On familiar ground with 'Voices From Okinawa'
The frequent East West Players collaborator looks at U.S. guns overseas in his new play.
Throughout his life, author and playwright Jon Shirota has been exploring the meaning of identity. The 80-year-old's newest work examines the relationship between U.S. and Okinawan culture in a present-day setting that evokes several parallels with the current war in Iraq.
"Voices From Okinawa" tells the story of Kama, an American of one-quarter Okinawan descent who receives his own cultural education as he teaches English to local Okinawans struggling with their relationship to American military GIs. The dramedy has its world premiere Feb. 13 at East West Players.
The idea for the play came after Shirota received a grant from the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts to do research on immigration in Okinawa in 2005, a project he conceived because he wanted to explore his own family history.
"While I was there, I was lecturing to an American literature class at the University of the Ryukyus, and realized there's a play here about the students," Shirota says. "The story is set in 2005, and as the students tell their stories, we learn about the attitude of today's young people toward the military."
Starting to write
Because of its strategic location in the Pacific, Okinawa is home to U.S. military bases housing tens of thousands of U.S. troops. Local residents have protested the U.S. presence over the years, pointing to criminal activity and rapes of women by American soldiers and the loss of Okinawan culture.
Shirota, who grew up in Maui, says his father left Okinawa in 1907, along with three brothers, and became a pineapple grower on Maui. Although the three brothers eventually returned to Okinawa, Shirota's family stayed in Hawaii.
"There were eight kids in my family, and we didn't want to go back to Okinawa because we'd heard so many negative things after the war. People were virtually starving. But when you're young, you think it doesn't have anything to do with your life," he says. "After spending six months in Okinawa, I began to appreciate all my father went through."
Shirota was drafted in January 1946, four months after the war ended, and served a three-year hitch with the U.S. Army, the last year in occupied Kobe, Japan. "The Japanese had accepted defeat, and their immediate goal was to restore a semblance of order to their lives," Shirota recalls. "If there was any resentment toward us, because we were Japanese in American uniforms, they kept it to themselves."
