Barbara Sellers-Young’s essay on Nihon buyō in the United States begins from a distinction that, in the abstract, can seem almost self-evident: art may look backward in nostalgia, or it may produce a hybrid “newness” adequate to the complex in-between conditions of diasporic modernity. What gives the article its force is that it refuses to let this distinction remain abstract. Once dance is taken seriously as a corporeal practice—as something transmitted “via the body of one person to the body of another”—the conceptual neatness begins to fray. Sellers-Young’s intervention is not simply to argue that diasporic traditional forms can also be innovative. More precisely, she shows that in dance the very process of repetition is transformative, because the repeated form must pass through different bodies, biographies, institutions, cultural pressures, and imaginal resources. A tradition carried abroad is not only remembered; it is lived anew under altered conditions of embodiment.
The essay’s opening scene from Wakako Yamauchi’s And the Soul Shall Dance is therefore strategically chosen. Emiko’s performance of Japanese dance figures longing, a momentary withdrawal from immigrant hardship into memory and dream. Sellers-Young accepts this as one genuine function of traditional dance. “One function of traditional or classical dance forms,” she writes, “is as a powerful metaphor for the past, a site of memory.” But she refuses the reduction that would make this function exhaustive. Bhabha’s distinction between “nostalgia” and “newness” depends, in her account, on an insufficiently embodied notion of how forms travel. It assumes that a traditional form, especially when displaced from its original national context, remains essentially a representational artifact: a picture of the past, perhaps politically conservative insofar as it “denies the present.” Sellers-Young’s correction is not polemical so much as methodological. It insists that dance cannot be theorized only from the level of image or discourse. One must ask what happens in lessons, in repetition, in muscular adjustment, in sensory attention, in the transmission of gesture, posture, and comportment. Her phrase for what Bhabha misses is exact: “the logic of practice.”
That phrase names a larger commitment visible across Sellers-Young’s work: the conviction that movement is not simply expressive of identity but constitutive of it. In this essay, that conviction appears in a particularly clear form. Nihon buyō becomes the exemplary case through which she can challenge the opposition between preservation and invention. What appears from the audience’s side as the preservation of “Japaneseness” may, from the dancer’s side, be a difficult and inventive labor of bodily mediation. The essay thus shifts attention from the visible traditionalism of costume, festival setting, and codified role to the less visible processes through which dancers make the form inhabitable.
A tradition already made through change
One of the article’s most important moves comes early, in the brief history it gives of Nihon buyō itself. This is no antiquarian preface. Sellers-Young needs to establish that the form entering the United States was never a pure residue of a static past. Derived from kabuki yet reshaped in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by reformist and modernizing impulses, buyō already bears the marks of adaptation. Tsubouchi Shōyō’s project of revision, drawing kabuki technique into relation with Western opera and “a modern temperament,” Fujikage Shizue’s choreography inspired by Western musical forms, and Ichikawa Ennosuke II’s efforts to unite Japanese and Western dance and music for the kabuki stage—all this matters because it unsettles the fantasy of a pristine classical inheritance. Tradition is shown to be historical rather than timeless, reformist as well as preservative.
This historical framing also clarifies a second point central to the essay: buyō had long since become a medium of social formation, especially for girls and women. Middle-class families sent daughters to study it not merely for artistic polish but to cultivate sesshin, “concentration and internal strength,” and an ability to cope with “the demands and realities of everyday life.” The article is attentive here to the gendered cultural work of the form. Before it became a diasporic practice in American settings, buyō was already a disciplined pedagogy of comportment, perception, endurance, and self-fashioning. In other words, what migrates is not only a repertory but a mode of bodily education.
This point is crucial because it enables Sellers-Young to avoid two common simplifications at once. On the one hand, buyō is not treated as a folkloric token of ethnicity, detachable from the pedagogic structures that give it force. On the other hand, it is not romanticized as a transhistorical essence of Japanese culture. It is a historically produced, institutionally organized, embodied discipline whose social function changes with location. That doubleness—historically dynamic yet institutionally conservative—makes it especially productive for thinking diaspora.
Buyō in Japanese American communities: memory, beauty, resistance
When Sellers-Young turns to Japanese American contexts, the article deepens considerably. Buyō teachers, many of them immigrant women, established dance groups on the West Coast before and after the Second World War. In this setting the form continued to serve as “a woman’s ‘cultural education,’” but with altered stakes. For nisei students, it transmitted Japanese stories, aesthetics, and an image of historical Japan, particularly the Tokugawa world so often encoded in its roles and repertory. Yet in the context of wartime incarceration and the violent overdetermination of “Japan” and “America,” such transmission could not remain innocent.
The discussion of Patsy Abe is especially telling. Abe first encountered buyō at Minidoka. What remains in memory is not ideology but sensuous detail: “beautiful costumes with wigs and pretty fans.” She “fell in love with the form as it made me feel connected with something good when life was very difficult.” Sellers-Young’s reading of this recollection is finely judged. She does not sentimentalize it as simple refuge, nor collapse it into ethnic loyalty. Instead she sees the study of dance under incarceration as a bodily negotiation between coercive assimilation and cultural retention. Abe may have been learning to embody “the issei’s nostalgia for home,” but she was doing so in a setting where the meanings of Japaneseness and Americanness were under duress, indeed weaponized by the state and by intra-community demands to prove loyalty. Under those conditions, to learn buyō was not merely to remember. It was “an act of self-definition and resistance to pressures of assimilation.”
This reading shows Sellers-Young at her best: attentive to historical violence, but equally alert to the sensory and affective life of practice. Beauty is not trivial here. The experience of fans, wigs, fabrics, and gesture matters because it gives form to a threatened self. Dance “felt good,” and that feeling is treated not as private escapism but as part of the politics of embodied survival. Such an argument anticipates later strands in Sellers-Young’s scholarship, especially her insistence that bodily pleasure or transformation must be read in relation to larger structures of representation and power without being dismissed as merely ideological. In this article, that balance is already present.
What students learn: not steps, but embodied social worlds
The essay’s central claim that dance transforms meaning through bodily transmission depends on a detailed account of what buyō pedagogy actually imparts. Sellers-Young is careful to describe the movement vocabulary—mai, odori, furi—but she quickly moves beyond technical taxonomy. What students acquire are not simply movement units but role structures and sensibilities. They learn female and male characterizations, onnagata and tachiyaku, and within these broad categories a range of stock Tokugawa social figures: samurai, geisha, priests, daughters, servants, older women. They learn how bodily focus alters with character: the outward orientation of idealized masculinity, the inward orientation of idealized femininity. They learn to shift quickly among these codified modes.
This training matters because it makes visible Sellers-Young’s larger proposition that dance shapes subjectivity by shaping bodily attention. Borrowing Cynthia Bull’s formulation, she notes dance’s power “to shape the practices, beliefs and ideas of people’s lives.” In the context of buyō, this means that Japanese American students are not only learning about a distant cultural past. They are incorporating an embodied repertoire of social differences and gendered comportments. The article is particularly strong in showing how theatrical stylization can become everyday somatic resource. The old anthropological temptation would have been to treat the dances as symbolic representations of Japanese culture. Sellers-Young instead shows how repeated training in posture, tempo, gesture, and role-switching forms the body as a site of cultural memory and disposition.
Yet this very pedagogy creates a problem in the United States, where “Japaneseness” is mediated through popular stereotypes. The essay’s discussion of the geisha trope—circulating through films, books, television, and orientalist fantasy—is not extensive, but it is sufficient to establish the pressure under which students learn. They must reconcile buyō’s disciplined ethos with American images of the Japanese woman as “super-feminized exotic object.” Just as importantly, they must reconcile buyō with the bodily norms of American schools and other dance forms. Sellers-Young names this with a memorable phrase: “body bilingualism.” The term is apt because it relocates identity conflict from ideology to corporeal habit. Japanese American dancers do not simply hold two identities in thought; they move between bodily systems, each with its own assumptions about space, sociality, gender, and expressivity.
This is one of the essay’s most durable insights. It makes clear that diaspora is not only a matter of double consciousness at the level of self-description. It is lived kinesthetically. The body must learn to code-switch.
The iemoto system and the paradox of continuity
The essay’s treatment of the iemoto system is equally important, because it refuses an easy opposition between institutional conservatism and lived innovation. Sellers-Young explains the system as a familial structure of artistic authority and loyalty: a school organized around inherited lineage, with strong teacher-student ties and an ethics of singular affiliation. In the United States, where communities may have only one teacher representing one school, this structure provides legitimacy, continuity, and a direct link to Japan. Students can rise to Natori status, receiving a professional name that incorporates them ritually into the lineage.
Here again the essay is interested in how institutional form becomes embodied and personal. When Diana Hinatsu receives the name Fujima Kanchie, the naming joins school lineage and family memory, linking the Kanemon branch of the Fujima school with an echo of her issei grandmother’s name. The iemoto system is not presented merely as hierarchical bureaucracy. It is an affective and symbolic structure through which diaspora sustains authority and belonging. At the same time, Sellers-Young is attentive to the system’s pragmatic flexibility. The authority of lineage does not prevent adaptation; rather, it provides the frame within which adaptation can be authorized.
This is where the article complicates assumptions about “tradition” most effectively. If one looks only at the iemoto structure—loyalty, inherited names, direct ties to Japan—one might conclude that buyō abroad can only reproduce the past. But Sellers-Young shows that the system’s very reliance on direct teacher-student transmission allows for subtle but consequential variation. There is no contradiction, in her account, between lineage and change. The body is the medium through which continuity is secured, and because bodies differ, continuity is never simple replication.
Dark knowledge and embodied assimilation
The section on pedagogy and consciousness gives the article much of its theoretical density. Sellers-Young invokes Zeami’s ideal student—one who assimilates the teacher’s art “into his mind and body”—to situate buyō training in a Japanese tradition of disciplined imitation. Repetition here is not rote copying but a psychophysical practice that gradually dissolves the gap between external form and lived action. To illuminate this process she turns to Yasuo Yuasa’s distinction between “bright” and “dark” consciousness. Bright consciousness names explicit, conscious awareness; dark consciousness indicates a deeper bodily level analogous to autonomic functioning, where what has been learned through repeated practice becomes naturalized and readily expressible.
This vocabulary allows Sellers-Young to articulate something central to her larger body of work: training does not simply deposit information in the mind. It reorganizes the lived body. The student first learns movements consciously, as difficult and perhaps resistant forms. Over time, however, “the movements and the associated cultural knowledge and aesthetic” become ingrained at a deeper level. One does not forget what one has learned through the body. The result is not merely technical proficiency but “an embodied understanding of Japan and a set of somatic skills associated with enhanced levels of body/mind integration.”
That formulation is characteristic. Sellers-Young is drawn to practices in which technique is also a pedagogy of consciousness. But she is too historically alert to universalize this process into generic self-help. In the context of buyō in the United States, the assimilation of form into “dark” knowledge is not simply the attainment of harmony. It takes place within intercultural tension. Bodily mastery means carrying Japaneseness in an American environment that may exoticize, ignore, or compartmentalize it. Thus even the deepest somatic integration remains socially fraught.
Three teachers, three adaptations
The portraits of Fujima Kanriye, Fujima Nishiki, and Hanayagi Jutemai give the article its ethnographic grain. Sellers-Young uses them not as colorful examples but as evidence that the same inherited system yields distinct pedagogic strategies in response to different biographies and communities.
Kanriye, trained in Hiroshima and invited to Oregon in 1957, teaches one-on-one across generations. Her lessons are notably nonverbal. She demonstrates short phrases, expects concentrated imitation, occasionally adjusts the student physically, and ultimately watches in near silence once the dance has been learned. The ethos here is formal yet warm, and the aim extends beyond dance: she teaches “somatic skills to live life gracefully”—focus, attention to detail, silence, playfulness, acceptance. The lesson becomes a mode of character formation as much as repertory transmission.
Nishiki, based in New York and linked to kabuki and international theatre networks, works in group classes. Collective practice structures the lesson, though repetition and mimesis remain central. Verbal correction appears more readily in later stages, but analysis still yields to reiterated doing. Her pedagogy reflects a more cosmopolitan, perhaps more institutionally mixed setting, without abandoning the assumptions of the lineage model.
Jutemai, a nisei teacher in Sacramento, offers the clearest instance of explicit adaptation. “American students have a different approach to learning,” she says, and her method adjusts accordingly. She slows difficult passages, breaks phrases into smaller units, supplies verbal prompts—“lead with the chest,” “drop the weight”—and adds music only after movement is secure. This is not a renunciation of mimesis but a modified mimesis, translated for another pedagogic culture.
Sellers-Young’s point is not merely that teachers differ. It is that direct transmission contains within it the capacity for situated response. The article’s most resonant formulation of this principle is the advice given to Kanriye on coming to the United States: “let America be your teacher.” The phrase crystallizes the essay’s whole argument. Diasporic tradition is neither stubborn replication nor simple assimilation. It is an art of listening to changed conditions without severing lineage. America becomes “teacher” not by replacing Japan but by forcing pedagogic and cultural adjustment. This is precisely where “newness” emerges: not at the level of avant-garde surface, but within the slow recalibration of embodied transmission.
Diana Hinatsu and the making of a new performer’s body
The essay’s most compelling figure is Diana Hinatsu, through whom Sellers-Young demonstrates most fully what corporeal “newness” means. Diana’s own testimony gives the article an inward axis. “Dance is a way of life,” she says; “it is a fire that burns in me.” More strikingly, dance brings her to “that moment of clarity when I am aware of all that surrounds me, and all that is within me—that moment I feel I know who I am.” This is not the language of heritage display. It is the language of identity as embodied practice.
Diana’s story unfolds through tension. As a sansei student of Kanriye from childhood, she had long inhabited separate Japanese and American worlds without needing to reconcile them explicitly. The crisis came when she performed buyō at school. Standing in kimono before non-Japanese peers, she felt acutely different and deeply uncomfortable. Sellers-Young links this moment to the broader Japanese American difficulty, articulated by Traise Yamamoto and Monica Sone, of being asked to choose between “Yankee” and “Japanese” selves. The school performance forces that impossible choice into visibility.
What keeps Diana dancing is revealing: not abstract fidelity to tradition but the combined force of maternal authority and loyalty to her teacher, cultivated through years of individual lessons. The iemoto structure here appears less as ideological discipline than as relational attachment. Dance persists because a social bond has already sedimented in the body.
The essay becomes most original, however, when it turns to Diana’s way of learning. As a child she often did not know Japanese and had no direct referent for the dances’ narratives. To make sense of them, she invented stories and images. “I created images and stories to the music,” she recalls, partly from what Kanriye told her, partly from “my own imagination.” These were not merely explanatory devices. They became the very means by which she organized movement. In dances such as Kami Ningyo, she did not memorize formal terminology; she built a system of kinesthetic metaphors, sensory images tied to music, gesture, breath, and affect. These images drew less on any inherited Japan than on her own Portland environment, neighborhood, and lesson experience.
This is the article’s decisive evidence against the reduction of diasporic buyō to nostalgia. Diana cannot simply remember a homeland she never lived. Nor does she merely perform an externally given Japanese script. She creates an internal image system adequate to the demands of the form. Sellers-Young’s interpretation here brings together several strands of her broader intellectual project. Howard Gardner’s bodily-kinesthetic intelligence helps characterize Diana’s mode of processing; Lakoff and Johnson’s account of categorization as embodied grounds the claim that these sensory images are not supplementary but constitutive of experience; Yuasa explains how such categorizations sink into the body’s “dark” level. The result is what Sellers-Young calls Diana’s “performer’s body,” a set of skills and knowledges projected outward in performance but formed inwardly through imaginative bodily labor.
The phrase Diana uses for this process—“internalization to externalization”—is especially suggestive. It describes not only a learning strategy but a model of intercultural embodiment. The performer receives an inherited form, internalizes it through personally generated somatic imagery, and externalizes it again as a visible performance that may appear fully traditional to the audience. Yet what the audience sees as continuity is underwritten by a hidden synthesis. Performance is “fully realized” or “perceptually integrated” not because it transparently reproduces Japan, but because the dancer has created an internal coherence between inherited vocabulary and lived American experience.
Sellers-Young’s handling of this example is subtle in another respect. She does not celebrate Diana’s synthesis as a triumphal resolution of bicultural identity. Even after becoming a Natori, Diana remains uncertain what that status means for her life. She wants the professionalism and recognition the designation affords, but she does not know whether she wants to teach or make buyō the organizing center of her existence “the way her teacher does.” Her mother’s use of wartime reparations money to pay the substantial Natori fee intensifies rather than resolves the historical complexity. Redress for internment underwrites deeper incorporation into a Japanese artistic lineage in America. Past injustice, cultural continuity, and future uncertainty converge in a single embodied decision.
This refusal of closure is one of the article’s strengths. Identity remains, as Sellers-Young suggests via Dorinne Kondo, positional and shifting. Diana’s life is “a constant negotiation between separate dance communities.” The newness generated by buyō is therefore not a stable hybrid identity one can simply name and celebrate. It is an ongoing mode of negotiation, a bodily capacity to inhabit multiple worlds without reducing them to sameness.
From representation to practice
By the end of the essay, Sellers-Young has effectively displaced the terms in which diaspora performance is often judged. Public presentations of buyō at O’bon or Cherry Blossom festivals can easily be read as heritage display. Newspaper photographs of kimono-clad teachers and children seem to confirm nostalgia: visual continuity, intergenerational transmission, a legible ethnic image for both internal community affirmation and external consumption. Sellers-Young does not deny this representational function. Indeed, she notes that festival performance nourishes “an internalized experience of ethnic identity” while also providing an image of Japaneseness to non-Japanese audiences.
What she insists upon is that representation is not the whole story. The child in kimono may, from the audience’s perspective, signify preservation; from the child’s perspective, however, learning may involve confusion, improvisatory sense-making, divided loyalties, embodied problem-solving, and the development of an utterly personal sensory logic. The article’s concluding claim follows directly: “what may appear from the standpoint of the audience as ‘nostalgia’ has the potential from the corporeal standpoint of the performer to be ‘newness.’” That sentence crystallizes the essay’s distinctive contribution. It relocates innovation from visible formal novelty to the less visible realm of embodied subject formation.
This is why the essay matters within Sellers-Young’s larger career. It marks a clear development from studying dance as social event-context toward a more explicit account of bodily transmission and somatic consciousness, yet without relinquishing history, gender, community, or power. The article stands at an important juncture in her thinking. It anticipates later arguments that technique forms consciousness, that intercultural exchange is mediated through learned bodily systems, and that reflexive attention to training processes can reveal dimensions of cultural negotiation that remain invisible in textual or representational analysis alone. One can also see here an early version of what would become a recurrent Sellers-Young theme: the insufficiency of judging intercultural performance from the standpoint of surface appearance, whether the issue is Orientalism, hybridity, authenticity, or tradition.
At the same time, the article preserves tensions that her later work would continue to value rather than dissolve. Buyō in America can indeed be nostalgic, especially for first-generation immigrants or in communal settings that explicitly stage memory. It can also be disciplinary, gendered, conservative, and vulnerable to exoticizing consumption. Sellers-Young does not pretend otherwise. But she demonstrates that none of these descriptions can exhaust the practice because they fail to account for what happens when inherited forms are actually learned. The body is where preservation becomes reinvention, where lineage becomes experiment, where cultural authority meets subjective necessity.
The essay’s final significance lies in this methodological lesson. To study performance in diasporic or intercultural conditions one must ask not only what a form signifies, but how it is transmitted, by whom, through what institutions, under what historical pressure, and with what consequences for those who inhabit it. Sellers-Young’s answer, developed through Nihon buyō in the United States, is that traditional dance forms are neither merely relics nor automatically radical hybrids. They are sites where memory, resistance, pedagogy, and invention are woven together in practice. If “newness” emerges here, it does so not by discarding the past but by incorporating it so deeply that it becomes the material of a present still in the making.
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