immediately went to like 1940s radio plays and so I wanted to try and recreate to the extent that I was able using spoken dialog, oral history recordings from people who lived this experience directly in cases

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Rob Buscher
where it was text based only, we brought in voice actors to actually voice those parts. And then I did the music and the soundtrack for it and had an incredible time in, you know, a 13 hour limited series, just reconnecting to music and doing it for the purpose of a project that was very intimate as it related in parts to my own family's story here in the United States as Japanese-Americans, but then also navigating how do we explore what it was like to be a Japanese immigrant or a Japanese American in 1943 in rural Wyoming?

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Rob Buscher
And how does that sound and what kinds of musical influences do we integrate and, you know, great, I get to play with my shamisen, my three string Japanese banjo. But wait, let's put in some slide guitar here too. Yeah, I can, like play around and do a Sergio Leone ask my Cowboy Western soundtrack for some of the episodes where we're talking about Buffalo Bill and the origins of of that region of the West and yeah, just had a great time.

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Rob Buscher
And so that was the last significant project. But of course I continue to play music.

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Rob Lee
That's amazing. And I think it definitely connects to sort of this, this background in and within media and almost an almost all also in preserving culture. I think where, you know, we do this thing, I feel like every couple of years we forget what's happened in the last five years. It's like, oh, this is really when it went down.

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Rob Lee
And when you get into these conversations around the history of maybe marginalized groups in the diaspora of certain groups when it comes to this country, Asian folk, black folk, all of those, it's like, Oh, yeah, this is actually what you guys experienced. No, no, no. You got to include us in the conversation. I think we know how to talk about it because we or by extension, our family has lives to it in some way.

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Rob Lee
So I think being able to do something that's a media property is very immersive and it speaks to history. I think that's a great way of going about it, in addition to all of the other great work that you're doing. So I want to talk about film a little bit more, but I want to go into this next question because I think is pertinent at least where we're at.

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Rob Lee
How did how did your background as an author, as a film and media specialist and educator, kind of lead you to sort of this community organizing and advocacy work? That's why I thought it was really connected there.

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Rob Buscher
Yeah. So in reality, I don't know that they're actually disconnected ever, at least in my own experience. I think that being an artist or a writer oftentimes sort of places you at the margins of society, kind of looking from the outside and being in the position, I think, of power and privilege to be able to critique the things, but then also this kind of discomfort and lack of belonging, which in a certain extent I think summarizes the experience of being a mixed race individual.

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Rob Buscher
You know, I could walk into any room anywhere in the world and I'll never be surrounded by people who look exactly like me or are of the same background of me based on the fact that I have mixed parentage, which is fine. I mean, I think to a certain extent no one has that experience, but they have the illusion of that experience in certain ways.

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Rob Buscher
So just kind of thinking about how to navigate identity to me has been such a personal part of the work that I do, both as an artist and an activist. But I think the term of artist activist and sort of the advocacy component within art and curation has been very front of mind for me, particularly after moving back to the States, having spent six years abroad.

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Rob Buscher
I left the United States during George Bush's second term in office. I made a conscious choice to leave at that point because I disagreed so much with what was happening and our wars in the Middle East and, you know, coming back to the United States with sort of a fresh perspective. In 2010, during the Occupy Wall Street movement, there was also Occupy Philly movement.

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Rob Buscher
Shortly thereafter with the murder of Trayvon Martin. We had the Black Lives Matter protests that kind of really came. And here in Philly especially were very important in terms of changing the narrative of like who we are, all of us, and how our collective privilege, but also the ways that we've all been oppressed in different time periods are sort of intersecting and interconnected in ways that really, I think, resonated for me in different ways and kind of having, again, this history of the Japanese-American experience.

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Rob Buscher
And my family was forced from their land in California shortly after Pearl Harbor and became homeless in the high desert plains of Utah and worked very hard as sharecroppers to just provide basic necessities for their five children at a time period when the entire United States viewed them as the enemy and, you know, that kind of experience, as it translates three generations later in my family, my my watch on my grandmother was involved in the redress movement, essentially Japanese reparations, Japanese-American reparations.

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Rob Buscher
And that was a successful push throughout the 1980s. It was her generation who did it. She played a certain leadership role in the region of the country that she was based in at that time. And I feel like that had always been part of our family history. And my relationship to my Japanese-American identity has always come with the knowledge that this is something that has been and continues to be stigmatized and can be viewed as a negative by a lot of people, sort of puts a target on our backs at different times.

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Rob Buscher
I mean, you look no further than the recent anti-Asian violence during COVID pandemic. It's not just affecting the Chinese-American community. There's a lot of hate crimes that have taken place against Japanese-Americans and other East and Southeast Asians as well. So a lot of those things are just sort of the knowledge of what it means to like navigate the worlds in whatever body that you're in.

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Rob Buscher
A new kind of come to know these things and in unspoken ways, I think most of the time. But as an as an artist and a curator, I wanted to try to give voice to those concerns and issues through the work that I've been doing in my career. And I think when Donald Trump was elected, that was sort of a defining moment in my career where previously I had already been organizing film festivals for the express purpose of kind of disproving the stereotypes about Asians and Japanese and Japanese Americans.

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Rob Buscher
But when Trump became elected in 2016, Philadelphia just felt like this huge depression and the sky opened up and there was rain and it was just this awful downpour. And everyone was depressed. Everyone was hung over the day after Election Day, and then the next day following. That was the opening night of our film festival in 2016. And so, you know, as the festival director trying to rally our staff and our volunteers and the filmmakers and the audience, even to be excited about being there when basically our identities were things that put us on a target on our backs in the eyes of the GOP.

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Rob Buscher
And under the Trump administration, it became a very intentional act of resistance to be in that space that night and that that week, as we celebrated our cultures and our diversity as strengths rather than weaknesses and things that we should be proud of. And I think over time, it kind of embedded itself more, both within the organization, the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival, as well as kind of my own work as a curator.

00;19;44;07 - 00;20;32;18
Rob Buscher
The most obvious example being the American Peril exhibit that I curated in 2018 as part of our festival, which looked at the historical periodicals, printed material, ephemera, posters, postcards, etc. that illustrated some type of anti-Asian racism through racialized caricatures, largely illustration, largely political satire, but essentially dehumanized Asian peoples from the 1870s until post-9-11. And how these same tactics basically translated across time period and across community to scapegoat immigrants of whatever era as the reason for all of society's ills.

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Rob Buscher
And so as this was happening in 2018, the Trump administration had recently coined the phrase fake news and alternative facts. And so my my point was, if I could show you a piece of paper from 1942 that has like the anime Japanese soldier with like bath bat wings and vampire teeth, you know, dropping a bomb on a group of children.

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Rob Buscher
Like, you can't tell me that my family didn't experience racism because of that. Okay? And that's where that's where my mind went to. And I think obviously there have been other ways that have been more nuanced that we've continued to explore that through both the film festival and the other projects that I'm involved with. But I feel like that's a good example to kind of take all of those ideas together.

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Rob Lee
Thank you. And I think it's I think it's important to you know, as I was touching on earlier, we always go back to it. You know, it's like, look, you were touching on like this is stuff from the forties and further that, you know, we just come back to like it's, oh, this is brand new. No, it's not.

00;21;44;12 - 00;22;05;19
Rob Lee
It's always been there. It's always an undercurrent there, the same as we can have from our different perspectives. Have relatives who are still here, you know, tell us like, hey, this is what we experienced. The same people who are like, you know, the shitholes are going to be the same. They're going to have the same stories like, you know, those Asians are bad.

00;22;05;19 - 00;22;36;07
Rob Lee
You know, blacks, all I can do is shoot jumpers and so crack rock. And it's like, that's not what it is. And to see that this is not who we are, you know, as a people in this country is like no history says otherwise. History says otherwise. And and I think about when you mentioned that the sort of post Trump being elected, I go back to that episode of SNL when it's like Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock or Rene and they're like, Yo, didn't expect this.

00;22;36;07 - 00;22;57;08
Rob Lee
This is this is not new. It's like, oh, my God, I can't believe this will happen. Like, well, it's yeah. And so I want to, I want to talk about some of the some of the word because that you're doing in addition. So we have Japan, American Society of Greater Philadelphia, we have show foo. So Japanese Cultural Center.

00;22;57;10 - 00;23;06;27
Rob Lee
Let's talk about that a little bit. What is your work there entail with, you know, within those and what are some of the things that. Well, I'll start I'll start there. I'll start there actually.

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Rob Buscher
Yeah. So in a nutshell, the Japan America Society is a citizen diplomacy organization and essentially building connections between Japan and the greater Philadelphia region through interpersonal relations, cultural exchanges, business partnerships and education. And one of the main programs, of course, is the show. So Japanese housing garden. And we have a beautiful 17th century style temple guest house that was actually constructed in the 1950s to be displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

00;23;50;15 - 00;24;16;06
Rob Buscher
So the house was actually built in Nagoya, Japan, then taken apart piece by piece, shipped to New York, rebuilt in the sculpture garden at MoMA's Manhattan Museum, where it lived for two seasons, and then was deconstructed and shipped to Philadelphia, where it now stands in the Parkside neighborhood of West Philly. And so it's been there since 1958 and at different times in its history.

00;24;16;06 - 00;24;46;27
Rob Buscher
It's been administered by different groups of people. In the 1980s, the House had fallen into a state of disrepair. The city hadn't really invested much into the upkeep or maintenance of the house, and unfortunately there had been a series of vandalism. And so at one point the government of Japan threatened to take it back, and it was actually a group of Japanese-Americans, essentially the same generation that my grandmother is, who had resettled here after their wartime incarceration experience.

00;24;47;12 - 00;25;10;00
Rob Buscher
And they saw this one, I think, as a great tragedy that this had befallen the Japanese house, being literally the only example of Japanese architecture that was visible here in the city of Philadelphia. But also, I think they saw it as an opportunity amid the redress movement, while they were trying to build support and empathy for the experience that the Japanese-Americans went through.

00;25;10;15 - 00;25;38;09
Rob Buscher
They saw this as an opportunity to sort of demystify the culture of Japan, but also to demonstrate that, hey, this is traditional Japanese culture, but we're Japanese-Americans like we're born and raised in the United States. We have very different experiences, perspectives, and unfortunately have experienced the realities of American racism as a result of the way that we look and our parentage and the religions that we practice and so on and so forth.

00;25;39;05 - 00;26;11;17
Rob Buscher
And this this happens also amid the US Japan trade war of the 1980s. Right. So there were things that were happening all over the country. I mean, Vincent Chen, Chinese-American man, he was beaten to death by two unemployed autoworkers in Detroit who thought that he was Japanese, you know, who blamed him, scapegoated him for losing their jobs. And so it's no coincidence then this is the same year in 1982 that the Japanese-American community in Philadelphia decides to become involved in the show house they garden and upkeep it.

00;26;11;28 - 00;26;47;06
Rob Buscher
And so fast forward almost 40 years later, and we're basically at a point now where unfortunately all of those elders have since passed on. And there had been, I think, a loss of memory within the institution. But we also have within all Asian American communities there is constant immigration and some communities it's more visible than others. But we do have a large and growing Japanese expat community here in Philadelphia, and that's the group that has been most recently associated with the Japanese housing garden.

00;26;47;19 - 00;27;30;18
Rob Buscher
So when I was hired to come into this organization in August of 2021, it was sort of a twofold role to one sort of reestablish this connection to the Japanese American multi-generational community, the folks who have been here since before World War Two, for example, and still have a very important role, I think, within the remembrance and also cultural maintenance of how Japanese culture was practiced and remembered and transmitted to other publics here in our region, which unfortunately that connection had been lost a little bit just based on time and transition of leadership.

00;27;30;28 - 00;27;56;03
Rob Buscher
The second part is that the reality, you know, Parkside West, Philadelphia is a 95% African-American neighborhood and most of the community members and the local residents didn't really see so as a place for them. And I think that's often the case when you have cultural institutions in neighborhoods that are predominantly black or brown, where the cultural institution is not reflective of that.

00;27;57;02 - 00;28;41;17
Rob Buscher
And so a lot of the work that I've been doing over the last year and a half is trying to find ways to sort of celebrate the things that we have in common. And I found music to actually be the most exciting way to do that. We had a we have an annual cherry Blossom Festival and last year we actually devoted the programing entirely to this exploration of the overlap and shared musical culture among and between Japanese, Japanese Americans and African Americans looking at sort of historically black music genres like blues, like funk, jazz, like reggae, and how is that practiced and celebrated both in Japan and among Japanese American musicians.

00;28;41;17 - 00;29;12;01
Rob Buscher
And so it was a really incredible experience to just kind of open up the festival in that capacity and just see how the musicians interacted with one another and how it just totally made sense to everyone who was part of the lineup and everyone that was there in the audience really excited to see and celebrate and think about, you know, what are some of these ways that we already do exist and coexist and overlap?

00;29;12;21 - 00;29;55;00
Rob Buscher
And in that shared cultural space. So yeah, I mean, that's just one example. But we've done a lot of work with some of the local schools where we're sort of exploring more of the educational setting. What is the overlap of the history of activism among Japanese-Americans and African-Americans? And looking at the civil rights era and folks like Yuriko Toyama, who was one of the really important Japanese-American activists in New York City, also a close confidant of Malcolm X, became one of his most trusted friends throughout the last years of his life, working on a variety of causes in New York or even more close to home.

00;29;55;00 - 00;30;24;16
Rob Buscher
Kiyoshi Kurama, who was born in the Heart Mountain Incarceration camp in World War Two. She came to school here at University of Pennsylvania and became totally passionate about the struggle for black liberation and was one of the first non-black marchers in the Selma montgomery marches and became actually very close friends with Dr. King to the point that his family and him continued to stay in touch even after Dr. King's assassination.

00;30;24;16 - 00;30;45;14
Rob Lee
And that's that's I mean, you're laying it on him, and it's is great to hear of these things, because this is all new for me. And it's just like I got a list of things now I'm going to dove into and like, yeah. So remember back in the day when this was happening, we always rocked with the Japanese folk, the Japanese American folk as well, you know, having that delineation there.

00;30;45;14 - 00;31;07;01
Rob Lee
And I think, you know, when we talk about it, there's not a lot of those conversations on where there is some sort of common ground and some sort of connection. And I think it doesn't lead to that sort of discourse and that sort of exchange. But what you were describing there, I'm just hearing vision. I'm just hearing really unique ways to bring in communities together.

00;31;07;01 - 00;31;31;01
Rob Lee
And I love it, frankly. And I think all the time we hear, oh, well, these people don't get along moving on. And it's like, how do you know? Like, why are you the person saying it? You know what I mean? It's it's always someone that has something to gain of showing this sort of dissension. But if these certain different, like, marginalized groups kind of get together and show that there is some connection, there's so many new things that can be built out of that.

00;31;31;14 - 00;31;36;24
Rob Buscher
In my experience, too, it's not usually someone from either of our communities that are telling us that either.

00;31;37;09 - 00;31;59;27
Rob Lee
Well, you're not wrong this know that that's true and you know you see, I remember like I go out of my way to try to be as, you know, open and try to hit, like for me, you know, I'm going to have my own sort of what my experience is. I'm a black man. So that's where I kind of know who I can talk to, you know, starting off.

00;31;59;27 - 00;32;18;12
Rob Lee
But then from there it's just like, all right, whose work interests me, who I think have an interesting story and it's as broad as possible. And, you know, full disclosure, obviously, this is the second time we're recording this interview because I don't know how to record. But, you know, we had that that piece of exchange. You know, you took me to the the coffee place.

00;32;18;12 - 00;32;36;18
Rob Lee
And that was a very special moment for me. You know, small, but especially when someone takes you to one of their places, it's like, hey, you should try this. I drink that immediately, by the way, and it's it's big. And I think that that's a sort of exchange. So now on the other side of it, I'm like, all right, this is what I like.

00;32;36;18 - 00;33;04;10
Rob Lee
You should try this. You know, maybe it's the my my famous Japanese influence crabcakes. I'll put you on later, patrol later. And that's just what it is. And that's a natural thing. And, you know, when we go back to some of the really terrible things that have happened over the last few years, I remember I was doing an interview, I think it was maybe Lunar New Year with the a Chinese business owner who had us had a spot in Baltimore.

00;33;04;27 - 00;33;25;04
Rob Lee
And this was like when some of the vandalism and some of that stuff started before we got even to the ongoing violence and so on, all of the news was showing black people are attacking Asian people. And I was like, what are like 13% of the country? That's like, all right, everyone. Hey, cool. And he spoke and I was fine, you know, passing a fire along and I smoke.

00;33;25;16 - 00;33;55;00
Rob Lee
And it's just like this is the same thing. There's a rich history of what I like to see is and I don't know anything. I'm just speaking from my position is more miscommunication and isolated things that get blown out to show that, hey, these minority groups can't get along for whatever reason. And I think in going back to the full circle to tie it up, just, you know, when there's an opportunity to do something, you know, where you talk about the Cherry Blossom Festival, I'm like, immediately.

00;33;55;00 - 00;34;19;19
Rob Lee
Yes. Or I recently fell back in love watching basketball. And, you know, locally we have the was as close as the closest thing. Here they have Rushmore and I was like, he's Japanese and he's black. Let's go. He goes like, the black samurai is like, That's fire. That is fire. Yeah. He's like this. But he has like this maybe kimono or I already know I'm mispronouncing it that has like the cherry blossoms on.

00;34;19;19 - 00;34;32;22
Rob Lee
And I was like, This is fire. That's a fire fit. I love it. Let's make it happen. That's there's there's something there that can be blown up a bit more. But the average person won't know that that sort of connection exists. Yeah, that's the thing that gets me.

00;34;33;04 - 00;35;15;00
Rob Buscher
Well, and let's not forget Sister Naomi Osaka. I mean, she's also killing it. Absolutely. You know, again, bringing communities together. But when I think about like how these things are sort of embedded and like we just we don't know because people don't want us to know. I mean, there's such a rich history. And I think especially on the West Coast, right when the Japanese-Americans were removed forcibly from their homes and businesses and evicted and brought to the prison camps because of the redlining and the racially segregated neighborhoods of Los Angeles and San Francisco, other West Coast cities, Oakland included.

00;35;16;00 - 00;35;43;03
Rob Buscher
When African-Americans came from the South to work in the shipbuilding factories, guess where they lived? Japan towns which were empty then. So when eventually the Japanese-Americans were led out of these prison camps and started trickling back to the West Coast, and suddenly Japan towns became these incredibly diverse, rich cultural exchanges where, for example, Los Angeles Japantown was known at that time period as Bronzeville.

00;35;43;16 - 00;36;10;16
Rob Buscher
It was renamed after the African-American business district in Chicago, and it became a place of jazz clubs, and they used to call them breakfast clubs because they would stay open till the next morning. And so when the Japanese-Americans came back, I mean, a lot of these guys were into jazz music, too, right? Like they were musicians. They were swing jazz musicians that went and came back and then suddenly found in their own neighborhood jazz clubs that they could play at.

00;36;10;24 - 00;36;46;06
Rob Buscher
And so you have Japanese American jazz musicians that were playing with all black jazz groups. You have African-Americans that are eating at the sukiyaki joints and like shopping at the Japanese grocery stores. And that's just something that was firmly embedded in the West Coast urban culture. And the same thing is true of of Oakland and San Francisco, Japantown and the Fillmore District and, you know, for the most part, there's a lineage that continues from that of these communities, not just living together and exchanging culturally, but organizing together, too.

00;36;46;13 - 00;36;46;21
Rob Buscher
Yeah.

00;36;47;26 - 00;37;09;01
Rob Lee
So and thank you that this is this like I said, this has been, I think to some might be better than the first one. But I want to in this these these final moments before we get to Rapid Fire, I want to do something I've not done before. I'm going to throw it to you. What is the question including your work, including your background, that you've never been asked?

00;37;09;01 - 00;37;23;04
Rob Lee
Do you feel like you would love to be asked but haven't really had the opportunity or space to be asked that question? You know, kind of like this sort of open to question, like whatever you want to kind of like talk about in this like sort of final real point before we get to the goofy rapid fire questions.

00;37;24;01 - 00;37;49;13
Rob Buscher
You know, it's not a question so much as maybe it's more of a wonder or consideration of like, you know, as someone who does work that is so tightly contained within sort of a historical narrative, historical experience and obviously a very specific identity. It's sometimes hard for me get a sense of how much of what I'm doing resonates with general audiences.

00;37;49;26 - 00;38;21;10
Rob Buscher
Like I know that I have a group of people in the Japanese-American community and then other communities who have experienced similar, parallel marginalization, who see what I'm doing and understand it, relate to it, participate and celebrate it, and to some extent. But again, it's kind of like at what point does that only kind of live within an echo chamber of people who have had a particular experience?

00;38;21;19 - 00;38;59;07
Rob Buscher
That's kind of where I think I as a as a curator especially, I'm constantly struggling to figure out how do we reach the people that really need to hear this the most when we have work art, art or music or film that is inherently political, you know, how do we reach the audiences that we know disagree with us and still do something that is meaningful and sort of lives by our code of ethics and while at the same time engaging those audiences, is it even possible?

00;38;59;23 - 00;39;05;04
Rob Buscher
So yeah, that's I guess, the broader wonder, not a question or an answer.

00;39;05;25 - 00;39;33;21
Rob Lee
It's that's I think similar to and there's always a a sort of at least my $0.02 on it. It's always this sort of I go back to the the Daryl Davis documentary. Right. And, you know, he's getting these getting hoods from from a Klansman or what have so that's in the the worse. And he's a black man musician all of that stuff and I can see this, you know, when he was here in Baltimore, you know, when I first watched the documentary, I'll say, who is this dude?

00;39;33;21 - 00;39;53;07
Rob Lee
I was like tight just for whatever reason, just natural response and was like, What are you doing? It's this a bit and seeing some of the folks who are in this sort of activist lane that were here and we're talking 5 to 7 years ago at this point that maybe even a little bit longer that just weren't inviting.

00;39;53;07 - 00;40;12;28
Rob Lee
It's like, no, this is how you do activism, this is how you approach this. And he's speaking to and doing this sort of work. And from what I understand, the work was being done earnestly, wasn't like for, you know, for some a black cloud of fame or have you he's going into a very rough space and changing hearts and minds, or at least the intent is.

00;40;13;06 - 00;40;37;16
Rob Lee
And instead of trying to lean in and I know it's not only here, but I would imagine many people were like, no, that shouldn't be happening. These people are scum. You should even be wasting your time. But I still believe in my black ass of black hearts that that there's a connecting thing that makes us all humans. And I think that it's something that can be taking from that.

00;40;37;16 - 00;41;04;09
Rob Lee
And I don't believe in throwing away people. I'm not saying it's going to be easy, but I'm saying the opportunity where you can maybe talk to someone that I think a lot of it is born out of ignorance, propaganda and just people positioning things and we see it. We see it all the time. I think, you know, as we go and see more and more news and see like, oh, this is the real story in like the social media space and this is the approved upon reality in the mass media sort of space.

00;41;04;26 - 00;41;28;12
Rob Lee
We, we see those sort of differences. And I think when someone's trying something, at least the effort, the attempt is something worthwhile. And yeah, I think I'm on I think I'm in the same boat with you though, when it comes to that. So with that I want to go on to some rapid fire questions with you, and I've changed them so you could be so.

00;41;28;22 - 00;41;50;18
Rob Lee
All right, I got I got a couple of them for you. And I definitely saw I wanted to touch back on Japanese cinema. So if you will you know, Rapid Fire, could you tell us three hallmarks of Japanese cinema from like the movies you grew up watching the movies that even now really pop for you or evenly, you know, which you do from a critical standpoint.

00;41;50;25 - 00;42;03;14
Rob Lee
What are those hallmarks that come to mind for you? For someone who knows nothing, even your feet follow your fellow and noble podcaster here who knows nothing about Japanese cinema. I'm going to be asking for list soon. But what are the hallmarks?

00;42;03;26 - 00;42;29;07
Rob Buscher
Yeah. Okay. So I'm glad you didn't ask me to just pick one film, because that would have been a much more difficult question. But I'll tell you this, you know, like with Japanese cinema, the history of Japanese cinema dates back to the birth of cinema, right? So like we've had 130 some odd years now of filmmaking in Japan and every genre that's come out in the West has existed within Japan.

00;42;29;21 - 00;42;58;25
Rob Buscher
So just a kind of 20,000 yard view of it. Yasujiro Ozu, I think, is, is one of the most important directors of any nationality of all time who did really important contemporary dramas, kind of starting in the early thirties and working through the late 1950s, Tokyo story was probably his best known film and I think a great place to start with that.

00;43;00;17 - 00;43;29;07
Rob Buscher
Just a small tidbit on him. He had a quote that said, If we are Japanese, we should make Japanese things. And he wanted to try to make Japanese films in a style and an esthetic and approach that made sense as it being Japanese and did so by introducing the totem he shot. So giving you the camera lens view of what it looks like when you're sitting or kneeling its atomic floor, as people do inside of a traditional house in Japan.

00;43;30;21 - 00;43;57;17
Rob Buscher
So that's why I guess, you know, I have to throw in, of course, Yojimbo which is one of my all time favorite action films starring Toshiro Mifune and directed by Kurosawa Akira, one of the most lauded director actor duos of all time. Yojimbo is the film that inspired A Fistful of Dollars, the first film and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly trilogy, Clint Eastwood.

00;43;58;04 - 00;44;20;13
Rob Buscher
And so it was adapted from this film where Mifune is a wandering samurai who comes into this rural town and a sock laborer and a silk merchant are at war with each other, and they've all hired mercenaries to fight each other, and they're at a standstill. And so he plays them off each other, pretends to work for both, ends up killing everyone and rids the town of all the bad guys.

00;44;20;24 - 00;45;01;28
Rob Buscher
And just like, hands down, one of the most badass pieces of cinema of all time, beautifully shot, beautifully acted, and just a thrill to watch. And then I guess you know, for the last one, I'll just go with one of my personal favorites. ITAMI youSo he was an actor, filmmaker, director that was active in the 1980s, primarily, and he did a film called Tampopo, which is about the ramen shops in Japan and basically kind of tongue in cheek, you know, how they say spaghetti western for the Italian made Western films.

00;45;02;04 - 00;45;27;00
Rob Buscher
He wanted to do a noodle western where basically the context is a couple of truck drivers come into town looking for the best bowl of ramen and find this dove that they get jumped in. And then he has to help the single wife who was widowed to become a better ramen cook in order to beat the rest of the shops in town.

00;45;27;17 - 00;45;52;09
Rob Buscher
But in the process, it's just this beautiful exploration of the relationship to food that different people of different age groups and demographics have within Japan. At that time period of like the 1980s bubble economy. Just a really unique insight to that time period in Japan. But as a food lover, I mean, it's and not this film.

00;45;52;09 - 00;46;10;21
Rob Lee
You've you've given me several things to watch because I didn't have the the sort of entry point. Now it's just like, oh, okay, cool. Because I want to say this. This is showing you a thing where I was watching. I watch a lot of Japanese pro-wrestling, so I'm already there. I'm already there in that regard or what have you.

00;46;10;21 - 00;46;27;17
Rob Lee
And I'm picking up different. I was like, they just call them. And my father was like, All right, cool, cool. This is great. And, and I recently like finished Tokyo Vice and I got my brother into it and he's like, Yeah, there's a lot of subtitles here. However, this is a fire show. And he was like, You know what?

00;46;27;18 - 00;46;46;29
Rob Lee
He's like, I'm here for it. He's like, I can read and enjoy this visual. He's like, This is great. And that was kind of the thing that stopped me for a long time. But now it's kind of like, Oh no, this is just normal now. This is not going to speak the language. And now having an interest in learning the language enough that it's like, Oh, I can follow along here and be even more immersed.

00;46;47;08 - 00;46;58;26
Rob Lee
So now I have at least three movies. I'm going to be watching. So thank you for that. So I've got two more questions for you. Are you more of a thinker or doer?

00;47;00;07 - 00;47;24;02
Rob Buscher
I am a doer, but I'm constantly in thought when I'm active. My my wife gives me shit about it all the time, you know, it's the kind of thing where I wish I could turn my brain off sometimes, but I get so lost in thought and I'm constantly moving. So you know, in one sense, I am doing those things.

00;47;25;11 - 00;47;29;06
Rob Buscher
There's. But there is some strategy behind the things that I'm doing.

00;47;29;25 - 00;47;56;20
Rob Lee
Yeah. Mm hmm. I think we have how people and why people. And it's like, I know why I'm doing this. The how sometimes can be tricky. And as we start getting into the sort of the strategy and the execution of things, I'm definitely a Y person, but I think it's important to know the sort of how components, but how are we going to get there and like maybe even when when should we do this clean in the why drives it though here's the last one.

00;47;57;22 - 00;48;10;00
Rob Lee
So I believe words are important in being a person of biracial identity. And I there are some pronunciations that I butchered during this podcast that I was like, Thanks, Rob. This.

00;48;10;00 - 00;48;10;10
Rob Buscher
Yeah.

00;48;10;22 - 00;48;33;10
Rob Lee
So in your opinion, what is the most powerful word you think of a powerful words? What pops in your mind? It could be, you know, English, Japanese, Spanish, whatever you got. But what is like the most powerful word that comes to mind? I've had people in the past they love I've had people in the past. They know. So for you, what is the most powerful word that comes to mind?

00;48;34;07 - 00;49;09;29
Rob Buscher
I'm sort of torn between to both of them. Are Japanese the one that I think is just universally powerful is this idea of gaman, which is loosely translates to enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity. And it's something that has often been used to describe the experience of Japanese-Americans during the wartime incarceration. World War Two, sort of trying to turn the other cheek and prove that they were loyal Americans by accepting the extreme racism of that era.

00;49;09;29 - 00;49;38;20
Rob Buscher
The other one being ishow can measure, which is to devote your entire being to a singular task. And I think describes it very well. I think a lot of the craftspeople and artisans and artists in Japan and certainly elsewhere throughout the world, but I love that idea of devoting your entire self to a singular task. And I think as artists and creatives that that should be the thing that we all strive for.

00;49;38;20 - 00;49;58;25
Rob Lee
Well, so thank you. I've learned two new two new words. I'm going to throw them around like I actually know this is going to be great. So in the final moments here, I want to again, thank you for being on this podcast and making the time for me in this this sort of like series. It's great to have you as an addition to this Philadelphia folk series.

00;49;59;09 - 00;50;09;24
Rob Lee
And I want to invite and encourage you to tell the fine folks where they can check you out. Japan, American Society, Japan, American Society and all of the great work that you do on the floor is yours.

00;50;10;17 - 00;50;38;25
Rob Buscher
Thanks. Yeah. So I think for Japan American Society, our websites easy to remember it's Japan Philly dot org and you can find all sorts of information about the opening hours of the show. So House and Garden, which is open from March until end of November, Wednesday through Sunday from 11 to 5. We also have the Cherry Blossom Festival that's coming up this year, April 15th and 16th.

00;50;39;07 - 00;51;05;17
Rob Buscher
But we have an entire month long film program. We're actually doing a seven film retrospective of Toshiro Mifune films that sort of a cross-section of his early Japanese noir films where he plays like Yakuza or Detectives in sort of the gritty postwar Tokyo, as well as some of these classic like Chun but Samurai just kind of shoot them up with swords.

00;51;05;17 - 00;51;34;24
Rob Buscher
It's it's a great mix of all those films together, but seven of them on 35 millimeter, that'll be at the LightBox Film Center throughout the month of April. So yeah, hope that people are interested in some of the things that we talked about. If you want to listen to the podcast I mentioned earlier, it's available on Anker and Spotify pretty much anywhere that other podcasts are, and that's look towards the mountain stories from our Mountain Incarceration camp in there.

00;51;34;24 - 00;51;56;15
Rob Lee
You have it, folks, again, for Rob Butcher of the Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia, I'm Rob Lee. Saying that there's art culture and community in and around your city. You've just got to look for it.