By Tato Takahama
May 16, 2026
PACIFIC RESEARCH INSTITUTE — I attended a performance of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song at the Aratani Theatre inside the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo.
The production struck me not simply as a classical Broadway musical, but as an early intellectual experiment that visualized the dual structure of language and identity.
The work originated from C.Y. Lee’s 1957 novel The Flower Drum Song, was adapted into a Broadway musical in 1958, and later became a Hollywood film in 1961.
In 2002, however, the work underwent a major reinterpretation shaped strongly by Asian American creators themselves. The revised version reexamined the very politics of representation.
That long historical transition itself appears to form a kind of “history of Asian American self-representation.”
The importance of Flower Drum Song lies not in externally imposed Orientalist imagery, but in the process through which Asian American communities gradually reconstructed their own self-image over time.
The 2002 revision in particular critically reworked earlier forms of yellowface casting*1 and cultural simplification, placing the question of “who gets to speak” at the center of the production itself.
*1 Yellowface refers to the theatrical and cinematic practice — historically common in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — in which non-Asian actors portrayed East Asians through makeup, exaggerated gestures, and stereotyped performance styles. Structurally similar to blackface, it often reduced Asians to fixed images such as “exotic,” “submissive,” “comic,” or “mysterious.”
Flower Drum Song is not merely an immigrant musical. It is an ideal text through which to examine the politics of self-representation itself.
Within the work coexist two distinct cognitive systems in visible tension.
One is shaped by English-language rationality and American modernity. The other reflects the cultural logic and lived experience rooted in immigrant communities.
Recently, I have become increasingly interested in bilingualism. This musical seems to approach the core of that duality.
To possess two languages is not simply to possess two vocabularies or grammatical systems. It means that the very framework through which reality itself is interpreted becomes pluralized.
Language is not merely an object of translation. It is the structure of thought itself.
Linguistic research increasingly suggests that, for highly bilingual individuals, language functions not simply as a communication tool but as a cognitive mode.
“Bilingual thought should be understood not as translation, but as frame-switching.”
(Linguistic Cognition Review, June 12, 2023)
In studies of bilingual cognition, such switching is understood not as conscious translation, but as an automatic transformation of cognitive frames.
This structure becomes particularly visible among immigrant populations.
Anthropological studies suggest that second- and third-generation immigrant identities do not function as singular affiliations, but rather as systems capable of switching among multiple cultural codes.
One scholar explains:
“Third-cultural experience consists of possessing multiple cultures simultaneously as operable cognitive systems.”
(Transcultural Studies Journal, September 3, 2021)
So-called “Third Culture Kids” — children raised across multiple countries within diplomatic or transnational corporate environments — do not primarily live through fixed belonging, but through modes of connection.
Viewed from this perspective, the production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song that I saw felt remarkably ahead of its time.
Each character operates through a different mode of connection to the world, oscillating among assimilation, tradition, and hybrid identity. There is no simplistic binary opposition between assimilation and non-assimilation.
Rather, what the work presents is a society in which multiple interpretations of reality coexist simultaneously.
Historically, this structure also connects to the differing adaptation strategies of Chinese American and Japanese American immigrant communities.
Chinese immigrants often constructed parallel societies through Chinatowns. Japanese immigrants, by contrast, despite exclusion and discrimination, tended to pursue integration into mainstream American society through a “when in Rome” ethic.
Yet within today’s Asian American society, that binary framework has already begun to lose meaning.
Contemporary Asian Americans increasingly shift among different cognitive modes depending on workplace, family environment, and cultural space. This mirrors the structure of bilingual cognition itself.
Sociologist Emily Chang argues:
“Asian American experience should be understood not as a single identity, but as multiple selves operating in parallel.”
(American Sociological Review Commentary Series, February 18, 2024)
In this sense, so-called “Hapa” identity — a form of mixed Japanese or mixed Asian cultural intelligence — is no exception. Rather, it may represent a cognitive style gradually becoming standardized under contemporary conditions.
What matters is no longer bloodline alone, but a mode of thought premised upon simultaneous adaptation to multiple cultures, multiple languages, and multiple social systems.
Globalization, digitization, and expanded mobility are transforming this structure from exception into norm.
In this sense, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song is not a work of the past, but very much a work of the present.
The musical powerfully stages the moment when the modern assumption — that language, culture, and belonging must remain singular — begins to break apart.
Even the performers themselves embodied this structure: not only Chinese Americans, but Japanese Americans and Korean Americans as well singing and dancing as Chinese immigrants on stage.
“Dragon dancers, girls singing — Flower Drum Song.”
“Flower Drum Song — light and shadow in San Francisco.”
The experience of watching the production at the Aratani Theatre allowed me to recognize this theory not merely as abstraction, but as something physically and emotionally tangible.
Note: English translation prepared by the author. Translation assistance tools may be used.
The views expressed in this post are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cultural News.
Japanese Text: アジア系アメリカ人のアイデンティティを再定義したミュージカル「Flower Drum Song」「龍踊り 姑娘 歌へり 花鼓歌」 「花鼓歌 桑の港の 光と影」