Showing results by narrator "Greg Watanabe" in All Categories

80-something Dan Yamada has been rendered speechless after a stroke, and as he lies in bed, he vividly recalls his life, from his days in the World War 2-era internment camps, to serving in the US Army, to his one true love. At his bedside in the present, his adult children fight over his care and legacy, all while Dan tries to communicate his poignant final wish.

One by one, Tahir Hamut Izgil's friends disappeared. The Chinese government's brutal persecution of the Uyghur people had continued for years, but in 2017 it assumed a terrifying new scale. The Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority group in western China, were experiencing an echo of the worst horrors of the twentieth century. Over a million people have vanished into China's internment camps for Muslim minorities. Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is the story of the political, social, and cultural destruction of Tahir Hamut Izgil's homeland.

Dr Cliff Miyashiro arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue his recently deceased daughter’s research, only to discover a virus, newly unearthed from melting permafrost. The plague unleashed reshapes life on earth for generations. Yet even while struggling to counter this destructive force, humanity stubbornly persists in myriad moving and ever inventive ways. From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead, this story follows a cast of intricately linked characters spanning hundreds of years as humanity endeavours to restore the delicate balance of the world.

Japan 1945. Taro is a talented violinist and a kamikaze pilot in the days before his first and only mission. He believes he is ready to die for his country, until he meets Hana. Hana hasn't been the same since the day she was buried alive in a collapsed trench during a bomb raid. She wonders if it would have been better to have died that day, until she meets Taro. A song will bring them together. The war will tear them apart. Is it possible to live an entire lifetime in eight short days?

Isamu Noguchi is one of the most important sculptors of all time. His Akari lamps changed the way modern buildings light their space. But before he was important, he was a kid. This is his story. Noguchi was a Japanese American artist who gave the world light. The world, however, was not always so giving in return. Growing up mixed-race, born in the United States but raised in Japan, Noguchi found himself perceived as an outsider who did not belong in either country

They thought she was the victim, but they're the ones in danger.... Imagine a helpless, pregnant 16-year-old who's just been yanked from the serenity of her home and shoved into a dirty van. Kidnapped.... Alone.... Terrified. Now forget her.... Picture instead a pregnant, 16-year-old, manipulative prodigy. She is shoved into a dirty van and, from the first moment of her kidnapping, feels a calm desire for two things: to save her unborn son and to exact merciless revenge.

Tomi was born in Hawaii. His grandfather and parents were born in Japan and came to America to escape poverty. World War II seems far away from Tomi and his friends, who are too busy playing ball on their eighth-grade team, the Rats. But then Pearl Harbor is attacked by the Japanese, and the United States declares war on Japan. Japanese men are rounded up, and Tomi’s father and grandfather are arrested. It’s a terrifying time to be Japanese in America. But one thing doesn’t change: the loyalty of Tomi’s buddies, the Rats.

Are we stuck with our memories–or can we fix them? Pia is a neuroscientist whose research focuses on changing the way we process traumatic experiences. Will Pia’s emotionally distant mother–who survived the Khmer Rouge in 1970’s Cambodia–benefit from her daughter’s work? Or are some things just too terrible to remember?

After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the US government sent thousands of Japanese American citizens to detention camps. In 1945, three Japanese-American sisters return to their farm in Stockton, California, after years in an internment camp, but the once prosperous family finds it’s not easy to pick up the pieces of their former lives. As the details of their deceased father’s final arrangements emerge, the sisters must work together to keep their dreams alive.   

A Gesture Life is the story of an upstanding citizen who has come to epitomize the decorous values of his New York suburban town. Courteous, honest, hardworking, and impenetrable, Franklin Hata, a Japanese man of Korean birth, is careful never to overstep his boundaries and to make his neighbors comfortable in his presence. Yet, precipitated by the small events surrounding him, we see his life begin to unravel. Gradually we learn the mystery that has shaped the core of his being: his terrible, forbidden love for a young Korean Comfort Woman when he served as a medic in the Japanese army during World War II.

This anthology presents a new vision that recovers and reframes the literature produced by the people targeted by the actions of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress to deny Americans of Japanese ancestry any individual hearings or other due process after the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. From nearly seventy selections of fiction, poetry, essays, memoirs, and letters emerges a shared story of the struggle to retain personal integrity in the face of increasing dehumanization—all anchored by the key government documents that incite the action.

Ethan, a young lawyer in New York, learns that his father has long kept a second family - a wife and two kids living in Queens. In the aftermath of this revelation, Ethan's mother spends a year travelling abroad, returning much changed, just as her now ex-husband falls ill. Across town, Ethan's half brothers are caught in their own complicated journeys: one brother's penchant for minor delinquency has escalated, and the other must travel to Bangkok to bail him out, while the bargains their mother struck about love and money continue to shape all their lives.

Twelve-year-old Ted Gerson has spent most of his summer playing video games. So when his great-uncle dies and bequeaths him all the so-called treasure in his overstuffed junk shop of an apartment, Ted explores it like it's another level to beat. And to his shock, he finds that eccentric Great-Uncle Ted actually has set the place up like a real-life escape-the-room game!

A team of lawyers uses a little-known legal writ to fight and overturn the conviction of Fred Korematsu, unjustly sentenced for resisting the WWII mass incarceration of all Japanese Americans on the West Coast. The play draws much inspiration from Enduring Conviction: Fred Korematsu and His Quest for Justice by Lorraine K. Bannai (University of Washington Press 2015) and Justice Delayed by Peter Irons (Wesleyan University Press 1989).

During WWII in Seattle, University of Washington student Gordon Hirabayashi fights the US government's orders to forcibly remove and incarcerate all people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast. As he struggles to reconcile his country's betrayal with his passionate belief in the US Constitution, Gordon begins a 50-year journey toward a greater understanding of America's triumphs - and a confrontation with its failures.

Zenji Wgraduates from high school in Hawaii and is recruited into the army as a translator because he speaks perfect Japanese. He is sent to Manila undercover as a civilian to gather information on the Japanese in the Philippines. If they discover his identity, he’ll be executed as a traitor. When captured, he maintains that he is an American civilian despite unthinkable torture. He also survives being lost in the jungle for months.

Saigon has fallen, and two Vietnamese refugees meet in an Arkansas relocation camp before setting out on a rip-roaring road trip across America. Qui Nguyen tells the hilarious and only slightly not-true version of how his parents met and built a life for themselves in a new land. Recorded before a live audience at the UCLA James Bridges Theater in February 2020.

Ken Narasaki's adaptation of the novel by Japanese American author John Okada is set during the aftermath of the US government's incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II and the resettlement of Japanese Americans to the West Coast. In the play, Ichiro returns to Seattle, where he struggles to transition into post-war life.