Roughly translated, the word means considering with empathy. The indie-rock musician who goes by Kishi Bashi grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, and lives in Athens, Georgia. He opens up about racism, his long journey toward embracing his Japanese American identity, and his visits to WWII internment camps, which gave birth to a new project that took his music around a fresh bend.
Story by Sayaka Matsuoka | Photographs by Sean Dunn
We go by different names.
Kaoru Ishibashi sits in his home in Athens, Georgia, as we FaceTime. His mostly black hair, dyed deep red through the tips, is fluffed ever so slightly upward. He wears a striped shirt.
“Ever since I was 13, I’ve been going by ‘K,’” Ishibashi says. “I’m sure you can relate. The ‘A’ and the ‘O’ are hard to pronounce for Americans.”
The Japanese American indie-rock musician, whose stage name is Kishi Bashi, talks about having to rework himself as a child growing up in the South to fit in with the white world around him.
“I never felt like we had a Japanese community where we grew up,” Ishibashi says. “Both Norfolk, Virginia, and Ithaca, New York, it wasn’t like an immigrant community.”
As someone who grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, in the 1990s, I can relate.
My own name, which to me seems like it would be phonetic (which it is) and thus easy for non-Japanese speakers to pronounce, I often truncate to “Say” for ease of use and to avoid awkward corrections.
In reality, Ishibashi’s first name is beautiful when vocalized fully.
KAH - OH - RU
Roughly translated, it means “fragrance,” or the impression of a scent. Ishibashi says his grandfather gave him the name, based on a character from the world’s first full-length novel, Tale of Genji, written in 11th-century Japan.
Once, years ago, my mother told me that my name, Sayaka, has a similar meaning.
Spending much of his childhood in Virginia, Ishibashi was the target of occasional taunts that “all Asian kids get:” insults about his “slanty eyes” or his “ching-chong”-sounding name.
It caused him to grow up afraid of his Asianness.
“When we’re isolated, that tends to happen,” he says.
It happened to me, too.
“I saw it as a civil-rights issue, like (an) it-could-have-been-me kind of thing,” says Ishibashi about choosing the World War II internment of Japanese Americans as a central subject for his album. “Now it’s more about racism and racism toward immigrants.” He is pictured sitting in his yard in Georgia.
Many nights as a child, growing up in a North Carolina suburb, I laid in bed, my eyes growing heavy, hoping that when I woke, my hair would be lighter, my eyes wider, my skin paler. I would be white. I would, at last, be normal.
Ishibashi nods as he listens to my experience.
“I think there are value systems in beauty that happen a lot,” he says. “Because white culture is viewed as the dominant culture. I mean, I play indie rock, which is the whitest genre of them all, but I liked it.”
Ishibashi has been thinking about race a lot. Leading up to the release of his fourth record, "Omoiyari," which came out in May 2019, the musician took it upon himself to revisit one of the most harrowing events in American history — the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.
“The initial trigger was the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor,” he says. “And then all of a sudden, in 2016, Donald Trump gets elected into office and he’s passing all of these anti-immigration policies. People were talking about the Muslim ban and how Japanese incarceration was a precedent for that.”
Ishibashi had learned in high school about the wartime imprisonment of Japanese Americans, even did a minor project on it, but didn’t fully understand the history until he started doing his own research. In the past few years, he ended up visiting several of the incarceration sites and playing and recording music there.
The resulting album is the first time the artist has actively confronted racism through his work.
Ishibashi started out as a classically trained violinist, but gradually created his own brand of music, which incorporates jazz violin with bilingual singing, guitar, and occasional beat-boxing. While he’s often labeled as an indie-rock artist, Ishibashi’s songs run the gamut from orchestral movements to whimsical tunes with pop influences. He says he grew up listening to classical music at home. His parents were both academics, and his mom played the piano as a hobby. When he was 7, he picked up the violin, which would become his signature instrument for years, and then he began studying chamber music.
“I always liked it,” he says of the violin. “I think I liked it enough to stick with it, and by the time I was in high school, I was pretty serious, but I was also a metalhead. I liked rock and roll.”
After flunking out of Cornell, where he studied electrical engineering, Ishibashi transferred to Boston’s Berklee College of Music. He immersed himself in music and began experimenting with improvisational violin and jazz.
Ishibashi long ago established his musical identity, but he says coming to terms with his dual identity in his music took more time.
“I didn’t want to be seen as a world musician,” Ishibashi says. “I was uneasy with being associated as Asian, but now, as an older person, I’m starting to understand my culture more.”
I tell him how I relate and how, for years, I lived with a self-hatred that bled into the ways I interacted with the world.
I raged against the stereotype of the meek Asian girl by being loud and sarcastic. I avoided making Asian friends. I refused to bring my mom’s bento lunches to school after being teased for being “weird.” But now, I wear my identity like a proud scout’s badge, making it known in little and large ways, from the food I eat to the organizations I support.
For Ishibashi, the acceptance came through music.
“Omoiyari” marked the first time he had chosen a Japanese word for a title, and he says the work was part of his personal growth.
“I kind of looked inward and really started to look at my identity,” he says. “‘Omoiyari’ is me really confronting these issues.”
Layering vocals and instruments in his home studio in Athens, Ishibashi says he uses the Japanese language as a percussive instrument. “If you speak Japanese, it adds an element of interest, but if you don’t, it’s like a foreign instrument, which I think is cool.”
The word omoiyari, like many Japanese words, has no direct translation into English. At best, it means something like compassion or empathy, but it’s also tied to the action of remembering and thinking of and internalizing the idea of someone to reach those feelings.
Ishibashi says his journey to self-love bred a curiosity for the history of Japanese American culture, including the internal displacement and imprisonment of thousands of Americans of Japanese descent from February 1942 until March 1946 — during and after World War II. The internments become a theme throughout the 10-track album, which mixes Ishibashi’s love of symphonic sounds with the playful beats of indie pop while also producing darker, more harrowing tracks like “Theme from Jerome (Forgotten Words)” and “Violin Tsunami.”
Like in previous albums, Ishibashi sings in Japanese during some songs, using the sounds of his first language as another musical device.
“The use of the Japanese language is something I use as a percussive instrument,” he says. “If you speak Japanese, it adds an element of interest, but if you don’t, it’s like a foreign instrument, which I think is cool.”
He mentions how he reads Japanese at about a fifth-grade level. I admit I would probably only pass a first-grade test. We’ve also been conducting our interview in English, despite being raised to speak Japanese. But Ishibashi says that’s okay.
“It’s imposter syndrome,” he says. “It’s the feeling like you’re faking a Japanese person, that you’ll get caught, but I got over it by realizing that I’m both. That I’m American, but I’m also Japanese, and I love Japanese culture.”
Besides recording music at the internment camp sites like the Jerome War Relocation Center in Arkansas, Ishibashi also collected stories and first-person accounts of people imprisoned there. Ishibashi will release a companion documentary film, with footage from his travels, this year.
“I saw it as a civil-rights issue, like (an) it-could-have-been-me kind of thing,” says Ishibashi about choosing internment as a central subject for his album. “Now it’s more about racism and racism toward immigrants.”
While he was making the film, he says he made connections between the internment of Japanese Americans to what’s happening with immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.
“It’s pretty much racially fueled incarceration,” he says.
Ishibashi also talks about how the project broadened his view of racism and how it made him reconsider the kind of racism he grew up witnessing against black Americans in the ’80s and ’90s.
“I did confront my own racism against black people,” he says. “I grew up in Norfolk. I had black friends, but I definitely remember being kind of apathetic to police brutality in the ’90s. I pretty much had a very similar attitude to what white people had back then. Like black kids getting shot, they’re probably bad, and that’s why they’re getting locked up.”
He admits that it took until fairly recently to fully understand the scope of the problem.
“I didn’t realize until Black Lives Matter how this alternate reality existed for African American men,” he said. “That’s the kind of thing I started to confront on my own.”
Visiting the internment sites left Ishibashi with mixed feelings. He says he understood that the ground under his feet carried trauma and pain for a generation of Japanese Americans, but he also felt joy and a sense of calm during his visits. “It’s hard to write songs that are all negative and sorrowful,” he says. “So, in order to inspire my own music, I had to focus on the positive impacts, like resilience.”
Now, weeks into COVID-19 lockdown, he says he sees xenophobia against Asians and Asian Americans resurfacing, as ignorant people connect the virus with China, breeding a fresh wave of hatred.
“It’s the same shit happening over again,” he says. “The ignorance, the hatred, it’s happening again. Like during World War II, there were Chinese people who wore badges that said, ‘I’m not Japanese, I’m Chinese.’ Pitting minorities against each other is something that white culture has been doing forever. But minorities should be banding together.”
Visiting the internment sites left Ishibashi with mixed feelings. He says he understood that the ground under his feet carried trauma and pain for a generation of Japanese Americans, but he also felt joy and a sense of calm during his visits.
“It’s hard to write songs that are all negative and sorrowful,” he says. “So, in order to inspire my own music, I had to focus on the positive impacts, like resilience. Then, the story became much less tragic, and that’s how I created empathy for these people.”
He says the goal of the album — all of his music, really — is to breed compassion.
“The larger part of my purpose these days is to uplift people’s lives,” he says. “I want to impact people’s lives in a positive way.”
In recent weeks, while everyone has been trapped at home, Ishibashi has been playing music on Facebook and Instagram Live to give his fans a bit of an escape.
“Music and the arts help to alleviate the daily stresses that can cause conflict or aggression,” he says. “I hope people become more compassionate by listening to my music or find love in it.”
During his first Instagram Live at the end March, Ishibashi played through Omoiyari from a couch in his living room. He wore a dark gray sweatshirt, his hair styled just so, almost like a cockatiel.
He opened with the first track on the album, “Penny Rabbit and Summer Bear,” a piece that stretches Ishibashi’s vocal cords as he slips into falsetto during the verses and the ends of the chorus. Despite the tough transitions, Ishibashi hardly missed a pitch, hitting each cascading note quickly while his deft hands plucked away at the strings of his guitar.
The song is whimsical, describing a friendship between a bear and a rabbit and evokes a sense of cheerful wonder with lyrics like: “Sunset, holding hands, salt in the air, Penny Rabbit, Summer Bear, a fairy tale, a perfect pair, none in memory could compare.”
Using an interactive interface like Facebook Live allows Ishibashi to react directly to his fans in real time and creates, in some ways, a more intimate experience than a live show in person.
“It brightens people’s day, and as an entertainer, I think that’s kind of our job,” he says. “Checking in with my fans is something that I try to do.”
Since his first session, Ishibashi has done Facebook Live shows every week, each one focused on another one of his albums. During one session in which he played through his first album — 151a — his daughter, Sola, sat quietly in the background playing No Man’s Sky, a popular open-world video game.
Ishibashi says being quarantined has given him more time to spend with his family and a break in his busy schedule of touring. He says he and Sola try to cook Japanese meals together, but it’s hard to choose recipes because Sola is picky.
Recently, they made tonkatsu — a kind of Japanese schnitzel — for dinner.
In his free time, he makes music using his signature loop pedal and his guitar. Rather than sitting down and writing a song all the way through, he describes how he collects pieces of sounds and records them on his phone, saving them for later. When it’s time to create another album, he’ll go back through all of the fragments and turn them into complete songs.
“Lyrics are almost always last,” he says. “I’ll usually start with a chord progression on guitar and just hum a melody.”
As he and his family shelter in place, Ishibashi has been playing live concerts from home and staying connected with his fans. He says the goal of the album — all of his music, really — is to breed compassion.“The larger part of my purpose these days is to uplift people’s lives,” he says. “I want to impact people’s lives in a positive way.”
Now, with his fourth album released, Ishibashi describes how his music has changed over the eight years since his debut as a solo musician.
“I think it’s become more conceptual,” he says. “In the beginning my albums were super frenetic and wild, and I’ve realized that my last album was really simple. I realized that there’s something to simplicity, which I didn’t do when I was younger because I was more trying to stand out.”
These days, he says he just tries to make music that speaks to people but also reflects how he views himself. He says being an ethnic minority in America can make individuals feel like they have almost a kind of split-personality disorder. Like you might be able to speak the language or pass through a crowd, but don’t actually feel quite whole in either space.
“Bicultural identity exists for so many minorities in this country,” he says. “And it’s difficult for white people to understand that, and it’s important. I want to open up conversations and talk about these complicated issues, to show people that America is really changing in a way that there are so many dynamics, and it’s not a white country.”
And despite the struggles he faced in childhood, Ishibashi says he feels at home in this country and in the South.
“I mean, the South is riddled with negative racism,” he says. “The legacy of the South is incredibly depressing, but you can’t let that get to you. If you’re reminded of the worst of humanity, it’s debilitating. The South is my home … you don’t choose where your home is. Home is where you end up feeling comfortable.”
Editor’s Note: an earlier version of this story mistakenly said that omoiyari is “remembering with empathy.” It is more closely translated as “considering with empathy.” Also, the section on his childhood in Virginia has been updated to say that he remembers “occasional taunts” not being the target of constant bullying.
