In October 2003, Philip Kan Gotanda’s A Song for a Nisei Fisherman, in a new translation by Toyoshi Yoshihara, was performed at Tokyo’s Maple Leaf Theater under the direction of Takehisa Kaiyama.
By 1992, I had been trying unsuccessfully to get my works produced in Japan for some 20 years. I was getting discouraged. At one point the Mark Taper Forum of Los Angeles was approached by a large Tokyo presenter who was looking to bring American plays to Japan. The Taper suggested A Song for a Nisei Fisherman, written by me, a Japanese American. The Japanese presenter made it quite clear, however, that he was not interested in works by a Japanese-American writer. This about summed up my experiences in this endeavor.
Nevertheless, last year, my wife, Diane Takei, and I attended a production of Nisei Fisherman in Tokyo. After one performance, I sat on a panel of Japanese scholars who specialized in studying Japanese-American works. The next day a well-known theatre in Japan committed to presenting my play The Sisters Matsumoto. Interesting. After all this time, I was being discovered in Japan.
I’ve had a long and curious history with my Japanese roots. Raised by parents imprisoned in internment camps during World War II, I grew up in a household that was ambivalent about its place in American society. As I grew older, that ambivalence translated into a sense of dislocation. Where did I fit in?
In the early ’70s, I traveled to Japan in search of answers. None were forthcoming, of course. Ideas about national identity, race and culture were still in the process of being formulated. In part, my conflicted sense of wanting the Japanese to accept me as one of them—to acknowledge my American-born world as separate from, yet as authentic as, theirs—made my quest impossible.
Why, some 20 years later, are my works are being translated, studied and produced in Japan? Perhaps Japan is finally contending with the internal changes the outside world has wrought to its homogeneity. The Japanese people must now ask how they fit into this world of shifting national origins and racial ambiguity. And what better way than to look to their distant cousi’ns, the Japanese who left so many generations before?
Japanese-Americans are foreign and yet familiar—for the Japanese born, they are “of us” and yet can tell much about cross-cultural and interracial life beyond Japan’s borders.
So this is how I find myself sitting in the Sanbyakunin Theater in the Sengoku area of Tokyo watching Nisei Fisherman with a house full of Japanese. Yes, the actors are Asian and they’re speaking nihongo, but, hey, I know the story, so with my limited vocabulary, I’m doing just fine. They even have three gaijin actors speaking fluent Japanese to play the white roles. The director does add a prologue and epilogue to help frame the historical context as well as underscore the injustice of the U.S. government’s actions. All fine.
The audience response in Tokyo is not much different than that in New York or Los Angeles, though I do sense, at times, a blurring between what is Japanese and American-Japanese. There is always a need to identify with the characters and make them your own, after all, and in my works that is not much of a distance to travel. How ironic. Twenty years ago I came here wanting to identify with the Japanese—wanting answers to my American life. Today, this audience is identifying with my world, perhaps looking for answers to their nation’s rapidly changing face.
San Francisco-based playwright Philip Kan Gotanda lived and worked in the pottery village of Mashiko in Japan for two years in the early ’70s. The Mingei Theatre’s production of The Sisters Matsumoto will debut June 18 at Tokyo’s Kinokuniya Theatre.
