Music Credits: “NY,” composed and performed by Kosta T, from the cd Soul Sand. Used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.
“Sakura” traditional, performed by June Kuramoto. “Kokora” from the album Hiroshima, composed by Dave Iwataki and performed by Hiroshima. “Taiko Song” from the album Hiroshima, composed by Dan Kuramoto and performed by Hiroshima.
Jo Reed: From the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works. I’m Josephine Reed.
You’re listening to 2024 National Heritage Fellow June Kuramoto playing the koto a traditional Japanese stringed instrument. It is played by plucking its 13 strings with picks worn on the fingers, and its movable bridges allow for intricate tuning, creating a sound that is both delicate and powerful. It’s an instrument that requires precision, artistry, and heart—qualities that have defined June Kuramoto, who has spent her life expanding what’s possible with this iconic instrument.
Born in Japan and raised in Los Angeles, June fell in love with the koto as a homesick child yearning for a connection to her heritage. She quickly became an acclaimed traditional koto player, earning advanced degrees from the prestigious Miyagi School of Koto in Japan and mastering the intricate techniques of the instrument. But she didn’t stop with traditional koto music. Instead, she forged a groundbreaking path, blending its unique sound with jazz, R&B, and contemporary music, becoming a trailblazer as both a soloist and a founding member of the Grammy-nominated band Hiroshima. June Kuramoto’s story begins with a journey—one that would shape her life and her music in profound ways. As a young child, she left Japan with her mother and siblings to settle in the United States--a transition filled with challenges and resilience.
June Kuramoto: I was about five and a half years old when we came to the United States, and it was a very difficult transition. I don't think our parents really sat us down and told us what was really going on, that we were moving to a different country. And if they did explain to us at five and a half, what's a different country, right? All we knew is we were going on a boat ride.
But I remember to the night before, I had woken up in the middle of the night because I heard my mother crying and she was crying because she was leaving her home country. So that sent me to a guarded, sad place. My mother came to America with four children from two to seven years old by herself. My mother was a Japanese citizen. But my father was an American citizen and he was in Japan when the war broke out. Now he was stuck in Japan because he wouldn't be able to find a good job in America.
Now, my father wanted us to go to America to be educated. So he wanted to be sure that we grew up in America and got good education, and that's why he sent my mother and us four kids to America. Now, my mother should have gotten an NEA award for coming to America by herself with four kids.
Jo Reed: June remembers vividly the first time she heard a koto played.
June Kuramoto: Now, my mother was fortunate to be introduced to a social welfare organization that taught, especially Japanese immigrants how to survive in America. And they taught you how to make spaghetti and tacos so that you can find ingredients here. But one of those gatherings, they had a concert day, and this Japanese woman played this Japanese instrument. It was the Koto.
And soon as I heard it, I fell in love with it. And I felt, I loved the sound, I loved the way it looked. It just captured me. And I believe it was also my connection to Japan because I was so homesick. And that was, I think, my true heart of falling in love with this instrument.
Jo Reed: The woman playing the koto was Kazuo Kudo who would become June’s first teacher or sensei
June Kuramoto: So I told my mother, I said, "Mama, I want to learn this instrument. Can I please learn?" And so my mother approached Mrs. Kazuo Kudo. She had just immigrated to Los Angeles, and she didn't have a place to teach, so my mother offered her our house. And so Kudo Sensei came to our house once a week and taught Koto there. And she even brought her three sons who were very young around our age, and we all had dinner together after she taught. And so in exchange for lessons for my two sisters and I, my teacher got to teach there.
Jo Reed: That meant not only was June taking lessons, but she was listening to the Koto constantly in her house.
June Kuramoto: I think that's where I was totally absorbed and just enraptured by the whole experience. But at the same time, my two sisters who were taking it, didn't. They quit in about a year or two. They didn't like it, but I love Koto music and the complexity. The more I learned and studied, the more complex and beautiful it is.
Jo Reed: And June was a prodigy. By her late teens, she received advanced degrees from the Miyagi School of Koto in Japan and became one of the few koto masters in America today.
(Music up)
Jo Reed: The koto with its 13 strings and 13 movable bridges can be tuned in different ways which gives it amazing range and flexibility—but also makes it a complex instrument to play.
June Kuramoto: Originally it was on a, what they call pentatonic scale, which is five note scale. But because of the 13 bridges that are movable, you can create diatonic scale. And what we used to say was the Do Re Me Fa So La Ti Do scale, or you can even tune it chromatically. So that was one of the most challenging things when I started to improvise, is finding the tuning, but also the fifth string is not always a D, it depended on what kind of tuning you used. And if you use chromatically or diatonic tuning, the intervals would be different.
Jo Reed: But as demanding and beautiful and immersive as the koto was, it wasn’t the only music June was listening to. She was raised in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Crenshaw, home to both Japanese Americans and African Americans including many Black artists, like Ray Charles, Tina Turner, and Natalie Cole. And those voices influenced June’s music as much as traditional Japanese music.
June Kuramoto: This is the 60s and it's the R&B, the Doo-wop groups, the Smokey Robinson and The Miracles, Marvin Gaye and The Temptations. And what's a Koto? My friends would call it grandma's music. But at the same time, I love the R&B music too. I love Smokey. I mean, who did not love Smokey? So then that's where I think I wanted to try to incorporate soul music or instrumentations to the Koto so that maybe my friends and my peers would also see the beauty of the instrument if it was put more in a contemporary setting and maybe with contemporary instrumentation.
Jo Reed: In fact, June wanted to adapt the R&B song Duke of Earl for the koto.
June Kuramoto: Well, this is really how old I am, I had the transistor radio, and that's what I would listen. I had to walk everywhere, but I take the transistor radio. And at that moment when I was at my lesson, “Duke of Earl” came on and I played it to my Koto teacher, and I said, "Sensei, I want to learn how to play this on the Koto." And she told me that you cannot play that on the instrument but I was also sort of a rebellious teenager. And I think the more people said, or your parents especially said, no, then it kind of makes you want to do it more. And also, if you hear it, you feel it, you dream it, there's a way. I guess my dream to keep doing it. Sometimes I did give up, but the dream still would come back. So I kept pursuing it and little by little, you chisel your way. And that's where I feel you can move from a mountain, a shovel at a time. It takes time, but if you have the will, you can do it. And I kept pursuing it.
Jo Reed: Even as June continued to play traditional koto music, she was still determined to bring the instrument to other contemporary musical genres. And when she met multi-instrumentalist Dan Kuramoto at a community event, she saw her chance.
June Kuramoto: In the late 60s, early 70s, the quote "Movement" began to happen, especially for the Japanese American communities, and we wanted to discover our identity. And also at the same time, we had such negative stereotypic images available to us and we felt that is so small, that is so narrow. We need to educate and teach ourselves and the world that we are viable people and we have something to say and we have feelings, and we have culture, and we have worth. So we started taking care of our people, our communities, being involved with social justices as well as many, with other communities as well because we realized we are also Third World. And so there was this organization called Gidra that was creating an Asian American newspaper, and they would throw on a picnic, a community picnic, where they would have entertainment. And so they asked me to represent a cultural part, so I would play Koto music, but there was this band that also played at it. And at that time, the band was already named Hiroshima. And I looked at that and they were avant-garde, doing their own music, writing their own music. And at that time, the Japanese Americans had bands, but they were mostly copy bands playing cover tunes as they called them, and playing at dances. And I thought, "Oh, this band is different. Maybe they'll be open to incorporating the Koto and maybe we can start doing something, or I can start experimenting." So I approached the band and Dan was the leader, "Would you be open to jamming with this instrument?" And I think it took him a while, about a week or two, and he got back to me and said, "Yeah, I'd be willing to."
Jo Reed: That meeting led to reformation of the band Hiroshima, which became a pioneering Grammy-nominated Asian American band that blended the sounds of the koto with keyboards, sax, drums, guitar, bass, and vocals. But it wasn’t an easy transition for June as she and Dan discovered how to make music together.
June Kuramoto: So what he and I originally did was jammed Koto and flute since he played flute together. So we would play that together, assimilating the traditional way where I played traditional Koto music and he would improvise his flute over my pieces. And that was the start. But I said, but that's beautiful and it works, but we wanted to do something more. So he encouraged me to improvise. And I go, "Improvise? What's that? Write me the music and I'll transcribe it, and then I'll do whatever." But he goes, "No, listen, play what you hear." And I go, "I don't hear anything." And he goes, "No, you got to listen." And that was the blood, sweat and tears of beginning of learning to open up and to really throw away everything you learned, right? Because as a classical player, you're trained, you can play fast, blah, blah, blah, but what do you really hear and what is inside of you? And I had to tear out everything of my inside to create something different, which was not easy. And I was not very pleasant either. You can imagine. Then when we tried to get together with the band, of course you want to be flashy. Look at how much I know. Look how fast I can play, blah, blah this. But Dan would always say, "You are a part of a puzzle here. You are not the whole thing. So we need to create spaces for everybody, and these are the important things of being in a band." And so like I say, you have to sort of swallow your ego and your pride and start all over. And that's how Hiroshima began with this new sound of incorporating Koto. And then eventually he was also learning the shakuhachi, the bamboo flute. And then we also knew people who played Taiko, so we incorporated Taiko the Japanese drums.
(music up)
Jo Reed: June credits the African American community for being early supporters of Hiroshima’s music.
June Kuramoto: It was almost 80% was the African-American community. Number one, I felt they immediately felt the soul of the music, and they know and feel the struggle, and they understood searching for identity and immediately open arm embraced us and made us feel comfortable. It was the CETA program, Brockman Gallery in the late 60s, early 70s, they asked the band to be part of that. And we got to travel throughout our neighborhood, right? Where I grew up, which was predominantly black and got to play with them, play in their community, our community and the schools. And we played Watts Towers and Limerick Parks and totally open and sat down and grooved with us and embraced us with open arms.
Jo Reed: While traditional Koto players were far and few between in the US at that time, musicians who were extending the reach of the instrument were rarer still but June was determined to find them.
June Kuramoto: I always felt there was people who's been doing this for years that never got recognized. And I was constantly in search of them because I didn't know what I was doing. Right? And you wanted some kind of… someone to talk to. And the amazing amazing story is that I found Dorothy Ashby. She was an incredible harpist, and she was a classical harpist, but turned jazz. And she's the one who played on all the R&B songs back in the 60s. But she had inherited a Koto and she did an album called Wax and Wane, I believe. Incredible. And I had the greatest fortune of meeting her in the 60s, late 60s. And she had showed me her Koto, and we talked about it. And she had traditionally tuned the Koto to a pentatonic scale and had made a recording on it and sang. Also in the early 70s, Pharoah Sanders at the lighthouse had a Koto with him, and he played it. He tuned it in a different, if traditionally I could say he tuned it backwards. And Dan goes, "That's wrong." And I go, "No, there's no such thing as right or wrong. Right? It's what's preference." And it was amazing what he did. And actually it created a whole different sound because he heard it differently. And that's the beauty of it. I responded to the koto because of my love for it, my connection to Japan, but in other people responding in their own way, it's magic. It's magic. And so that's my introduction to trying to find other people. But then it was untraditional, but that also supported to be more open.
Jo Reed: Hiroshima’s first album in 1979—also titled Hiroshima—was a breakthrough. It sold more than 100,000 copies in its first three months But it was an adjustment for the band to move from performing and jamming to acquiring the skill set needed to record in a professional studio with all its constraints.
June Kuramoto: We were shocked and we were panicked when we went in to do our first recording. It was that Ocean Way. It's a beautiful studio. We couldn't have had it any better in. In that way we were very fortunate, Wayne Henderson, the trombone player, he's the one who showcased us to the various record companies. So he was our first producer, but he was also busy with his own Jazz Crusaders, so he didn't show up at many of our sessions. So here we are at a 32 track studio and duh, what do we do? But luckily Ocean Way had Allen Sides, the great engineer and owner. He helped Dan. We spent hours picking microphones for the drums, for everything. Right? And especially the Koto. I think I got exhausted every session because we spent 12 hours trying different microphones before he even recorded. Because nobody had recorded Kotos as well, right? And then with the band, with drums and bass and all this. So it was a whole new thing, but poor Dan learned to become an engineer and a producer at the same time. Okay, how do we do this? How do we put a track together? Do we all play live? Do we overdub? All this, right? And back then, when we used to mix, it used to be the two-inch tapes, so it's not digital. So if somebody sped up or slowed down, we would cut and slice the tapes to move up the tracks, things like that. Those days we would 30 hours mixing and go home and sleep for three hours and then come back and because you had deadlines. It was a very frightening experience, but it was very rewarding and we learned. But I think in hindsight, poor Dan had the brunt of it, and he had to step up. And I'm sure he aged 10 years. But we had a great hit.
(Music Up)
Jo Reed: Hiroshima was hardly a one-hit wonder. The band's second album Odori had the song "Winds of Change", which received a Grammy Award nomination for Best R&B Instrumental. Hiroshima got its first gold album in 1985 with Another Place and the second with Go in ’87. The album Legacy was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2010 for Best Pop Instrumental Album. With some 20 albums, Hiroshima has sold over 4 million records around the world. And through this remarkable run, June has also continued an individual career. But though she has had many memorable collaborations, she refuses to name any favorites.
June Kuramoto: I don't think you could really say. I mean, for different categories, there's different people, right? For the album, for the songs, even for engineer mixing, we've had so many people help and contribute. there's been up and downs and blood, sweat and tears, but overall, we've met so many beautiful people so that each one is a gem. So how do you pick diamonds, rubies from emeralds?
Jo Reed: As well as being a world-class player, June also composes for the koto and her compositions literally embody a hands-on approach to playing.
June Kuramoto: Composing, I think playing any instrument, it's really probably that every musician, what you want to find hopefully is your own sound, and which would be your own touch. And I think for me, when I started composing for the Koto myself, I'm a very simplistic person. And so my melodies are very simple. But that's why my compositions came mostly from my pizzicato sound rather than the plectrum sound of the pick. So when I compose, it's mostly pizzicato. And I think that creates a sound and a vibration that the harsh pick does not. Also when you touch the strings directly, you're more connected because I'm directly touching the string.
Jo Reed: Throughout her long musical career, June always found time to teach the next generation of koto players as well as leading a group of senior citizen kotoists and conducting classes for children at LA’s Buddhist temples. And she firmly believes teaching is a two way street.
June Kuramoto: I think I learned more from teaching than my students do, because every time I teach my student, you go back to fundamentals, which only improves me. Because basically the longer I played, I got away from fundamentals. And but when I taught, it brought me back to fundamentals. And that was the key thing that kept me grounded. So, give the students the foundation, because that's what gave me the courage and the confidence to continue when I was criticized for venturing out to find myself and my place in music. So if you have the fundamentals, at least I had the confidence to take the criticism. But at the same time, try to keep open-minded to be creative because every person needs to find their own voice and it should not be a clone of mine. I also learned you can't teach passion, you can't teach a child to learn an instrument if they don't like it, if they don't want to. Spend the energy finding something that they have a passion for, that they love, and invest in that.
Jo Reed: Even though June Kuramoto has been playing as a soloist and as a member of Hiroshima for over five decades, she still has a hard time believing that she realized her vision for bringing the Koto into jazz and other contemporary genres.
June Kuramoto: I'm still in denial. I am so grateful that I was able to pursue my dream even to here. And I can't imagine what more it could be and how much more the Koto could expand. If I start thinking about it, I will start crying because of being so overjoyed and so grateful to all the people who have accepted this, who have open-armly received it. Because I could only do so much, but the people had to receive it as well. The reception has made me more joyous. I feel grateful that they accepted it, that what I've done is good, or has helped or has meant something or they loved it. And that I cannot ever thank enough, and I'm forever indebted and grateful.
Jo Reed: June has been recognized with many awards both as an individual and as a co-founder of Hiroshima. The Smithsonian, U.S. Congress, State of California, and City and County of Los Angeles have honored her work and she has served twice as an artist-in-residence at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center. And then in 2024, she was named a National Heritage Fellow—which is the nation's highest honor in folk and traditional arts. June and the other fellows received the award in Washington DC in September.
June Kuramoto: When I remembered the trip, I just fell in love with all the recipients. We all had this great connection. And here these are beautiful people who are keeping the traditions. And I always felt humbled because I sort of went out of the box, out of the tradition. And I felt, I am not worthy. I am just a little speck in this world, but I stand proud because they accepted me. NEA has given me this honor that opened up my eyes, but also other people around me to really appreciate the art, the koto. So I think a lot of people didn't realize what I was doing until now. Because NEA has accepted both the traditional side of me and the modern open exploration as well. Also at the same time, it has deepened my appreciation more than ever for the true depth of Koto music and the depth of that culture. It has really humbled me. This was my teacher's teaching: when I received my degrees in the traditional Koto studies, I felt I didn't deserve it. And she said, "June, you live up to it." So she says, "Many people do not.” So my hope is to live up to the NEA fellowship, to give back and be more appreciative. And I hope I can live up to it.
Jo Reed: That was 2024 NEA Heritage Fellow koto musician June Kuramoto. We have a video of June speaking and playing the koto on her page on our website at arts.gov. We’ll have a link in our show notes.
You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating! For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.
