Norman Kaneshiro

Author: Hatsuho Kinjo

1. Who are you? What is your connection with Okinawan Studies at UHM?

I am the grandson of Okinawan immigrants from Saki Motobu on my father’s side and Henza and Takahara on my mother’s side. I was born in and nourished by the valley of Mānoa in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi where I still reside. I graduated from Theodore Roosevelt High School in Mākiki, then completed a BA in Ethnic Studies from UH Mānoa in 2001, and am currently working on a MA in applied Cultural Anthropology at UHM (in 2025). I have been on staff at the University of Hawaiʻi Press since 2003, while also serving as the instructor for the UHM Ethnomusicology Program’s Okinawan Ensemble class (MUS311F) from the same year. 

I am also a student of the late classical uta-sanshin master Harry Seisho Nakasone and have been certified as a shihan or master of the Nomura style of classical Okinawan music since 2007. I currently serve as chapter President of the Nomura-ryū Ongaku Kyō Kai Hawaii Shibu, the worldwide organization dedicated to preserving the Nomura school. In 1999, I co-founded Ukwanshin Kabudan, a non-profit organization that is committed to perpetuating Ryukyuan ancestral knowledges and identities through the performing, fine, and cultural arts and continue to serve as co-director and musical director. In addition to teaching at UHM, I also teach uta-sanshin in the community in Honolulu, Maui, and Hawaiʻi Island as well as internationally online. I perform extensively across the state and have had the honor of doing many collaborations with other artists both within and outside the worldwide Ryukyuan community. Above all, however, I feel my main role is as a space-maker and translator for sharing and divulging our ancestral knowledges among our worldwide Ryukyuan-heritage communities, as well as with other outside communities.

2. What is your connection with Okinawan Studies at UHM?

Thanks to the immense foresight and vision of the late Dr. Barbara Smith, both Okinawan music and Okinawan dance were established as for-credit classes at UHM in the early 1960s. My teacher, Harry Seisho Nakasone, was hired in 1966 to teach the already established Okinawan Ensemble class. After almost four decades of teaching classical uta-sanshin at UHM, Nakasone-sensei retired from his post and asked me to take the reins in 2003. Thanks to Dr. Smith, Seiko Ikehara, my sensei’s predecessor, and Nakasone-sensei, UHM has been one of the only educational institutions in the world outside of Okinawa that has offered classical uta-sanshin steadily as part of its curriculum. I am the proud inheritor of this legacy and continue to offer Okinawan Ensemble as a window into various aspects of Okinawan Studies and an opportunity for students to experience alternative methods of learning.

3. Is there any resource held by UHM you want to recommend to the student who wants to study about Okinawa?

I actually view Okinawan music and all Ryukyuan performing and cultural arts as vital resources from our intellectual heritage. Thus, I feel our offerings of Okinawan music and dance at UHM are invaluable resources for both scholars and the community at large. The music in particular is multi-dimensional in that it encompasses not only the musical practice, but a litany of other disciplines and areas of study. There is literature in the poetry of the songs and in the layered stories behind the lyrics. Understanding not only the origins of our musical traditions, but also the full context of the songs and the times from which they came requires at least a rudimentary understanding of Ryukyuan history. We do a bit of linguistic study in the use and preservation of language as well as examining the pronunciation of the words and their orthography. Because of the wide breadth of subjects covered in our songs, we must have at least a working knowledge of various other Ryukyuan arts, cultural traditions, folklore, and even geography. And, of course, we have cultural practices embedded in the manner and posturing in performance, our etiquette between teachers, students, and other artists, as well as in the ways we share the art with others. I encourage all scholars of Ryukyuan and Okinawan studies to engage in our arts to gain a deeper understanding of the cultural contexts and worldviews of the areas they are studying.

It is unfortunate, however, that the university does not place the same value on our ethnic music and dance classes, relegating them to only 1 credit while other “academic” classes are offered for 3 credits.

4. When and how did you start practicing traditional Okinawan Art?

From as far back as I can remember, our mother always reminded us that we were full blooded Okinawans and to be proud of that fact. However, my mother’s declaration of “Okinawanness” was more based on not being Japanese more than on an affirmation of values or cultural practices. Our family had no ties to any Okinawan communities and we did not grow up with the kinds of foods, pictures, and stories that many of my local Okinawan friends enjoyed as kids. In a way, having grandparents who were born in Okinawa made me feel a need to fill this gap with my heritage more intensely. So, I sought out Okinawan performing arts classes with no intention or desire to perform or teach, but simply to get some footing in an Okinawan knowledge community. I had no confidence in music, so I started learning dance from Yoshino Majikina when I was about 11. I only mustered up the courage to start learning classical uta-sanshin a couple of years later and I chose Harry Seisho Nakasone as an instructor solely because he was the only master instructor fluent in English at the time. Although I continued learning dance from Majikina-sensei for about ten years, I ended up gravitating toward the music and went on to get certification as an instructor not long after I started college, even spending a year in Okinawa to learn from masters there.

Being both a learner and a performer allowed me to meet people who were very passionate about Okinawan culture and its preservation. However, my particular experience also showed me the importance of creating spaces for people to access our ancestral knowledges and facilitate closer connections to heritage. My background has shown me the importance of not just preserving or practicing our culture and arts, but to explore what practicing them as an indigenous Okinawan means and looks like.

5. How do you see the connection between Okinawan dance and Sanshin, and other traditional arts?

The sanshin is said to represent the world between the heavens and the earth, and the strings, the people who occupy that space. As the sanshin is the main companion to our songs, that metaphor places the value of uta-sanshin (song and sanshin) as a vehicle for capturing and sharing our collective experiences, thoughts, and feelings. Those impressions and reactions to the world and the people around us have been traditionally relegated to localized community spaces. Therefore, the songs that come from these communities are based on local relationships to land, customs, language, and folklore. In other words, place and the relationships of those people in place are all built in to the songs. And like inside jokes, familiarity and knowledge of these places and their people make a difference in the depth of connection to and understanding of these songs.

In my own experience and understanding, Okinawan dance is a kinetic interpretation of the songs we sing. In other words, they are an additional layer of interpretive expression to our songs. So by extension, dances are the visual expression of the stories of the place they come from. Not only do they interpret the songs of that place, but the ways of moving also distinguish themselves from one place to another.

While other traditional Okinawan arts are not necessarily entwined the same way song and dance are, I feel the common thread that ties them all together is the sense of place and community. While practical issues such as materials or even climate play a role, the stories and identity of these communities in place define a kind of thematic esthetic across all arts. In general, the individual connection to place and community is so strong, even an attempt at creative expression still tends to tie the individual back to where they are from. In speaking with practitioners of other arts, it seems we all speak the same language in the ways that our very different mediums and forms of expression tie back to a sense of place. In that respect, both traditional visual and performance “artists” are perhaps collectively better defined as cultural practitioners. 

6. How do those traditional arts impact the form of Uchinanchu identity?

In my own experience, Okinawan music and dance were gateways to exploring my heritage and identity. In a time before the internet and in the scarcity of English-language materials on Okinawa, performing arts seemed the most accessible means to learning about where my ancestors came from. If culture is the way a people understand and exist in the places and communities they come from, then the arts are the attempt of the current generation to highlight, even augment, the soul of that culture and share that with future generations. Performing arts are especially powerful in this respect because they play multiple roles in a community. Not only are they made to stir memories and impressions in an audience, but they also challenge the performer to interpret their culture in real time. Furthermore, teaching and learning the arts themselves is both a cultural act as much as it is a window into the knowledges embedded in that culture. The portability of culture through performance is an immense privilege that comes with a heavy responsibility.

In my journey to relocate my roots and reposition my heritage into my identity, the arts were the love letters and manuals I needed from previous generations. But, I have come to realize that these relics and treasures left to us are not meant to be simply preserved and frozen in time. Rather, they were meant to help us to continue to exist and thrive as a people in continually changing environments, climates, and relationships. They are references and guides that are meant to be examined throughly to hear and see what our ancestors wanted to tell us about life and the world and provide a template for the current generation to not only flourish off of that wisdom, but participate in its persistence. The arts are especially affective and are immensely deep carriers of insights into who we are as a people. Without those time capsules from our ancestors, how do we truly define ourselves as indigenous people? And more importantly, how do we persist collectively as an indigenous community without knowing and feeling our ancestors? The arts not only provide meaningful insights to these questions, but also a means of seeking those questions in the significance of our own lives.