Inside his second-floor studio at Links Hall, Fujima Shunojo is talking to a student. He is sitting Japanese style (on his knees) and reminding the student, a nine-year-old Japanese-American girl in a pink-and-white kimono, to bend her knees. “Even if it hurts you’ve got to bend,” he tells her.
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Fujima tries to follow the tradition of the strict sensei (teacher) but admits that he is not as strict with his students as his teacher was with him. “My teacher never gave any explanation. You just watched him and learned by yourself. His thinking was ‘Just follow me, no questions.’ But you can’t do this here. Students need explanation. In Japanese schools students don’t ask questions. There’s no discussion. In the United States, whatever you want to say, you say. That is what I have learned.”
“While Western Dance aspires toward the heavens,” Gunji writes, “Eastern Dance shows great love for the earth. In Western Dance the arms are raised high above the head, the body is lifted up on the tips of the toes, and there are many bounds and leaps.” Japanese dance, on the other hand, involves “pressing the hips downward to make the body appear shorter and in close contact with the ground.”
He came to Chicago in 1971 to visit an American friend he had known in Tokyo. “During my visit, a woman asked me what I did in Japan. When I told her I was a dancer she said, why don’t you dance here? Then she set everything up.” Several people who saw him dance here suggested that he teach, and in 1977 he opened his school.
The essence of the art, however, remains unchanged. “We bring to America our culture, our traditions. It doesn’t matter, good or bad we have to do it that way. Some people ask me, ‘Fujima why do you only do traditional dance? Why don’t you do something more modern?’ I tell them it’s because if I have to do that I don’t want to teach. It’s not worth it to me.”
