FESTIVAL HIGHLIGHTS ASIAN-AMERICAN CULTURE
The Davis Cherry Blossom Festival returned last weekend, welcoming thousands to enjoy live music and taiko, food vendors, cultural demonstrations, local artists and more.
Gregory Wada, who helped organize the event, explained that this year’s event focused on the need for mental health services, particularly among Asian American youth.
“We’re supporting an organization called Asian Pacific Community Counseling,” he said. “They’re a mental health care advocate helping people get in contact with a culturally appropriate set of mental health services.”
The nonprofit organization’s website explained that it’s been providing mental health and wellness services to “the diverse Asian and Pacific Islander communities throughout Sacramento County for over 35 years.”
“We specialize in unique cultural and linguistic approaches to meet the diverse mental health and wellness needs of the API community,” the website emphasized.
Wada explained that the festival is a nonprofit organization and is “a collaborative project of Japanese and Asian American student organizations at UC Davis and members of the Davis Community.”
The festival was founded and produced by Bakuhatsu Taiko Dan — an ensemble drumming group from UC Davis — that Wada was a part of.
The website noted that the nonprofit seeks “the liberation of all living beings through an annual fundraiser for a charitable organization working towards social or environmental justice.”
“One thing these students are trying to do is bring attention to social issues,” Wada emphasized. “So the idea is we’re going to have a festival for Asian Americans, not just because it’s some foreign thing, but because Asian people live here. We’re one of a multi-ethnic landscape and we’re trying to form deeper sol
idarity between artists of color.”
Wada noted that his Taiko group has done other fundraisers in the past, raising money for hurricane relief, women’s domestic shelter, advocacy organizations and more.
“It’s a way we’re trying to connect what we’re doing as musicians and how we’re thinking about moving a community with music,” he highlighted. “This kind of idea that art can make a difference.”
Additionally, Wada highlighted the importance of the festival because of the often forgotten history of Japanese Americans.
“Japanese American history has been very much altered by immigration and by the mass incarceration of the Japanese during World War Two,” he noted.
According to state archives, “approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese residents from the coastal areas of Washington and Oregon and all of California were removed from their homes and incarcerated in camps.”
“Although initiated by the federal government, the state of California was heavily involved in the removal effort,” the archive continued. “The state created the War Services Bureau to meet the ‘war needs’ of California, which included providing social services to Japanese Americans during their registration and removal to incarceration camps. County employees also assisted with the removal.”
To learn more about this, visit archives.cdn.sos.ca.gov/educational-resources/japanese-incarceration-teacher-guide.
This year’s event was sponsored in part by Visit Davis, Visit Yolo, the city of Davis Art and Cultural Affairs Program and was hosted at Sudwerk Brewing Co. located at 2001 2nd St. in Davis.
Ashley Shen, board chair of the festival, coordinated the committees involved in organizing the festival and noted that the festival has continued to grow in popularity since it held its first festival in 2016.
“When I first joined, the festival actually had to be canceled due to the pandemic,” Shen said regarding the 2020 festival. “So they made an online format that wasn’t the same, but we were still happy to have a lot of different Taiko groups and performers submit videos.”
The 2021 festival was also live-streamed, but she said the festival’s return in 2022 “saw a crowd like we’d never had before.”
“That was the first year where everybody felt like they could get back out there and celebrate in a single space again so it was really exciting to see,” she highlighted.
She said roughly 5,000 attended the two-day festival last year, which prompted them to expand this year’s festival to accommodate its growing popularity amongst the community.
“We’ve expanded so much that we can’t even offer parking on site, which is something that we’re trying to address, but that’s how it’s been going,” she concluded.
To learn more about the festival, visit davischerryblossomfestival.weebly.com.