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https://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2025/1/29/gus-hokama/

Gus Hokama: “The Past in a Song”

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From the windows of his house, Gus Hokama can see the city of Posadas. The capital of Misiones Province, in northeast Argentina, it extends along the Paraná River, with colorful houses and buildings that are lit up at night. But his actual home tells another story: Gus lives in the city of Encarnación, in the neighboring country of Paraguay. While people migrate for diverse and personal reasons, in Gus’s case, it was a call of the heart.

In Buenos Aires, he had met a young Nikkei woman who was studying for a master’s degree in pediatric dermatology. They fell in love, began a relationship, and then it came time to decide between Argentina and Paraguay. The couple eventually chose the latter country.

Gus smiles into the Zoom camera. He’s wearing scrubs and explains that he has to go at two sharp: duty calls. These days he can work from anywhere in the world, although it wasn’t always that way. He’s a doctor with an unusual specialty: legal medicine. Gus explains,

My work consists of evaluating patients and determining, from a legal-medical perspective, what types of diseases or pathologies they suffer from. This often includes discussion with other doctors, comparing opinions, and defending my position with solid arguments. Sometimes I think of it as an intellectual challenge, where I have to find the best way to support my conclusions and make sure that the result is consistent with my analysis.

I used to work in physical rehabilitation, but over time I came to specialize in this area, which even though it’s fairly unusual, brings me a lot of satisfaction. Another advantage is that it allows me to work remotely, since most of the cases they send to me can be solved remotely. After the pandemic, this approach has become completely virtual, which has greatly transformed the way I work.

In Encarnación, Gus found a large and active Nikkei community, similar to the one that exists in Oberá, Misiones Province or in Pirapó, Paraguay. Many Japanese immigrants settled on the red lands along the river, throughout different eras: from the legendary Kairiyama family, who pioneered green tea plantations after World War I, to the experiences of the Garuhapé, in the late 1950s.

“In Paraguay it’s common to hear parents talking to their children in Japanese, even with the youngest generations,” Gus explains. “Many Nikkei around my age, as well as teenagers, speak Nihongo. There are also a lot of Japanese communities in Paraguay where the main activity is agriculture, and there you also frequently hear them speaking Japanese. On the other hand, in Argentina there are festivals that originated in Okinawa, something that you don’t see in Paraguay where there are very few Okinawans.”

As is the case with the majority of the Argentinian-born children of Japanese immigrants, Gus’s grandparents, both on his father and his mother’s side, emigrated from different places in the Okinawan archipelago. While there are diverse and individual reasons why people make the tough decision to move to a new place, Gus’s grandparents did so in search of a better life.

While today it is known for its crystalline waters and traditional flowered shirts, Okinawa was one of the most hard-hit regions during World War II. Many Okinawans, faced with the scale of the devastation, decided to cross the ocean with the hope of finding a place where they could plan a better future for their families.

Gus plays at “Okinawa Latina” in Lima, Peru, with the Diamantes and John Azama, 2017.

The Shinsato, on Gus’s mother’s side, first went to the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and then emigrated again to Argentina. For the Hokama family, on his father’s side, the trip was direct, with no intermediate stops. When Gus was little, his paternal grandfather used to tell him the story of that long journey by boat, which lasted almost six months. From Oozato-Nanjo, in Okinawa, he and his family traveled to the booming city of Buenos Aires, in the southern part of South America.

Their first destination was Rosario, perched along the Paraná River in Santa Fe Province. However, Gus’s grandfather suffered from asthma and as a result the family had to find another place to settle down. That’s when they came across an opportunity to rent land outside Buenos Aires, in José C. Paz, where other Japanese families farmed with the goal of someday buying the land for themselves. Unlike the many Japanese families who opened bars or laundries, Gus’s paternal family went into the flower farming business, with many years dedicated to growing carnations.

As occurred with many immigrant groups—Spaniards, Italians, Germans, and Japanese—Gus’s grandparents worked hard to build a better future for their children. “At the time, you could make a good living. With hard work and sweat, you could get ahead. My grandparents were able to pay for their four children to attend university. Of the four, my father became a kinesiologist, two became orthopedists, and the oldest, the chōnan, or first-born son, followed in my grandfather’s footsteps and became a flower grower,” Gus says.

Gus spent part of his childhood in Caseros, where his mother’s family owned a laundry, and the family later moved to Villa del Parque. He attended primary school at the legendary Japanese school Nichia Gakuin, in the Almagro neighborhood. In 2018, he recalls, he was invited by the school to give a talk to the students and was surprised to discover that 90% of them do not have Japanese family members, nor are they Nikkei themselves.

“In my time, it was the reverse. It was very rare for a student to come from a family that wasn’t Japanese,” he says. According to Gus, the school was very demanding. Some of his teachers came from Japan to teach classes there. He learned the language that his grandparents spoke, but Gus didn’t use in the street. Nor did he use Japanese when he finished high school and decided to take on the challenge of studying medicine at the University of Buenos Aires.

He didn’t have an opportunity to use it until much later, when at the age of 35 he was awarded a scholarship by the city of Kita Nakagusuku, in Okinawa, to visit his maternal grandparents’ hometown.

Gus performs alongside singer Lucy Nagamine at Uchinanchu taikai in Okinawa, 2016.

What did he find most surprising when he set foot in Okinawa? Gus thinks about the question for a few seconds. It’s easy to imagine him getting off the airplane, the tropical heat, the airport signs written in the Japanese alphabet.

“The strangest thing was seeing so many Japanese people in the same place,” Gus says. Although that image might seem obvious, it isn’t if you think about it: “In Argentina you see a Japanese person now and then, but there it’s every day. I really liked observing their customs, their attitudes, and their physical postures.”

Gus wanted to understand how they talked while standing in line to buy something, what kind of music they listened to, what made them laugh. What most interested him were the people, not the impressive landscape, nature, or the idyllic beaches. He wanted to learn about people’s interests, what they did, and what they talked about.

He was surprised to discover that the Japanese language he’d learned as a young boy at Nichia Gakuin school was still latent in his memory and now bloomed, like a plant that sprouts anew. “Whenever I had the opportunity to speak with a Japanese person, we talked at length about their life, about their dreams. It was fascinating to me, being in a different country but one that also has a lot to do with my own story and origins, and discovering their views on life,” Gus says.

He asked many questions. Questions that he probably would never have asked in Argentina, much less among his group of friends. But in Okinawa, with the freedom that foreigners are sometimes granted in a not so distant country, Gus allowed himself to ask: What were their dreams, what did they expect from life, what did they think about, and what did they feel. Traveling to Okinawa that first time enabled him to understand many things, but more than anything, it reminded him of what his grandfather was like.

Often, ideas simply grow; they don’t start from a specific point, origin, or because of a specific reason. Perhaps the idea has always been there: composing a song about his grandfather, his journey, and the decisions that motivate someone to move across the world, insert themselves into another culture, in a new place, and start from zero.

“At the time I was thinking a lot about transcendance,” Gus says. “I didn’t want to spend my life in banal or superfluous ways. What was important was that I didn’t want it all to disappear without leaving a mark. It seemed to me that the story of my grandparents was important, and that maybe in generations to come, no one would remember what they did. I thought of it as a way to honor them, to leave a record for the future.”

In 2015, he composed the song “Entre Claveles” (“Among the Carnations”). Gus did not consider himself an instrumentalist. He had studied harmony as a child and learned to compose. After coming up with lyrics and a melody, he began working with a music producer.

That’s the origin of the Spanish version of the song, which he had the opportunity to sing in Okinawa, in the same city where his maternal grandparents were born. And there, he says, he met Yuko Nakasone who, over time, became his manager. She suggested they produce the song in Japanese so that Okinawans could gain a deeper understanding of his grandfather’s story, “and so that Okinawans themselves could understand the meaning of the sacrifice, of immigration. I translated the lyrics, not literally, but in their own words, so it would be comprehensible to them and would be felt more deeply.” The Japanese version is called “Jikuu no hana.”

Gus at Festival do Japão in San Pablo, Brasil, 2017.

The following year, Gus traveled to the Okinawan Convention “Uchinanchu,” held in Okinawa every 5 years, and took part in the event’s music festival. The festival brings together Okinawans from around the world and for four days, a variety of events are held in different places around the prefecture. Gus knew that it would be a great opportunity for his song’s message to reach a wider audience.

The question was, how to do it? “Then it occurred to me that perhaps, by creating an animated clip, it would be much more visual and easily understood. In addition to that, I thought that if I launched into the song directly, it wouldn’t have the same impact as telling the story behind the song. So I decided to create a dialogue that comes before the song and tells the story.” Thanks to the song’s impact at the festival and the promotion by Yuko Nakasone, Gus went on tour in Japan in 2016, 2017, and 2018.

Gus had participated twice in the Nikkei Panamerican Convention (Convención Panamericana Nikkei, or COPANI), an event held every two years that brings together the largest Nikkei communities in the region (from countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Canada, Mexico, and Paraguay, among others): as a singer in 2017 and as a participant in Lidercambio de Perú, in 2011. With the song, his prospects grew even brighter.

He was invited to sing the song at the Japanese Festival (Festival Do Japão) and the Okinawan Festival (Festival de Okinawa) in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Also, during the pandemic he participated in several virtual events based in Brazil, Hawaii, and other parts of the United States. Meanwhile, the song defined a new line of work, and he composed another song titled “Nakurunausá,” a word in the Okinawan language that means: “everything will be resolved over time, live calmly and persevere, things will fall into place with patience and hard work.”

He also composed a song about Nikkei women and in early 2025 plans to release a new single, “Moashibi.” The title is a word he uses to describe the way young people get together in the evenings to participate in traditional island dances.

Gus in the recording studio in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

On February 8, 2025, Gus will perform at the 20th anniversary celebration of the Discover Nikkei website, which will take place at the headquarters in Los Angeles, California.

When Gus is asked about why social events are so important for the Nikkei community, he responds:

“There’s no doubt that every event I participated in had an impact on me, both personally and as a singer. The first thing I would highlight is the opportunity to create unique friendships on each occasion, and at the same time, how happy I feel seeing friends I’ve met previously. Beyond the social aspect, every musical experience has been enriching and meaningful.”

Jikuu no Hana” opened the community’s doors for me and became the song I performed at every event I was invited to. What moved me the most was that, whenever I finished singing it, many people came up to me to share their own family stories. Many of those stories reflect emotions and experiences that I had described in the song. That’s the most beautiful power of music.”

* * * * *

On February 8, Gus Hokama will participate as a panelist in an International Nikkei Family Stories Panel Discussion as part of Discover Nikkei Fest, celebrating Discover Nikkei’s 20th anniversary. Gus will also perform his original songs at the evening’s reception. Register to attend in person or virtually. 

 

© 2025 Fernando Krapp

Argentina Discover Nikkei Fest (event) Discover Nikkei programs (event) Gus Hokama interviews music musicians Okinawa Okinawans Paraguay singer-songwriters Uchinanchu
About the Author

A filmmaker, journalist, and writer, Fernando Krapp studied literature at the University of Buenos Aires and cinematic screenwriting at the National School of Film Experimentation and Production. He was born in 1983 in Adrogué, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina. He has published Bailando con los osos (2013), Una isla artificial. Crónicas sobre japoneses en la Argentina (2019), Es solo una película. El cine según Martín Rejtman (with Pablo Chernov, 2023) and ¡Viva la pepa! El psicoanálisis argentino descubre el LSD (with Damián Huergo), which earned the Best Essay Award from the National Arts Fund in 2023. He has directed the films Beatriz Portinari. Un documental sobre Aurora Venturini (with Agustina Massa, 2014, Argentores Prize), El volcán adorado (2017) and El amo del jardín (set to premier in 2025). As a scriptwriter, he has collaborated with Francisco D'Eufemia, Manuel Abramovich, and Pedro Barandiaran, among others, and has written for Radar and Radar Libros, Revista Agenda, Gatopardo, Revista Coolt and Anfibia.

Updated January 2025

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