#6: Betty Inada, “Sioux City Sue”

From the 1880s to the beginning of the Japanese American incarceration in 1942, Sacramento had a bustling Japantown.  The six-block area was the home of all sorts of shops, restaurants, places of worship and recreation spaces.  Residents could also take classes in traditional arts, such as music, dance, tea ceremonies and flower arrangement.  They could go to clubs to listen to jazz and dance.  When residents of Japanese were forcibly removed to camps in 1942, people of many other ethnicities moved into the area.  However, when many Japanese Americans returned after WWII, the area gradually regained its Japanese character.  Unfortunately, this did not last.  In the mid-1950s, Sacramento passed a “urban renewal” plan that would destroy Japantown and surrounding multiethnic neighborhoods.  Despite significant resistance, the city’s plan prevailed, and the neighborhood businesses were replaced by government buildings and hi-rise condos.

Japanese American singer Betty Inada was born in Sacramento’s Japantown in 1913. She became interested in jazz at an early age, and began singing in Japantown’s clubs.  Inada wanted to make it big in the American entertainment industry, but the possibilities for an ethnically Japanese woman were limited. She watched her close friend Fumiko Kawabata, a jazz singer/dancer and a “Nisei” (i.e., second-generation Japanese Americans), move to Japan, hoping for more career opportunities there. In fact, thousands of Nisei—primarily from California and Hawai’i—moved to Japan for improved work opportunities in the 1920s and 30s. There, Japanese American immigrants weren’t marginalized for their ethnicity.  In fact, their American origins carried cachet in the Japanese jazz community.

Despite speaking very little Japanese, Inada followed Kawabata to Japan in 1933 and made a name for herself in dancehalls with her unapologetically loud and boisterous singing style. Inada developed this singing approach so she could avoid using a megaphone, which would have blocked her from the audience’s view. She also sang in the many successful “jazu kissas” (i.e., jazz cafes) that began to open in the mid-1930s. Inada and Kawabata joined other Japanese American jazz musicians who took advantage of this burgeoning jazz interest in Japan. Within a decade, Inada became one of the most popular female jazz singers in Japan.

As her fame peaked in Japan and World War II ended, Inada expanded her repertoire beyond jazz and tapped into the rise of “tiki culture,” the popularity of which was perhaps born of a war-torn population eager to consume fantasies of tropical climates and easy living. Inada recorded Hawai’i-inspired music with Buckie Shirakata, a Hawai’ian Nisei who also, coincidentally, spent time performing music in Japan during the 1930s. In some cases, as with “Sioux City Sue”, Inada sang lyrics in Japanese and English. She also mimicked traditional Hawai’ian Hula dancing on stage, which caused Inada some legal trouble in Japan until she explained Hula’s cultural significance to Japanese authorities.