I’ve attended my share of various Asian themed heritage nights Golden State Warriors Games ever since I attended my first NBA game with Jeremy Lin‘s debut in the NBA October 29, 2010 against the Los Angeles Clippers, but I don’t recall the Golden State Warriors ever having a Japanese Heritage Night before since then (or maybe I couldn’t attend one due to my schedule), so I was very interested inattending.
The pre-game event started off with Japanese American and local NBC Bay Area’s Mike Inouye ringing an honorary bell (video above) which to be honest, was not that big of a deal. I don’t think even most of the crowd knew what was going on. What happened next was pretty interesting.
I don’t think I’ve ever recalled the national anthem being just performed with an instrument and not sung. Soloist Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto performed the national anthem with the koto:
which was really interesting to see. I think the crowd enjoyed the unique performance.
After the game started, in the 2nd quarter, I knew that there would be a video interlude to highlight Warriors Dance Team members from Japan, Mari & Nahoko, but wasn’t prepared to cover the video entirely since I didn’t exactly know what was going to happen. I only caught a part of the video:
From what I recall, apparently two of the performers are from Japan, not Japanese Americans. I wondered how they wound up getting on the Warriors Dance Team, but unfortunately I didn’t have time to schedule an interview with them.
Shortly afterwards, the entire Warriors Dance Team Gold Squad performed:
which I’ve seen many times at every Warriors game that I’ve attending.
The big performance for Japanese Heritage time was at halftime, with the Okinawan Kenjin Kai Eisa Shima Daiko performing:
Now this was a real treat as I’ve seen Japanese Taiko drumming before, but this was sort of like a combination of Taiko drumming and dancing I had never seen before.
Overall, I had a great night at the Golden State Warriors Japanese Heritage Night, and even better as a Warriors fan that the Warriors won that evening.
