Accentuating the positive

San Francisco

Shortly after the second act of the musical revue “The Camp Dance” began, a cast member announced, “We are proud to present to you today the Songbird of Manzanar, Mary Kageyama Nomura.”

From the wing, Mary Nomura swept onstage in a silky gray-and-white ensemble with a colorful samurai painted on the front. The more than 400 Japanese Americans who filled the folding chairs and lined the walls of the gymnasium at the Buddhist Church of San Francisco seemed taken aback.

This was not one of the young cast members who’d been simulating life in the Japanese American internment camps during World War II. This was a willowy, elegant woman in her 80th year, clearly a second-generation citizen, a Nisei, like many in the audience.

The pianist struck three chords. “Gather ‘round me, everybody,” intoned Nomura in a satiny contralto as dark as ink. “Gather ‘round me while I’m preachin’.”

When she launched into the lilting chorus of the Harold Arlen-Johnny Mercer song “Accentuate the Positive,” the elderly in the audience began tapping feet and drumming fingers. They seemed transported to the days when the joy of being young trumped the humiliation and deprivation of the World War II-era Japanese American internment camps, including Manzanar, where Nomura was a heralded singer as a teenager.

As Nomura finished the song, the audience responded with a wave of applause, squeals and whistles.

“Oh, very talented,” enthused Isao Tanaka, a 78-year-old retired photographer and former resident of Tule Lake camp as he pounded his hands together. “And her voice is still so nice too.”

The cast of “The Camp Dance” ably performs the songs, dances and embarrassments of a vanished generation of young people living under vanished conditions in vanished camps. Nomura brings to the production a concrete historical presence, as well as the ability to swing an old tune the way it was meant to be swung.

“There’s something about living the life experience that’s in her voice,” said Soji Kashiwagi, the 41-year-old writer and producer of the show. “I don’t know if I can describe it, but it’s there, a feeling of really knowing what these words mean. ‘Accentuate the Positive’ is really what the show is about. It’s how my parents’ and grandparents’ generations survived the camp.”

Well known among Los Angeles Nisei -- she frequently has performed at Manzanar reunions -- Nomura was the logical candidate to infuse the show with extra authenticity. When organizers approached her about singing, she readily agreed.

A world upended

Nomura is an agile and breezily self-effacing woman who sometimes laughingly refers to herself as “the Old Crow of Manzanar.” The mother of five and grandmother of 12 lives in a sunny Huntington Beach apartment where the melodic twitter of a caged yellow canary rides the air.

Her mother, Machi Kageyama, was a musician and music teacher. As a child, Nomura would listen in on the lessons she gave and mimic her students. By age 4 she was performing traditional Japanese opera at the old Koyasan Buddhist Temple on Central Avenue and San Pedro Street.

“People in the audience were so enthralled to see someone that little singing these songs,” she recalled. “They were crying and throwing money on stage.”

From then on, Nomura was a confirmed ham, eventually winning school talent shows and nursing a dream to become a popular singer like those she heard on the radio.

She was picked, at age 12, to be the only child performer in a troupe of Japanese Americans who entertained U.S. servicemen on the West Coast. She soloed in Little Tokyo’s Nisei Week Talent Shows in 1940 and 1941, enhancing her reputation.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor upended Nomura’s world, but by the time she and her three siblings arrived at Manzanar in 1942 (her parents had died years before), she was known among the 11,000 internees. She was frequently called on to sing at weddings, funerals and dances. Her talent and readiness to perform earned her the nickname “the Songbird of Manzanar,” a sobriquet she’s still a little embarrassed by.

“People really raved about her because she had an entirely different type of voice from everybody else,” said 79-year-old Archie Miyatake, a Los Angeles photographer who was a teenager at Manzanar. “Everybody looked forward to listening to her sing. Being stuck in the middle of the desert and still having a person like her to entertain us was wonderful. Our morale was kind of on the down side, and she really gave us a lift.”

Bruce Kaji, the founding president of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles and erstwhile trumpet player in the Manzanar dance band, the Jive Bombers, said the camp’s music teacher, Lewis Frizzell, wrote songs for Nomura and nursed her professional aspirations.

“But at that time Orientals weren’t favored,” he said, “so it was kind of impossible for her to break into show business.”

‘Nothing bitter’

After the war, she married Shiro Nomura, whom she’d met in camp, and settled into the life of homemaker and helper at the couple’s fish market in Garden Grove. Over the years, she continued to sing at occasional Nisei events, but her husband, who died four years ago, discouraged any forays into the commercial music world.

What she might have become had she not been detoured into a internment camp is something on which Nomura wastes little thought and less emotion. Leafing through an album of photographs from her years in Manzanar, she said she felt “nothing bitter, just nostalgia.”

“I was very young. It was probably different for adults and old folks. My husband used to say, ‘You can hear the ugly parts from other people.’ In other words, ‘accentuate the positive.’ ”

According to psychologists who have studied the phenomenon, this attitude has been common among Nisei. Before the war, many lived on farms and had difficulty meeting other young Japanese Americans. In the camps they were suddenly thrown together with their ethnic and age peers in great, comforting numbers.

It was not until the U.S. government in 1986 made formal reparations of $20,000 a person to the camp internees that many Nisei were able to express darker feelings that underlay their memories, according to Satsuki Ina, a Sacramento-area psychologist who produced the PBS documentary “The Children of the Camps.”

“I’ve talked to many people now in their 80s who for years told people that camp was a blessing in disguise,” she said. “But now they admit that was just a disguise to cover up their shame. Mrs. Nomura was a teen at that time, singing to teens. She represented the escapism, the trying to laugh and enjoy your youth.”

Although its mission is primarily to entertain, “The Camp Dance” does not gloss over the heartbreak that attended the camps. For all its bounce and jubilation, a strain of seriousness as deep as Mary Nomura’s voice runs through it.

That seriousness is rooted in Japanese culture’s veneration of the elderly. The show is presented by the Grateful Crane ensemble, a nonprofit troupe dedicated, according to its mission statement, to meaningfully entertaining Japanese American seniors “in appreciation of the many sacrifices they have made so the generations that followed could live a better life in America.”

At the San Francisco performance last month, tears flowed when surviving veterans of the much-decorated all-Japanese American combat units from World War II were asked to stand, and a few elderly men in the audience self-consciously rose to be honored.

Even some cast members wiped their eyes when, in the show’s final number, “Moonlight Serenade,” Nisei who lived in the camps were invited to the front of the hall and several elderly couples swayed together to “the last dance,” a sight, like Nomura’s performance, both inspirational and melancholy.

“The Camp Dance” returns for four performances in Los Angeles July 24 and 25 at the David Henry Hwang Theater. Information is available at (323) 769-5503.