You’re a Tokyo native. How did you end up in Chicago? Chicago had always been one of the prime locations for things I was interested in [back then] in the ’70s. It was experimental filmmaking and experimentalism in music. The School of the Art Institute had all the famous experimental filmmakers as faculty. [And] Chicago was the origin and mecca for avant-garde music.
You teach film at the Art Institute school, but are better known as a musician. How do you describe yourself? I’m just an artist. I don’t decide myself whether I’m a filmmaker or musician. People ask me how I do all things together. Basically I’m doing only one thing, being an artist, trying to do what I can to express issues.
Your mother was a geisha, your father a filmmaker. Did they inspire you to be an artist? They did in a later part of my life. I really did not know all that stuff until my late teens. What they did is sort of plant seeds in my soul, which later became a flower. As a child, I was like everybody else. I wanted to be a pilot, a bus driver, not really thinking I’d be a performing artist.
You just performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art. How was it? It was both a musical accomplishment because of our very unique music and a social achievement-at one of the renowned places in Chicago in Asian-American Heritage Month. We were able to produce this concert with the MCA, and I think it is a really important statement.
You’ve created a family of performers with your wife and three children. To what end? My children and myself are different. I’m an immigrant. My kids are basically Asian American. I’m associated with a lot of Asian-American activist movements. What it means is I like to transmit what I brought to this country to generations to come, educating my own children as well as other children in the taiko group. I hope to give them ideas of who they are or the kind of heritage they own.
Who’s your hero? Artists must be persistent in believing in what we’re doing regardless of being rewarded or not. My avant-garde jazz master in Chicago, Fred Anderson, represents persistence. He’s 74 and well-recognized now, but it took him 40, 50 years. If you’ve seen Van Gogh and Gauguin exhibits, you realize the paintings we know are just one of 40 they painted in a week or a month. We’ve got to keep producing. Whether I’m doing something good or not is up to history. The purpose of art is to leave something to society and the world.
