Los Angeles Journal


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2008-02-25

by Ed Rampell

Interview with Jon Shirota

Summary

The writer on Voices From Okinawa at East West Players

Article

Jon Hiroshi Shirota is one of Hawaii’s leading local literary lions, creating an authentic ethnic expression in fiction and theater.

The son of indentured cane field laborers from Okinawa Shirota was born in Peahi, Maui. After being stationed by the army in Japan, Shirota attended Brigham Young University in Utah on the GI Bill. An accountant, he worked for the IRS traveling from New York to Los Angeles, Guam to Greenland, where, during the long nights, the literary bug bit him. Inspired by James Jones’ From Here To Eternity – 1953’s screen adaptation starring Frank Sinatra, Montgomery Clift and Burt Lancaster is the only Hawaii-set Best Picture Oscar winner – Shirota went on to write Lucky Come Hawaii, Pineapple White and Leilani’s Hibiscus.

The 80-year-old Shirota currently resides in L.A. where his latest play, Voices From Okinawa, premiered Feb. 13 at East West Players in Downtown L.A.’s Little Tokyo, East West Players, David Henry Hwang Theater, and will run through March 9.

Los Angeles Journal: Tell us about Voices From Okinawa.
Jon Shirota: I had a grant from the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission and National Endowment for the Arts to go to Okinawa in 2005 to study immigration to Hawaii. While there a professor of American literature asked me to lecture with him at the university. The novel used for the class was my book, Lucky Come Hawaii. I’d speak to the class in English; the students would respond in English to me while among themselves speak in Japanese. I realized there was a story here -- a play if you will. I decided to ask questions of the students, and the play evolved out of this. It takes place in 2005. The protagonist is a part Caucasian, part Okinawan young man looking for his Ph.D. at UCLA in Asian Studies who goes to Okinawa to research his own ancestors. He teaches English there and learns from his students of the relationship of the young people with the American military… His great aunt, who is 96, gives him more information about his ancestors and background. What he and the audience learn through this process is what’s going on in Okinawa today. Voices From Okinawa is very contemporary.

LAJ: Who are your literary influences?
Shirota: Ed Sakamoto, who went to Iolani (school), is a prolific writer; he’s done more plays than anyone I know. He is the writer of Hawaii. I read From Here To Eternity and I thought, jeez, if a haole (Caucasian) can write about Hawaii why can’t I who was born and raised in Hawaii? I was at college when I read Eternity and I was so enthralled by it… So I started to write Lucky Come Hawaii not realizing how tough it is to write a novel. I finished it Lowney Handy’s Writers’ Colony in Marshall, Il. It took me seven years to write it.

LAJ: Lucky Come Hawaii is a local counterpart to Eternity, which has no major local characters.
Shirota: That’s right. Because Eternity took place among the haole GIs at Schofield Barracks. Lucky takes place during the first week of Pearl Harbor on Maui. What if the Japanese had landed in Hawaii on Pearl Harbor day? How would it have influenced the Islanders and Japanese Americans?

LAJ: Tell us about your other works.
Shirota: Pineapple White is about a retired Hawaii plantation worker who comes to California hoping his son -- who’s married to a white girl – will, according to Japanese custom, take care of him. He gets stuck in Little Tokyo, where he has misadventures and realizes his son is really American more than Japanese. So he goes back to Hawaii. That novel was also adapted into a play and was produced at East West Players and won a Rockefeller Foundation grant.
Leilani’s Hibiscus was produced by East West Players (in 1999) and went to Hawaii, where it was produced by Kumu… It was translated into Japanese and produced at Tokyo and Okinawa, including at a theater where my father was born and raised in Ginoza village… Leilani’s is about my father’s brother, who lived at Maui and fell in love with a Native Hawaiian and had a child. He went to Okinawa just before the war and got stuck there. He comes back to Maui 20 years afterwards and sees his daughter for the first time. The daughter didn’t even know she was part Okinawan; her stepfather was Chinese.

LAJ: Discuss being a non-Hawaiian writing about a Native character.
Shirota: Born and raised in Maui I had all kinds of friends, including Native Hawaiian boys my age. So I knew quite a bit about Native Hawaiian folklores, backgrounds. If you hang around with people you get to know them.

LAJ: Voices From Okinawa deals with military occupation of land; the U.S. military owns 25 percent of Oahu.
Shirota: Governor Ota is very vehemently against the military occupation there. He asked, “How come 75 percent of the American troops in Japan are in Okinawa?” Okinawa has a strategic location, close to China and North Korea. During the Vietnam era, bombers flew out of Okinawa. I don’t think we’re going to leave there; not any time soon, anyway.

LAJ: Recently, a presidential candidate said it was fine with him if U.S. troops stayed 100 years in Iraq.
Shirota: One of the characters in Voices From Okinawa asks an American sergeant how long the U.S. will stay in Iraq, and the soldier says, “Until they’re fully recovered.” So the Okinawan says, “You’ve been in Okinawa for 60 years. Are we fully recovered yet?”

Jon Shirota’ s Voices From Okinawa is at East West Players, David Henry Hwang Theater, 120 Judge John Aiso St., Los Angeles, until March 9, 8 p.m. Wednesdays to Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. For more information call 213/625-7000.