This story aired in the May 14, 2026 episode of Crosscurrents.
Today we start with this question: What are the first sounds that come to mind when you think about war? If you happen to say music - you’re not alone.
MUSIC: Maguro Fever by Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto
Oakland musician Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto would agree. She is a beloved musician who has played music her whole life. And it’s music deeply influenced by her family’s history.
She’s the descendant of Japanese immigrants who were incarcerated during World War 2. Something she shares with students, like in this Berkeley classroom.
SHIRLEY KAZUYO MURAMOTO: My mom and her family were put in the camps. She was your age. Can you imagine? Being put in this camp, away from your house, your friends. It was a very scary time for her.
Even after nearly seven decades of performing, she still shares the songs, and histories, with anyone who wants to listen.
Click the play button above to listen.
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Story Transcript:
REPORTER: When I walk into Shirley’s studio, I come face to face with something like, 30 kotos, leaning upright against the walls.
SHIRLEY: 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30? 30. Something like that.
REPORTER: The instruments, 13 stringed Japanese zithers, stand taller than me.
I just love seeing you amongst all them. It kind of feels like you're standing amongst friends.
SHIRLEY: Yeah. That's nice of you to say it like that. I feel like I'm in the forest. [laughs] They're all trees. Right. [laughs] [singing] I talk to the trees, but they don't listen to me. [laughs]
REPORTER: Of the 30-something instruments, she reaches for some more often than others.
MUSIC: Coming Home Baby played by Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto
SHIRLEY: I'm a weird person. I do think that, you know, uh, an instrument has to be played to, you know, develop the sound that's the soul in it.
REPORTER: People send her kotos they’ve found in family storage, tucked away and untouched for decades. She points to one that she’s more wary of.
SHIRLEY: It's got a sad personality, so I don't know if I wanna play it. It's been 80 years, right?
REPORTER: It’s been more than 80 years, now, since the federal government incarcerated 126,000 Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during World War 2. But Shirley’s committed to holding onto these instruments, because of the stories they tell.
SHIRLEY: So, you know, couple generations they forget about that history, especially if they don't hear about it.
REPORTER: And the stakes are high. If we’re not taught history, we’re bound to forget it. And what happens when we do?
SHIRLEY: We've already sort of forgotten. They're putting people, you know, they're putting them in warehouses. They're shipping them out of the States. You know, I can't believe this is happening.
REPORTER: Japanese Americans like Shirley have made an explicit connection between what’s happening now with immigrant detention centers and deportations and their community’s history of incarceration during World War 2.
SHIRLEY: A lot of the survivors have been going out and saying. We don't want this to happen again. Never again. Never again. We keep saying every year, never again. And, and then here it happens again. Right. And in fact, they're trying to erase that history.
REPORTER: But here in the Bay Area, Shirley’s doing all she can to help us remember.
SEIJI ODA: Talk, talk Shirley!
Sounds of Shirley playing the koto.
REPORTER: Shirley has lived in Oakland her whole life.
MUSIC: Shirley on the koto in OMCA
REPORTER: Onstage at a performance at the Oakland Museum of California, she plays her koto with grace, ease, and style. It’s sunny out. Music drifts out over families and elders sprawled all across the lawn. Shirley’s here to accompany a performance and guided meditation by Oakland’s own Seiji Oda, a rapper and producer.
MUSIC: Seiji rapping in OMCA
REPORTER: Shirley’s koto’s melodies complement Seiji’s self-proclaimed lofi hyphy style. I have one of those moments where I think: only in the Bay.
SHIRLEY: This is my city, this is my place…I feel like there’s maybe something in the water that’s really artistic.
REPORTER: When Seiji invited her to play this gig, Shirley doubted his judgement.
SHIRLEY: I’m 70 now, so I told him, Don’t you want a younger person? [laughs] Right? My son is maybe better than me. And he goes, Oh no, I like the intergenerational vibe right now. And I’m going ok, fine.
SEIJI: Shirley Muramoto on the koto! Make some noise! [applause]
REPORTER: Over the years, she’s been asked to work on all kinds of projects, with all kinds of people. They’d say:
SHIRLEY: We wanna try a koto in Ethiopian music, or we wanna try the koto in gospel, or bluegrass.
REPORTER: She was surprised how harmonious the music was. Like similar scales, and sounds.
MUSIC: Coming Home Baby
REPORTER: What Shirley’s done is not common. Definitely not for musicians of her generation. Koto playing can have pretty strict standards. Players typically have to stick to the styles of the schools they learned in. And, it’s an instrument that traditionally only women have played. But Shirley broke many of the old school rules she was raised on – she plays jazz and pop music on her koto, and has even taught her son how to play.
All of this to the disdain of her mother, who was her first koto teacher.
SHIRLEY: When I started having my own ideas about music, I think she didn’t like that part of it.
REPORTER: Shirley challenged her.
MUSIC: Aoi Blues by Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto, Brian Wong, and Alex Baum
SHIRLEY: Well, why can’t I play rhythm and blues? She almost made it sound sacrilegious to do that kind of stuff. She would say to me, “You don’t play koto like a Japanese person.”
REPORTER: Because she was playing it like a Japanese American person. Shirley was coming of age as a person, and as a musician, with the Civil Rights Movement as a backdrop.
In the 70s, she was a student at Oakland High, where she would eventually become chair of the Asian Students Alliance. As Shirley and her friends began uncovering their collective history, she realized there was more she didn’t know about her own family’s story.
Her mom was a koto musician and her dad ran a Japanese grocery business. They nurtured their children’s Japanese heritage. But they barely mentioned their experience incarcerated in camps during the war. When Shirley asked how her mom learned how to play the koto, her mom just replied, “in camp.” Shirley remembers thinking:
SHIRLEY: Wow, you could learn koto in the summer camp?
REPORTER: Older generations weren’t ready to talk about it yet. US history books didn’t either. Even in the 1970s, Shirley says she could count the number of books about the Japanese incarceration camps on a single hand. Then one year, she brought one of the books she did find to Thanksgiving.
SHIRLEY: My grandfather's like going, you know, oh, what is that you're reading? And they said, it's a book about…Camps. Right. You know, do you know anything about this? And, and he's, and he, you know, starts talking about camp, right. And my grandmother and my mother, my aunt were like, oh my God, he's talking about it. You know? And, um, so that was the first time anybody was talking about it in the family.
REPORTER: Like other Japanese people in the Bay Area, they were held at the Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno. Then they were moved to Topaz prison camp in Utah. Her mother was only nine years old.
SHIRLEY: A lot of times you think, kids that young don’t understand, but they do.
MUSIC: Summertime by Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto
REPORTER: In the camps, families did their best to create a sense of normal life within detention. They organized craft classes, talent shows, and sports teams. Couples had weddings, and babies were born.
Some younger incarcerees, who had already integrated into American culture before being detained, embraced Western music. They formed bands and played jazz and swing. Ballroom dancing was popular, too.
Others leaned into Japanese traditional arts, learning dances like ondo and performing kabuki plays. Some kids, like Shirley’s mom, took classes to learn how to play the koto and shamisen.
Some people brought their instruments to camp, or had them sent in. Sometimes instruments arrived with missing parts. So they had to get creative.
SHIRLEY: My mom had got a koto finally no strings, no bridges, so they used raffia for the strings…
REPORTER: …and her grandfather got creative carving bridges. She still has one.
Sounds of shuffling around a drawer.
SHIRLEY: Too much junk in here. Where did it go?
REPORTER: She pulls out a triangular wooden bridge that fits in the palm of her hand. A top piece juts upwards with a groove down the middle, meant to hold a string. The groove is made out of green plastic, which Shirley’s grandfather fashioned out of a toothbrush.
Sounds of paper unwrapping.
SHIRLEY: Isn’t that funky?
REPORTER: They also had to improvise with materials for finger picks, usually made of ivory.
SHIRLEY: They made the finger picks out of cow bones, or chicken bones.
REPORTER: She tells me, camp authorities realized they could ease anxieties, and prevent unrest by allowing incarcerees to play music. Some music, especially American music, was even sponsored by the War Relocation Authority, to prove that this detention of Japanese Americans was humane. Despite being forcibly removed, relocated, and incarcerated. So they let people play. But not without close inspection and direction.
SHIRLEY: They had to examine his music.
REPORTER: She’s just pulled out a sturdy and very dusty case. On the far right of the box, in neat white handwriting reads Mr. Kizuka Tokushige. Then an address, in Bismarck, North Dakota. Where the Fort Lincoln prison camp was located. On the upper left, we see that the box was sent from Watsonville, California where Mr. Kizuka was an apple farmer before he was incarcerated.
Inside the box is a carefully wrapped shakuhachi, a bamboo flute. Tucked into the top is a stack of cardstock. They’re sheets of music. When I look closely, I see faded purple stamps.
SHIRLEY: Can you read it?
REPORTER: Detained. Alien. Enemy. Mail.
SHIRLEY: Yep.
REPORTER: Examined.
SHIRLEY: Yep. Yep. It's just music.
MUSIC: Maboroshi o Oute by Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto
REPORTER: Authorities even scrutinized his sheet music.
SHIRLEY: If some people practiced Japanese traditional arts, some people did see that as not being American.
REPORTER: Some people did practice Japanese traditional arts in protest of their incarceration. Especially at the camp in Tule Lake in far Northern California.
In 1943, the War Relocation Authority made adult incarcerees at all camps answer a loyalty questionnaire. Those who answered “no” and “no” to two specific questions were deemed disloyal and were segregated from the rest, sent to Tule Lake prison camp. They got the moniker, “no-no’s.” Shirley’s family members answered no and no. So they spent the rest of the war incarcerated at Tule Lake.
Because of its population of no-no’s, Tule Lake became a camp known for protest.
SHIRLEY: These were the people that protested. That’s the American thing to do, you know, protest what’s not right. So I admire the people in Tule Lake, actually.
REPORTER: In her 2014 documentary Hidden Legacy, Shirley interviewed survivors who learned Japanese traditional arts in the camps. She still shows the movie, and often pairs it with a performance.
MUSIC: SFPL Performance
REPORTER: Here’s Shirley, playing alongside her son, during a screening at the San Francisco Public Library. She plays songs that incarcerees once played in the camps.
Shirley says there is positivity in this music. That her own elders emphasized the essential role the music played in camp. She says, one told her:
SHIRLEY: I don’t know why you sansei’s keep talking about politics. We survived. We lived through it. And we came out right? We lived and we survived because we did this, we played music, we danced, we sang.
REPORTER: The koto she’s playing at the library once belonged to Tama Nakata, who played it while detained at Topaz. After the war, Tama and her husband, who she met in camp, moved to Berkeley. But Shirley tells me that Tama’s husband refused to let her play the koto ever again.
He told Tama:
SHIRLEY: We are not gonna speak in Japanese. We are going to assimilate into American culture. And that was for the protection of his family.
REPORTER: Tama’s son unearthed the koto many years later. He asked Shirley to be its caretaker.
SHIRLEY: He grew up with absolutely no Japanese culture.
REPORTER: Because his family had buried that culture, for their survival.
SHIRLEY: But he made us a Japanese style dinner himself. And, you know, his house was full of Japanese things. And I thought, oh my goodness. He bought the culture back into his life because maybe he missed it, right?
MUSIC: Sentimental Journey by Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto
REPORTER: The youngest survivors of the camps are passing on, like many of the musicians Shirley interviewed. But their stories live on. And I only get to learn their history today, because someone, Shirley, felt it was important to remember, and share.
