Pounding drums echoed throughout the plaza of the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center in Little Tokyo on Sunday morning as the taiko performers of Prota, a Los Angeles-based Japanese taiko drumming ensemble, took the stage for an electrifying and innovative performance.

Over a thousand people gathered for the Japanese American National Museum’s annual Oshogatsu Family Festival, celebrating the new year and the Year of the Horse. The Oshogatsu Family Festival featured free crafts, activities, traditional Japanese performances such as taiko and kendo, as well as other entertainment.

The festival’s organizer and Director of Public Programs for the museum, Joy Yamaguchi, said preparations for the event began back in August, after the museum’s Natsumatsuri Family Festival concluded.

While the museum usually hosts the festival, ongoing renovations forced a change of venue to the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center. Last year, the festival joined the JANM on the Go initiative, which aims to make the museum available to the community during its closure through public programs and events.

“We want to make sure that all that we do is accessible to a wide audience, and especially folks who maybe don’t come to JANM usually or wouldn’t think about attending,” Yamaguchi said.

Yamaguchi said it’s essential for the museum to be a reliable resource for the community, as people return to the festival every year.

“We do programming of so many kinds, and a lot of times we’re dealing with adults — who I love and are great to program for — but there’s something so exciting about seeing all these families come together,” Yamaguchi said. “Just being able to see this intergenerational kind of cross-community connection is really exciting.”

Yamaguchi said featuring different performances like taiko, calligraphy and improv speaks to how JANM blends the experiences of different generations of Japanese Americans while carrying on the legacy of Japanese immigrants.

“It’s really indicative of how the museum functions and what our history is,” Yamaguchi said. “We’re celebrating the Japanese New Year, but it really is a Japanese American celebration, and it really reflects the museum’s approach to how we tell our story.”

Little Tokyo is 140 years old and one of three remaining historic Japantowns left in the nation, according to the Little Tokyo Community Council. Yamaguchi said they hoped the festival encouraged visitors to give back to Little Tokyo.

“It’s really important that we maintain that legacy and bring folks in,” Yamaguchi said. “We can use our platform to bring other [organizations] in, and then it often works that then, they invite us to their events, and it’s just a really cool collaboration.”

USC alum Michael C. Palma is the artistic director for Cold Tofu Improv, one of the groups that performed at the festival. The group was founded in 1981 and was the nation’s first Asian American improv and comedy group. Palma said having an annual cultural festival is a great way to share Japanese American culture with neighboring communities.

“It just helps to broaden everybody’s perspectives and their view of the world, because they’re seeing something that they’re not familiar with,” Palma said. “It’s always nice to just share different cultures and let everybody know that there are so many diverse people out there.”

Palma said Cold Tofu Improv has partnered with JANM since the group’s inception, about 45 years ago. He said it’s special for the festival to feature an improv group not only for entertainment, but also to see a predominantly Asian American group performing.

“Just to see Asian American faces up there sharing a particular art form … it’s just nice to see Asians out there doing things that maybe people aren’t used to seeing or aren’t familiar with,” Palma said.

As a fourth-generation Japanese American, Michael Hirota, a performer with Prota, said festivals like this play a part in allowing him to connect with his Japanese heritage.

“I would like to say that we were surprised and impressed and blown away by the reception here, but honestly, it’s something that we’ve come to accept and expect,” Hirota said. “We’re very privileged to be able to expect that.”

While President Donald Trump has placed pressure on museums across the country to strip their websites of language related to diversity, equity and inclusion, Yamaguchi said JANM is committed to being present in the community through events like the Oshogatsu Family Festival and will not remove cultural information from its website.

“We’re not going to back down from our mission, which is to tell this story,” Yamaguchi said. “It’s definitely important to us to be able to say ‘Hey, we’re celebrating the diversity of our culture here,’ and hopefully that teaches lessons for future generations.”