How a Japanese American Dance Party Subculture of the '60s and '70s Fostered a Sense of Belonging
From the mid-'60s to late '70s every Japanese American young adult in L.A. knew exactly what they were doing on any given weekend. They would round up a group of friends and attend one of several dance parties happening across the city, dancing and mingling to live music from cover bands playing the greatest hits of the day.
"Going to the dances was like arriving on the red carpet at the Grammys or the Oscars," recalls Harry Manaka, a third-generation Japanese American (sansei) who had recently published, "Chronicles of a Sansei Rocker" — a book he wrote and self-published during lockdown in 2020, detailing his experiences during the sansei dance era. Manaka frequented these dances in the late ‘60s through the ‘70s and performed regularly as the keyboardist for the band Somethin' Else. "I mean, the ultimate in chicness was to be able to pull up in a fancy muscle car — a [Pontiac] GTO, Chevelle SS 396, Dodge Hemi, something like that."
Dancing, live music, muscle cars. This was the Japanese American sansei dance scene era — a dance party subculture of the mid-'60s and '70s.
One to two generations removed from World War II, young Japanese Americans were rebuilding community in various parts of Los Angeles post-internment and sought spaces to celebrate and take pride in their identity when exclusion and discrimination were still present in the daily lives of sansei. Mary Uyematsu Kao, a sansei who regularly attended dances, and her older sister grew up in Sierra Madre, an area she described as "lily white" at the time. She cites the isolating feeling in Sierra Madre as one of the things that drew them out to sansei dances.
"My sister and I were kind of starving for seeing more Japanese American guys," Uyematsu Kao remembers, "Especially for my sister who was more at a dating age. White guys...they just wouldn't date her. And so, definitely, the exclusion was felt."
Dance, Dance, Dance
Uyematsu Kao was a 9th grader in junior high when she attended her first dance, dazzled and enchanted with the opportunity to tag along with her older sister, Amy, and her friends — all of whom were seniors in high school at the time. Coincidentally, Uyematsu Kao's date to her first dance was Manaka, who was going to dances as an attendee rather than a performer in his earlier years. Upon entering the venue, one of the first things that caught Uyematsu Kao's eye was the dimly lit dance hall and the tall, flamboyant hairstyles donned by most young men in the crowd.
"When I first went into the Rodger Young [Auditorium], it was dark, but you could just see in the shadows these pompadour profiles," Uyeda laughs through the gargled audio of a Zoom call, reminiscing about her first dance some fifty to sixty years ago.
On the dance floor, attendees could try their hand at some dance moves popularized by some of the top charting musicians of the day. Betty Uyeda, who frequently attended dances in the '70s, remembers waiting near the dance floor, sipping a Tom Collins with her girls until they were asked to the floor. "We stood around and we waited for a guy to ask us to dance," Uyeda says. "You know, being a young person, there's this need to see and be seen."
Dance fads like the "Mashed Potato," the "Hully Gully," the "Pony" and the "Jerk," as well as more timeless moves like the cha-cha and the twist would have crowds moving in sync under the thick smell of hairspray that blanketed the dance hall.
The Rodger Young Auditorium was one of the more popular dance venues of the Japanese American sansei dance era, challenged in popularity only by the Parkview Women's Club. The auditorium, located at the heart of downtown L.A. where the 10 and 110 freeways meet, could hold up to 500 partygoers in their main ballroom and could squeeze an additional 200 more in their auxiliary dance hall.
However, Manaka notes that capacities were easily and frequently surpassed at dance venues, particularly at Parkview Women's Club.
"Most of the dances held [at Parkview Women's Club] were in violation of the local fire code and occupancy limits. Usually there was an overflow of people extending into the adjacent courtyard," Manaka recalls in his book.
At a time before social media existed as a platform to spread word, information about the dances' location, time and headlining bands were spread by word of mouth, the social calendar of the Rafu Shimpo, flyers and bids — tickets, about the size of a business card, sold up to a week in advance or at the door.
Uyematsu Kao often got word of dances after flipping to the social calendar in the Rafu Shimpo — a long-running Japanese-English newspaper based in Little Tokyo. "All you need is a couple of people to know, and then it spreads," said Uyematsu Kao, who also writes for the publication today.
Other popular venues of the time were the Aeronautical Institute, the Surfrider Inn, Elk's Club, Blarney's Castle, Lococo's and the Gung Hay Restaurant. Today, the Rodger Young Auditorium is now defunct, its spacious halls since used for a revolving door of businesses through the years, the most recent being an escape room.
Breaking the Musical Color Barrier
Live music was perhaps one of the biggest draws for crowds every weekend, the era giving birth to a slew of local bands brimming with Japanese American and Asian American musicians. For many partygoers, the presence of Asian Americans on stage performing elicited a great sense of pride and fulfilled the lack of Asian American representation in mainstream media and culture.
"You only had like a handful of Asians you could see in media," Uyeda says. "So, we would go to a dance and be proud that all those musicians were primarily Asian. Where else were we going to get that?"
From the late '60s and throughout the '70s, Manaka was the keyboardist for Somethin' Else, lugging a 425-pound Hammond B3 electric organ to various dance halls every weekend. The band primarily performed covers of popular songs from artists in the likes of Chicago, Earth Wind and Fire and the Doobie Brothers.
Manaka had always been interested in music, taking piano lessons in his youth. But he preferred the top hits over Chopin.
"I would always get into shouting matches with my teacher, because she wanted me to play classical music. And I wanted to play rock and roll," Manaka chuckles. "Bless her heart, she was a big influence on me, just in terms of teaching me technique and teaching me how to play the piano. But we had some all-out battles over the kind of music that I wanted to play."
Other bands of the day included The Prophets, Carry On, Thee Chozen Few, Free Flight, Brown Rice, Long Time Comin', Beaudry Express, The New Trend, Winfield Summit, Small Fry, Fresh Air and, of course, Hiroshima — a band from the era that reached commercial and artistic success, earning two Grammy nominations throughout their career.
Although Hiroshima as a fully realized band wasn't involved in the sansei dance scene, the band's leader Dan Kuramoto and his brother performed at a handful of dances with obscure art school garage bands, changing their group's name at every gig.
Admittedly, Kuramoto confesses that he and the art school bands he performed with didn't "fit in" to the dance scene. As an artist, Kuramoto was more interested in creating original music rather than covering the top hits, experimenting to find a new sound and at one point even performing a song that was nearly 15 minutes long.
"We did the first concert at Rodger Young, where people didn't dance. They sat down on the floor and they listened to the concert," Kuramoto recalls. "I didn't even know what we were doing there. But I wanted to play there because I wanted to sort of call it to the attention of our own community and our own peers that, you know, this is another option. But I didn't want to ruin the dance for anybody."
Throughout Kuramoto's years in art school at Cal State Long Beach, he and his peers would dream about creating art that resonated and properly represented Asian Americans.
"We're thinking, 'Man it would be so cool if we had a voice for ourselves," Kuramoto says, "Because the only images we ever saw of any Asian was some kind of weird stereotype."
This drive to forge a new sound came to fruition years later when he met June Kuramoto, a koto player, solidifying the sound for Hiroshima, blending traditional Japanese instruments like the shakuhachi, koto and taiko with a Western jazz and R&B sound Kuramoto grew up listening to in East L.A. "My whole point was that we're going to try to do songs that created a voice for us," Kuramoto says.
While Hiroshima was relatively removed from the dance scene, Kuramoto admires and recognizes the importance of the dances for Japanese American youth at the time.
"I thought that at least [the dances] were one way, particularly for JAs to retain contact," Kuramoto says. "Because the way the diaspora was affected, was that, you know, Japanese Americans were held in prison camps throughout the war. And when they got out then the diaspora was scattered."
While dances were predominantly attended by Japanese American youth, the parties certainly weren't exclusive to sansei either. Groups of Chinese American, Korean American and Filipino American young adults were frequent partygoers as well as a sizable Black population, in part due to strong ties between Japanese American and Black communities in the Crenshaw area.
Dances held in the earlier years were more frequently headlined by bands from East L.A., one of the more popular projects being Thee Midniters — a Chicano rock band considered to be one of the best acts to come out of East L.A. at the time and among the first to openly sing about Chicano themes and issues.
Manaka remembers Thee Midniters' notable popularity among Japanese American sansei, likening their performances at the Parkview Women's Club to "the second coming of the Beatles."
"The bands kind of broke that color barrier or the racial barriers, and I always felt that that was one of the benefits that came out of the dances," Manaka says.
When the Party's Over
Outside the doors of the dance venues was a world facing a long overdue reckoning, with social justice movements gaining momentum in L.A. and across the country. And as the Asian American movement picked up speed and became more and more prominent in the social consciousness, a handful of partygoers shifted from the dance scene and attended parties less frequently. "There were definitely a lot of people that started getting more energized by what was happening with the movement and basically left the scene, the dancing," Uyematsu Kao said.
A handful of sansei would go on to be active participants in the Asian American movement, like Uyematsu Kao who documented the Asian American movement as a student activist and photographer and Kuramoto who helped establish Asian American studies at Cal State Long Beach.
Moreover, the Vietnam War loomed over the generation like a dark and ever-present shadow.
"One of the subtexts of the whole dance scene was, on the side, people will whisper 'Well, you know, this guy or that guy's been sent off to Vietnam,'" Uyematsu Kao says. "So that was really our first introduction to what was happening in Vietnam. These guys are gone. And a lot of them never came back."
A Place at the Table
Today, through the pixelated haze of a Zoom window, Kuramoto, now well in his 70s, briefly darts his eyes to something out of frame. In a string of apologies, he asks to be excused for a second before quickly sliding out of the camera view. From the kitchen, his disembodied voice tells me he's preparing mochiko chicken for his family — namely his two grandkids who are now three and six — cooking in bulk to cover their meals for a week.
Kuramoto is calling from his Monterey Park home, resting on a one-week break from touring with Hiroshima, a tour which the group had announced earlier this year would most likely be their last. His memories of the sansei dance scene are hazy, partly due to the fact that he only attended a handful and partly because of the decades that have passed. There aren't any vibrant stories that are burned into his memory, but there's one thing about the dances that stuck out to him.
"It was always extraordinary to see all these Asian people together at one time," Kuramoto says. "I was just amazed that you could get so many people to congregate. And they would do it every weekend."
When we stood together, we had a place at the table and were a force to be reckoned with.Harry Manaka, author of "Chronicles of a Sansei Rocker"
For Manaka, his sansei rocker days have long passed, with Somethin' Else dissolving in the late '70s. But his memories remain strong and are cemented in his book, "Chronicles of a Sansei Rocker," a 219-page Bible to the sansei dance scene era. Manaka will be joined by a panel of former "sansei rockers" Tina Fujino, Gerald Ishibashi and David Honjo for the "Sansei Rocker Symposium," a free event organized by the Japanese American National Museum in partnership with Manaka on July 30.
"I wouldn't trade my experience in the sansei dance party era for anything in the world," Manaka writes. "When we stood together, we had a place at the table and were a force to be reckoned with."
