Here is Happiness

Thanking my father, ten years after losing him.

Leisure suit, jumper: Teddy and me, Santa Ana, CA, 1977.

My father, Theodore Chinen — known professionally as Teddy Tanaka — died on this date ten years ago, of complications from esophageal cancer. He was 73. Stating this fact plainly, without backing into it somehow, took me a little time. Today I’m taking a moment to brush past sadness and lean into celebration. Thanksgiving is a day for gratitude, and he gave me plenty of reasons to be thankful.

Dad was the sort of person who could walk into a room and make everybody feel at ease. This came naturally to him, but he’d also worked at it. Because he spent the first four years of his life on the mainland in internment camps¹, speaking only Japanese, it was a rough reentry to childhood in Hawai’i after the war, and he cultivated those skills as a matter of survival. Elocution was a practice that went hand-in-hand with voice training, which he pursued with a teacher of local renown, paying for lessons by doing chores around the studio. His whole family was musical — my issei grandfather played the samisen; he’d met my nissei grandmother in a community band, where she played koto — and he lived by the conviction that music-making came out of a marriage of joy and discipline.

The Honolulu Star-Advertiser ran an obituary whose headline hailed Teddy as a singer and showman who “broke ethnic barriers,” a distinction I hadn’t quite articulated in those terms, myself. But the lede made this point clear, correctly stating that he “was widely known, here and abroad, as a pioneering Asian-American performer who parlayed a win in a high school talent contest into a full-fledged singing career.”

In high school, my Dad sang lead in a doowop group called The Jokers; that’s him in the dark dinner jacket. (I just looked it up, and their 45 rpm single “I Do” sold at auction earlier this month for just shy of $800.) Breaking off as a solo act, Teddy landed a record deal in Tokyo, as a crooner. His 1963 album Mr. Happiness was buoyed by a hit single, the ballad “Koko Ni Sachi Ari,” whose English translation — “Here is Happiness” — surfaces in a spoken-word interlude. For generations of listeners in Japan, the Philippines and beyond, the song is a veritable standard.

This was all before my time, and so were the cross-country touring days of The Tokyo Playmates — a dynamite group Teddy formed with with my mom, Nanci, and another singer, Kimi. But I grew up in the era of Teddy and Nanci Tanaka, a mixed-race duo popular on the Waikiki showroom circuit, and on local TV. For a good swath of my childhood, this was the family business. (Later, it became a Christian ministry.)

Through it all, my father’s breezy humor, earnest curiosity and stubborn positivity were foundational influences, things I carry with me. And while his relationship to music was less analytical than mine turned out to be, he taught me a lot there, too.

A few days after he passed, I woke up in the middle of the night and wrote a post that captured the blur of my feelings. If you followed me on socials back then, maybe you saw it. I’m republishing it here, in a spirit of gratitude. Thanks, Dad — and thank you, dear reader, for indulging this personal reflection. Happy Thanksgiving.