My mother made friends with a lot of artists, who were dancers and teachers, and so that’s when I began to take Japanese odori, playing the shamisen, doing nagauta, I guess, and I loved it. I mean, I really enjoyed it. I think that if it weren’t for those camp days, I wouldn’t have been interested in the arts or acting. What I really loved was doing kabuki plays. I didn’t understand a word that I was saying, my mother would tell me what the words were, what they meant, and then I would just memorize it. I could read it in katakana, so she would write out the words in katakana, and my favorite was playing Hichidameno Okaru. Well, I remember one line, and it still gives me pleasure because it’s different. It would be “ura-san ka, watasha omae ni moritsubu-sare,” you know, very overly dramatic.

acting actors artists dance entertainers music plays World War II camps

Date: November 8, 2018

Location: California, US

Interviewer: June Berk

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum

Interviewee Bio

Takayo Fischer, born in November 1932, is a Nisei American stage, film, and TV actress. During World War II, as a young child, she and her family were forcibly evacuated from the West Coast and spent time in the Fresno Assembly Center before being relocated to Jerome and Rohwer concentration camps. Fischer later lived in Chicago, Illinois, where, as a young adult, she won the crown of “Miss Nisei Queen.” She has appeared in dozens of major Hollywood films, including Moneyball (2011), Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007), The Pursuit of Happyness (2006), and Memoirs of a Geisha (2005). She also appeared in the stage production of The World of Suzie Wong in New York in 1958 and many productions with East West Players in Los Angeles. (June 2018)