Through blog posts, podcasts and videos presentations of public programs and concerts, you can learn more about the American Folklife Center's collections directly from folklorists, specialists, and performers.

Highlighted Blog Posts

The highlighted blog posts below focus on the topic of Asian and Asian American communities and culture, and offer entry points into related materials in the American Folklife Center collections.

Highlighted Podcasts

Below is a selection from the AFC Folklife Today and America Works podcasts featuring traditions and practices from Asia, the Pacific Islands, and their diasporas, as documented in the American Folklife Center collections.

Highlighted Public Programs

Drawing on research for his recent book, "Voices from the Canefields," author Franklin Odo situates over two hundred songs of Japanese immigrant workers in Hawaii, in translation, in a hitherto largely unexplored historical context.

According to Odo, folk songs are short stories from the souls of common people. Some, like Mexican corridos or Scottish ballads reworked in the Appalachians, are stories of tragic or heroic episodes. Others, like the African American blues, reach from a difficult present back into slavery and forward into a troubled future. Japanese workers on Hawaii's plantations created their own versions, in form more akin to their traditional tanka or haiku poetry. These holehole bushi describe the experiences of one particular group caught in the global movements of capital, empire, and labor during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Franklin S. Odo is a Japanese American author, scholar, activist and historian. Odo has served as the director of the Asian Pacific American Program at the Smithsonian Institution since the program's inception in 1997.

(Event date: September 20, 2013)

Recording of conversation with PJ and Roy Hirabayashi in the Whittall Pavilion, Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of Congress on June 30, 2017 as part of the Homegrown concert series sponsored by the American Folklife Center. Smithsonian Folklife Festival 2017 artists and NEA Heritage Award Fellows Roy Hirabayashi (co-founder) and PJ Hirabayashi (artistic director emeriti) of the ensemble, San Jose Taiko, were featured in a discussion and demonstration of taiko moderated by Dan Sheehy, director emeritus of Smithsonian Folkways Records. San Jose Taiko was founded in 1973 in San Jose, California, by young Asian Americans searching to convey their experiences as third generation Japanese Americans (Sansei) inspired by traditional Japanese drumming. Taiko is the Japanese word for drum. In North America, this term is used to describe both the Japanese drum itself and the art form of kumidaiko (ensemble drumming with Japanese drums). Roy & PJ Hirabayashi discuss the education of young people in San Jose Japantown in the art of taiko; the background of their families and community; and demonstrate choreography and compositions they have created for San Jose Taiko.

(Event date: June 30, 2017)