Los Angeles Journal


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2008-02-25

by Ed Rampell

'Voices From Okinawa'

Summary

East West players way in on imperialism

Article

When Jon Hiroshi Shirota read the Feb. 11 Kyodo News report about the alleged rape of a 14-year-old Okinawan schoolgirl by a U.S. Marine he had an eerie sensation, as if life was imitating art.

“I wondered if someone in the military had read my play,” mused the Peahi, Maui-born Shirota, whose Voices From Okinawa world premiered days later at the East West Players in the Downtown L.A.’s Little Tokyo.

Voices From Okinawa is a lighthearted, affably told tale, but beneath the surface it deals with the explosive subject matter that is the stuff of drama. The lead character, Kama Hutchins (Joseph Kim), is an American who’s 25 percent Okinawan; his ancestors migrated to work in Hawaii’s cane fields. Kama travels to Okinawa to seek a Ph.D. in immigration studies and teach English. Instead Kama gets a lesson from his students and his 96-year-old auntie, Obaa-San (Amy Hill).

Among Kama’s pupils is the young woman Namiye Matsuda (Mari Ueda), who reveals details of her rape by a GI that are strangely similar to the recent incident in Okinawa. Like Namiye’s real life teenaged counterpart, a U.S. soldier sexually assaults Namiye after offering her a ride. Previously, the gang rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan by GIs triggered massive protests in 1995. Voices also presents the issue of land ownership on an island 40,000 U.S. troops occupy.

Hill, who played a Korean grandma in Margaret Cho’s mid-1990s sitcom All-American Girl, said, “The play’s strongest theme… resonates with our presence in Iraq and many places around the world where maybe we’ve outworn our welcome.”

At an post-show reception, Japanese-American actor George Takei, who will appear this summer with Tom Hanks in The Great Buck Howard, explained: “The American presence is there in Okinawa, not spread out in Japan, and it is dominant. That American base there – you can drive for miles and miles...” Hill interjected, “They have the best land,” and Takei added: “That presence, as we learned in the play, has been 60 years. John McCain is talking about being in Iraq for 100 years.”

Takei added, “This kind of American – let’s use that word: “imperialism,” that’s what it really is. There was a time when the sun never set on the British Empire. Well, it’s now becoming like that with the U.S. And you know what happened to the British Empire. We’re seeing that pattern, that handwriting on the wall for American civilization. We have the most disastrous, reckless presidency now… This play suggests all of that, and as well as a heartbreaking, touching and human story,” asserted Takei.

When the actor who played Sulu on the sci-fi TV series Star Trek and subsequent Trekkie adaptations is asked if the “Federation” should send Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and Sulu to confront President Bush, Takei and Hill laughed. “That was about the possibilities in the future of a diverse, egalitarian culture that went across the universe making peace, spreading good will,” Hill pointed out.

At the premiere Okinawa-born actress Tamlyn Tomita, who co-starred with Dennis Quaid in 1990’s Come See the Paradise about the wartime internment of AJAs, said, “I liked it. I thought it showed portraits of Okinawan culture and people, the general ambiance of what exists in Okinawa today… This play [features] Okinawans who share the island with American GI forces. It’s always a clash of cultures, it’s an ongoing conflict.”

Tomita added that Voices also deals with the theme of ethnic identity. “Being of Okinawan descent, meaning not quite 100 percent Japanese, which is a subject touched in this play, is something that we don’t understand a whole lot… Realizing and appreciating my heritage and culture, knowing that it’s separate from being Japanese, and also separate from being American, can be confusing, but is also much celebrated in my family,” Tomita affirmed.

“There is an attitude that Okinawans have about Japan itself,” Takei noted. “There is a resentment. The [WWII] battle was fought there, not on the mainland; Okinawa was the buffer.” Deadwood, South Dakota-born Hill, who currently spends much time in Hawaii and lived for years in her mother’s homeland, Japan, called Okinawa “cool, different, mystical.”

Jon Shirota’ s Voices From Okinawa currently runs at East West Players, David Henry Hwang Theater, 120 Judge John Aiso St., Los Angeles, from Feb. 13 -- March 9; 8 p.m. Wednesdays to Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Contact: 213/625-7000; info@eastwestplayers.org.