Instructor perpetuates bon dance traditions

As anyone who has happily mimed the mining of coal to “Tanko Bushi” can tell you, there is a world of difference between watching a bon dance and actually joining the dance circle.

As a booked-solid bon dance instructor and director of the Honolulu Fukushima Bon Dance Club, Joyce Gushiken has spent the last dozen years helping those watching wistfully from the periphery discover the unique joy of dancing around the yagura (tower) with family, friends and neighbors.

“I have a passion for teaching bon dance,” she says. “I like seeing that light turn on when they get it. It’s so rewarding to see people just get out there and have fun. I like seeing all those happy faces.”

Gushiken, 70, says her fondness for bon dance dates back to her childhood in Kaumakani, a small plantation town on Kauai, where the folk traditions of the form resonated with a community that well understood what it meant to labor on the land.

For practicing Buddhists, like Gushiken’s mother, who was an active member of a minyo (song) group, the summertime bon odori was the highlight of obon season, when the spirits of the dead return to visit the living. But for Gushiken, who adopted Christianity in high school, and many others, it was also a major social event, an opportunity for people from different cultures to connect within the bond of community.

“Bon dance is something you can embrace on the basis of culture,” Gushiken says. “Hawaii is so diversified and bon dance brings out the best in everybody in terms of participation. It brings people together.”

Gushiken left bon dances behind when she left Kauai to attend the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she majored in elementary education. Marriage, motherhood and a 35-year career as a legal secretary followed, and it wasn’t until a seemingly random outing with a friend in the mid-1990s that her love of bon dance resurfaced.

At the invitation of Lorraine Wong, a local freelance writer, Gushiken tagged along on an assignment to cover a “bon-dancercize” class at Honpa Hongwanji Mission of Hawaii. The experience inspired her to take classes, which in turn led to opportunities to teach bon dance once she retired from her job in 2004.

These days, Gushiken holds bon dance classes (both traditional Japanese and Okinawan eisa) at Makiki District Park, the Kapahulu Center and the Kahala Nui retirement community, where she provides instruction in the fundamental movements that form the basis of hundreds of different dances.

Gushiken’s commitment to bon dance is also evident in the work she does on behalf of the Honolulu Fukushima Bon Dance Club, which provides dance leaders for four bon dances on Oahu and performs at various venues and events. Earlier this year, the club traveled to Fukushima, Japan, to perform.

In what little free time she has, Gushiken also enjoys line dancing, another hobby she picked up after retirement. In contrast to the rigidly observed traditional movements of bon dance, Gushiken says she enjoys the freedom of expression that line dancing affords. (Gushiken is also accomplished in classical Japanese dance.)

Gushiken says she feels an obligation to perpetuating the tradition of bon dance and in so doing keep alive the traditions of a Hawaii long gone.

“I teach people the dances our ancestors did on the plantations,” she says. “If we forget our ancestors, we forget who we are. We lose our identity when we lose our culture.”

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.