Omoiyari: A Song Film by Kishi Bashi (2022 | US / Japan | 93 minutes | Kaoru Ishibashi & Justin Smith)
The tragedy of Word War II was destructive in so many ways both big and small. The loss of life, the loss of innocence, but most importantly the loss of humanity. Fear does funny things to us as individuals, but it’s chaos when it hits the masses. Fear and it’s vice-like grip on our sanity is the only logical explanation for some of the most heinous crimes we enacted against our own people. It has been over 6 decades since Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 allowing the Secretary of War to restrict access to any part of our country by Americans that he saw as a threat. The long and short of it: they rounded up any Asian Americans they wanted, proof of danger or not, and put them in militarized zones from which they could not leave.
Omoiyari is a Japanese word that means to have sympathy and compassion towards another person. This is not only the title of Japanese-American musician Kaoru Ishibashi’s (known professionally as Kishi Bashi) film, but the very soul and purpose of it. We travel with Ishibashi around the United States as he embarks on a path of discovery both of his roots and the two worlds he’s torn between: culture and country. Those two aspects are not in opposition, but his entire life he’s kept them separate and at times hidden; now he’s finding a way to bring them together.
Growing up in a rural white neighborhood with immigrant parents, he did his best to blend in and assimilate; something that whittled away at his family’s traditions and his own identity. To breathe life into the parts of himself he’d been neglecting for so long. This film finds him on a journey, instrument in hand, plumbing the depths of his people’s history in the United States to discover what this nation did to people just like him for no other reason than they looked like “the enemy”. That’s generational pain and it doesn’t just go away despite being swept under the rug with little-to-no reparation. While he may not have experienced the trauma himself, going to the physical sites where interment camps had once dominated the land, the destruction was palpable. Performing songs that both honored the people kept there and revealed the horrific injustice that took place seemed a kind of catharsis for him and the viewers. Something he not only wanted to share, but needed to. I’m grateful he held these events up to the light and built a piece of artwork around it to make sure we don’t forget, to keep the conversation alive. The music is beautiful, as his work always is, but coming from such a personal place it felt even more powerful.
Omoiyari: A Song Film by Kishi Bashi premiered in person on March 14 and virtually on March 15 at SXSW Film 2022. Be sure to check out all the SXSW 2022 Sunbreak Coverage