Barbara Sellers-Young’s “Generational Divides: The Iemoto System in America” takes what might seem, at first glance, a narrowly local subject—the history of Portland’s Fujinami-kai, a school of Nihon buyō—and shows it to be a condensed history of migration, exclusion, incarceration, pedagogy, and intercultural remaking in the United States. The paper’s real subject is not simply a dance school, nor even Japanese American cultural preservation in any straightforward sense. It is the way a traditional artistic institution, the iemoto system, becomes a vehicle through which different generations inhabit Japan differently in America, and through which bodily discipline becomes a medium of social memory, resistance, and new subject formation.
The argument unfolds through a historically layered community portrait. Sellers-Young begins with the 2007 fiftieth-anniversary celebration of Fujinami-kai at Portland’s Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, but the commemorative occasion is quickly enlarged. The school’s history, she suggests, is “symbolic” of “the over hundred-year history of Japanese Americans in the Pacific Northwest.” In this framing, the dance school is not a decorative adjunct to community life. Its history is “integrat[ed]” into the life of Portland’s Japanese American community, into the city’s artistic culture, and into an “ongoing relationship with the Fujima school of Japan.” What is traced, then, is an “artistic and political discourse between Japan and the United States,” with the iemoto system as one of its most durable and revealing forms.
That phrase—artistic and political discourse—is characteristic. Sellers-Young does not treat artistic transmission as a private or purely aesthetic matter. Dance lineage is already political because it organizes belonging, authority, legitimacy, and continuity under conditions not of cultural ease but of racialized precariousness. In her broader work, technique is never neutral; it forms consciousness and social relation. Here that principle is given a sharply historical inflection. The iemoto system is not merely an inherited administrative structure from Japan. In Oregon, it becomes a way of maintaining dignity and connection when Japanese immigrants are denied citizenship, barred from land ownership, subjected to immigration restriction, and later uprooted through wartime incarceration. The system’s “organizational structure and ethics of loyalty,” as Sellers-Young puts it, create “a direct link to Japan.” The point is double-edged. That link offers continuity and legitimacy, but it also means that buyō communities in the United States are tied vertically to Japan rather than horizontally to one another. The institution preserves artistic depth through exclusivity, hierarchy, and familial allegiance.
House, lineage, and the politics of transmission
Sellers-Young is careful to describe the iemoto system in social rather than abstract terms. The school is structured “similar to a Japanese family,” centered on the inherited authority of the house head, while other members stand in relations resembling those of siblings and mentors. Students study within one school only; to do otherwise would be “disloyal.” The explanatory force of this description lies in its refusal to detach pedagogy from social form. To learn buyō is to be inserted into an ethical and relational order. One is taught not only repertory, but how to belong.
That matters especially in the immigrant generation. The Issei brought with them not just arts—buyō, ikebana, haiku—but modes of association through which a community under pressure could sustain itself. Portland’s prewar Nihonmachi appears in the paper not as picturesque ethnic enclave but as infrastructure: a center for labor, business, social life, and cultural continuity. Sellers-Young’s account of anti-Japanese law and violence is brisk but decisive. Japanese immigrants, unlike many European immigrants, were “not allowed to become citizens”; Oregon’s Alien Land Bill prohibited them from owning or leasing land; the 1924 Immigration Act effectively barred further immigration. To preserve a link to Japan under such conditions was not a matter of sentimentality. It was one of the few available means of preserving collective legitimacy.
Yet the essay does not romanticize the system it describes. The iemoto order works because loyalty is personal, exclusive, and inherited. It offers family, but it is a disciplined family. Sellers-Young’s longstanding interest in the consciousness-forming power of technique appears here as an interest in institution as embodied ethic. The house system transmits not only dances but obedience, attentiveness, and a sense of one’s place within a lineage. In diaspora, such forms can sustain life; they can also mark cultural separateness in a hostile nation-state. Sellers-Young does not force this tension into overt polemic. She allows it to remain visible in the structure of the account itself.
Camp arts and the bodily making of Japanese America
The paper’s most acute historical intervention comes with its treatment of the Nisei, and especially of buyō in the wartime incarceration camps. Sellers-Young turns here to the language of gaman, “endur[ing] the situation with dignity and grace,” but she avoids reducing camp arts to uplift. Instead she asks what, exactly, dance offered those who encountered it there. The answer is neither simple heritage recovery nor nationalist allegiance. It is a complex embodied encounter with beauty, historical distance, and self-making under duress.
Patsy Abe, a Nisei who first learned dance at Minidoka, becomes the paper’s central figure for this generation. What Patsy remembers is not doctrine, not ideology, not even first of all Japan as such, but the sensuous event of the form: the “beautiful costumes with wigs and pretty fan.” She “fell in love with the form as it made [her] feel connected with something good when life was very difficult.” Sellers-Young’s reading of this sentence is subtle and exacting. Patsy is not simply inheriting “the Issei’s nostalgia for home related to Japan.” The phrase that follows matters more: “it was her home as Japanese American.” The distinction is crucial. Buyō in camp does not transport the student back to an originary Japan. It produces, under the conditions of state confinement, a different relation to Japanese-ness—one that belongs neither to the parent generation’s memory nor to the American state’s coercive demand for absolute assimilation.
This is where Sellers-Young’s larger intellectual commitments come into focus. She has long argued that performance is a social technology for managing what cannot be settled discursively. In the camps, buyō became such a technology. It gave students access to an aesthetic order and a bodily discipline when civic belonging had been shattered. But its effect depended not simply on “culture” in the broad sense; it depended on the exact structure of the form. Students learned an image of Japan through Tokugawa-period stories and through a codified vocabulary of mai, odori, and furi. They learned not generic “Japanese tradition” but a stylized bodily archive.
Sellers-Young lingers productively over the consequences of this archive. Students inhabited onnagata and tachiyaku, idealized feminine and masculine modes; they learned stock figures—samurai, priests, daughters, older women, servants—from a premodern social order remote from both camp life and modern American experience. The phrase she uses is arresting: students were “learning performative identities for which they had no contemporary referent.” In one sense this marks distance, even estrangement. In another, it identifies the very power of the form. The dance offers not immediate self-recognition but a repertoire of embodied possibilities through which a self under pressure may be reconfigured.
The camps were a place where “Japan and America were over-determined identities,” as Nisei negotiated their parents’ memories of Japan alongside the Japanese American Citizens League’s encouragement to prove they were “110 % American.” Under those conditions, to study buyō was to occupy a charged and unstable position. Sellers-Young’s conclusion is therefore exact without being reductive: the study of buyō could be read “as an act of self definition and resistance to pressures of assimilation as well as an act of physical empowerment.” Physical empowerment here does not mean modern individualist liberation. It means the recovery of agency through stylized action, through inhabiting a body otherwise subject to confinement, surveillance, and humiliation. Patsy’s phrase—“just felt good”—is left in place not as naïve testimony but as evidence of embodied knowledge preceding explanation.
Kanriye Fujima and the transmission of personhood
If the camp scene reveals buyō as a resource for survival and self-definition, the section on Kanriye Fujima shows how such transmission is sustained after the war: through a teacher whose authority is at once historical, pedagogical, and transnational. Sellers-Young’s portrait of Kanriye Fujima is concise but richly telling. Born Hidekko Fujita in 1923, trained from childhood in the traditional master-student system, licensed to teach in the 1940s, and later transplanted to Oregon through marriage, Kanriye embodies continuity with Japan at the level of practice itself. Her monthly travel to teach in Portland, Spokane, and Ontario renders lineage laborious and physical; continuity is maintained through repeated bodily presence.
The pedagogical description is one of the strongest passages in the paper because it shows Sellers-Young thinking from the inside of technique. Kanriye’s interactions with students “closely resemble the non-verbal approach practiced in Japan in which the student is expected to diligently concentrate on copying the body of the teacher.” She demonstrates phrases; the student follows; kata are not broken into analytic components; correction comes through demonstration, occasional physical adjustment, and small cueing gestures. The relationship remains “warm but formal.” It is a classic Sellers-Young move to insist that this method teaches much more than movement accuracy. Through it, students acquire “stillness, concentration, attention to detail, complete engagement in the moment, respect for authority and duty to one’s community.”
This is one of the paper’s central claims, and one of its most characteristic contributions to dance studies: a training system transmits a mode of personhood. The lesson is not a neutral container for repertory. It produces ways of attending, ways of sensing, ways of standing in relation to authority, community, and silence. Sellers-Young invokes Edward Hall’s notion of “high context” culture to name the communicative environment in which nonverbal cueing and relational inference matter. But the paper’s deeper claim is somatic. A student in this system learns to perceive implicitly, to dwell in concentrated imitation, to inhabit formal restraint without requiring constant verbal explanation. This is not simply “Japanese style” as a cultural label; it is a discipline of embodied consciousness.
The significance of this claim within Sellers-Young’s career is considerable. Her work repeatedly opposes the assumption that technique is a transferable set of skills detached from worldview. Here, as elsewhere, she shows that pedagogy itself is cultural formation. The iemoto system survives in America not merely because dances are passed on, but because a teacher like Kanriye Fujima transmits an ethic of learning that exceeds the dance.
The Sansei problem: not preservation but negotiation
The paper becomes most conceptually ambitious in its discussion of the Sansei, where the question is no longer how to preserve a world from elsewhere, but how to live across incompatible or at least non-coincident worlds. Sellers-Young’s key example, Diana Hinatsu, allows her to move from institutional history to the microphysics of intercultural embodiment. Diana began studying with Kanriye at seven. As a child, Sellers-Young notes, her “American” and “Japanese” selves remained in separate spheres. The crisis came when she was asked to perform buyō at a school function. In kimono, before her peers, she suddenly became publicly different. What had been compartmentalized became visible and uncomfortable.
Sellers-Young refuses to sentimentalize this moment as multicultural enrichment. It is a scene of embarrassment and dissonance. Diana might have quit had it not been for the authority of her mother and, more deeply, her affective loyalty to Kanriye Fujima. Here again the iemoto relation matters. It is not an abstract tradition but an intimate structure of obligation and attachment that can carry a student through conflict. The teacher-student bond becomes the hinge through which cultural discomfort is not erased but endured and transformed.
What follows is especially important because Sellers-Young does not narrate Diana’s later study of modern dance as liberation from traditional hierarchy, nor as a movement from ethnic heritage into universal art. Diana studied with Janet Towner, entered Portland’s modern dance community, and became a natori in 1992. Yet modern dance and buyō are not presented as opposite choices. Diana does not abandon one bodily system for another. She synthesizes them through a mode of internal processing that Sellers-Young renders with unusual precision.
Internalization to externalization
The phrase Diana gives for her own process—“internalization to externalization”—is the conceptual fulcrum of the paper. As a child, she found buyō’s teaching format, Japanese terminology, and narrative structures confusing because she lacked immediate referents for them in her American life. To learn the dances, she built an imaginal pathway. In a children’s dance such as Kami Ningyo, she created a sequence of sensory images corresponding to the movement vocabulary. These images did not derive straightforwardly from an inherited Japanese symbolic world. They came largely from “her Portland home, neighborhood, and the actual experience of the lesson.” She did not memorize the Japanese names of kata; she attached each phrase to a kinesthetic image integrated into a story.
Sellers-Young’s language here is revealing. These images are “kinesthetic categories,” later “kinesthetic metaphor[s],” sensory structures that join “aural and visual—music and movement experience.” They are not linguistic labels. Nor are they simply private fantasies. They are embodied means of organizing perception and memory when one cultural code does not yet fully map onto one’s lived sensorium. The reliance on Lakoff and Johnson underscores the point: categorization is formed through embodiment; it is “the stuff of experience.” Diana’s categories arise out of the bodily labor of making Japanese form intelligible through an American childhood.
This is an exemplary instance of Sellers-Young’s resistance to simplistic notions of hybridity. The interesting thing is not that Diana is “between cultures” in some generalized way. It is that she develops a highly specific somatic logic in response to a pedagogical problem. Her body learns to translate not by verbal equivalence but by sensory structuring. Later she applies the same process to modern dance, replacing a more overtly Western analytic vocabulary—turnout, spinal alignment, spatial intention—with an internal monologue of images. The consequence is not a collapse of difference between forms. Rather, buyō becomes the generative ground for a personal method of performance across forms.
Sellers-Young is especially alert to the invisibility of this process. Audiences do not see the internal image-work; they see its effects and describe her dancing as “fully realized” and “perceptually integrated.” This is a sophisticated observation. Performance often appears as finished coherence; what disappears from view is the intercultural labor by which coherence has been bodily composed. The paper restores that labor to visibility.
Reparations, title, and historical condensation
One detail in Diana’s story condenses the paper’s historical intelligence with unusual force: the natori fee was paid in part with reparations money Diana’s mother received from the United States government for wartime internment. Sellers-Young does not overstate the symbolic power of this fact, but it scarcely needs embellishment. State redress for racialized confinement is converted into recognition within a Japanese artistic lineage in America. The continuity of the iemoto system in Portland is thus materially sustained by the afterlife of incarceration. Tradition survives not outside history but through history’s most violent entanglements.
This detail also clarifies the paper’s refusal of static heritage discourse. Buyō in America is not preserved in a sealed cultural chamber. It is remade through legal exclusion, state violence, marriage migration, intergenerational conflict, and eventual redress. The iemoto system may appear ancient and stable, but in diaspora its endurance depends on adaptation, affective loyalty, and very modern political histories.
Yonsei, expanded family, and the widening of Nikkei identity
The final section, on “Yonsei and Beyond,” extends the argument into a multicultural present. Sellers-Young opens and closes with the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center’s phrasing: “Our present Nikkei population is richly diverse. Our new sense of community is a delightful blend of many different cultures and races. As always, the Japanese sense of family remains strong—the definition has just been expanded.” This quotation is not merely celebratory framing. It names a transformation in the social basis of the dance school. Following civil rights-era changes, increased intermarriage, and expanding Oregon-Japan corporate relations, Fujinami-kai comes to include children of cross-cultural marriages, corporate sojourners from Japan, and non-Japanese students such as Larry Kominz.
What interests Sellers-Young is not simply demographic change but the altered meaning of the practice under those conditions. For students without Japanese ancestry, buyō no longer functions as inherited ethnic memory. Instead it offers “kinesthetic skills such as concentration, stillness” and related capacities “useful” even in the “low context culture of the United States.” The point is not that these skills become generic or deracinated. Rather, they are now available across lines of descent, while still being shaped by Japanese pedagogy, lineage, and communal history.
This is a delicate argument, and Sellers-Young handles it with restraint. She does not claim that the opening of the form to non-Japanese students dissolves questions of cultural specificity or historical ownership. Nor does she retreat into ethnic essentialism. What emerges instead is an expanded understanding of Nikkei “family” and an accompanying expansion of who may enter into the discipline of buyō. The house system remains; its social meaning broadens. In this sense, the paper anticipates Sellers-Young’s later, more developed formulations of intercultural embodiment: forms travel through bodies that do not share the same histories, but the form does not therefore become empty. It continues to shape subjectivity through its own demands.
Tradition as invention under pressure
The paper’s concluding claim is that traditional dance forms in diaspora can become “a site of resistance,” “a site of synthesis,” or “an opportunity to develop new somatic understandings.” This tripartite formulation is more than a neat typology. It is a compressed theory of how embodied traditions live historically.
For the Issei, buyō helped recreate a Japan-centered world under conditions of exclusion. For the Nisei, and especially in camp, it became a way to maintain dignity, craft identity, and resist enforced assimilation. For the Sansei, it generated the problem and possibility of bodily negotiation across cultural worlds. For Yonsei and non-Japanese students, it became a discipline of attention and a mode of participation in an expanded Nikkei community. Across these shifts, the iemoto system preserves continuity, but what continuity consists in is itself transformed. Sellers-Young’s language of “intertwining” is apt: the result is not dilution of tradition but the emergence of “new modes of inter-cultural practice and subjective identity.”
The phrase “subjective identity” matters. Sellers-Young has long been interested in how bodily practices form the self—not the abstract liberal self of declared beliefs, but the performed, sensed, and culturally patterned self. Diana Hinatsu’s example shows that identity does not resolve itself primarily at the level of ideology. It is worked out through repetition, imagination, proprioception, breath, and the slow construction of internal correspondences between discrepant worlds. The iemoto system in America is therefore not only a structure of heritage transmission; it is a machine for making selves under pressure.
The paper also challenges an assumption that often shadows discussions of traditional arts in diaspora: that they persist chiefly as nostalgic survivals or as symbolic markers of ethnic authenticity. Sellers-Young demonstrates instead that the form’s vitality lies in its capacity to mediate changing historical demands. It can preserve a connection to Japan, but that connection is never merely reproductive. It is re-authored by people whose relation to Japan is shaped by racism in the United States, by wartime incarceration, by mixed ancestry, by local artistic practice, and by the sensorium of American childhood. The body does not passively carry tradition; it remakes tradition in order to carry it.
Within Sellers-Young’s own intellectual trajectory, “Generational Divides” occupies an important place. It stands at the intersection of her work on Japanese performance, somatic pedagogy, intercultural transmission, and reflexive attention to how technique forms consciousness. One can see here, in concentrated form, several of her enduring commitments: that dance must be read with its event-context; that pedagogy is never just pedagogy but a social ethics; that intercultural exchange is productive precisely because it exposes the labor of translation; and that the moving body is where history becomes knowable in ways neither purely textual nor merely symbolic.
The essay’s lasting strength is its refusal of both celebratory multiculturalism and authenticity policing. It does not romanticize the iemoto system, but neither does it dismiss hierarchy as mere residue. It does not treat buyō in America as unbroken Japanese continuity, but neither does it reduce diasporic transformation to loss. Instead, Sellers-Young shows how a traditional form persists by becoming a living site where exclusion, loyalty, imagination, discipline, and desire are held in motion together. In that sense, Portland’s Fujinami-kai is not simply an example of Japanese dance abroad. It is a record of how communities make inhabitable futures through inherited forms, and of how those forms, once transplanted, begin to generate new bodily ways of being American, Japanese American, and something more intricately intercultural than either term alone can name.
Reflect with VABS