LOS ANGELES — Little Tokyo’s JACCC Aratani Theatre hosted the world premiere of a new opera, in English, about a Japanese-American family wrongfully placed in a concentration camp in 1942. The forced move was part of a mass incarceration in 10 different camps following the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. As many as 120,000 Japanese Americans of all ages—immigrants from Japan and naturalized and U.S.-born citizens alike—were rounded up and sent to poorly and hastily equipped, unheated barracks dotted across the American West and Midwest. The opera pays homage to the collective suffering of these people and power of collective resistance to injustice.
Although restrictions against Japanese Americans were revoked when World War II ended, the last internment camp to close, the Tule Lake Segregation Center, lasted until March 1946. Operated during World War II by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), many of those camps continued to be held by the government, which was prepared to use them for the mass detention of radicals during the Cold War witch hunt and red scare.
The two-act opera features a rhyming libretto by Lionelle Hamanaka, and a rich score by L.A.-based composer Daniel Kessner. The venue for four performances in late Feb. and early March was the Aratani Theatre operated by the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center. We attended on March 1—and happened to be seated right behind the well-known Japanese-American actor George Takei.
The Camp centers the Shimono family from Southern California. Mas (baritone Roberto Perlas Gomez), a fisherman and the head of the household, is arrested by the FBI on suspicion of espionage—since he owns a boat at Long Beach’s Terminal Island! The scene of his being taken away for who knew how long recalls a similar scene in the Oscar-winning Brazilian film I’m Still Here. After several months, during which he has suffered permanent damage to a foot, the family is reunited in a desolate incarceration camp, one square mile of mud and dust with 10,000 prisoners. The rest of the family consists of his wife Haruko (mezzo Alexandra Bass), and daughters Suzuko/Suzy (soprano Tiffany Ho) and Rebecca (soprano Habin Kim.)
At the camp we meet other internees: Nobu, a classmate and suitor of Suzy (Patrick Tsoi-A-Sue), Krishna Raman in multiple roles as the Commentator, an FBI Agent, and PFC Parker, Sarah Wang as the busybody neighbor Mrs. Hosaka, Steve Moritsugu as Tana, Dennis Rupp as Edwards, an Anglo supervisor at the camp and as a Reverend, Hisato Masuyama as Kenji, and Jamie Sanderson as Taylor.
As months turn into years, the strain on the family is apparent, but they reconcile and pull together. In some ways, it is a coming of age story for the two girls, though the constant cold gives Rebecca a case of pneumonia which proves fatal. She dies at 12.
On February 19, three days before the first performance, the community honored the annual Day of Remembrance. On that date in 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, giving the U.S. Army the authority to remove civilians from designated “military zones” in Washington, Oregon, and California. From the Little Tokyo area, within blocks surrounding the Aratani Theatre, hundreds of families were loaded onto buses and carted off to concentration camps. No such similar action was taken against the millions of German and Italian Americans.
Conductor Steven F. Hofer led his cast of 11 singers and a 22-member orchestra. The stage director was Diana Wyenn, joined by associate director John Miyasaki, whose family was incarcerated at Manzanar Concentration Camp. Completing the creative and production teams were scenic designer Yuri Okahana-Benson, lighting designer Pablo Santiago, costume designer Kathleen Qui, props designer Brittany White, and stage managers Darlene Miyakawa and Anthony Rivera.
Librettist and composer
The principal creative talents behind this new opera merit a little further exposition. Lionelle Hamanaka was born in New York City, a Sansei whose American-born parents were incarcerated at a camp in Jerome, in southeastern Arkansas. Jerome and a companion camp less than 30 miles away at Rohwer were so large that briefly they were the fifth and sixth largest towns in the state. She studied Kabuki and Noh theater at Brooklyn College. Aside from her many acting and writing credits, she also devoted many years to a career as a jazz singer. Her father, character actor Conrad Yama, appeared in the original Broadway casts of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song and Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Pacific Overtures, as well as appearing in Frank Chin’s Year of the Dragon and Edward Albee’s Box-Mao-Box.
Composer Daniel Kessner, born in 1946 of Ukrainian Jewish heritage, grew up on the edge of L.A.’s Little Tokyo community after World War II. He was acutely aware of this dark chapter in U.S. history because of its impact on his childhood friends and their older family members. He later joined his high school friend Kerry Kunitomi Cababa on the annual pilgrimage to Manzanar in the Owens Valley, 225 miles northeast of L.A., and felt that the experience could find an expression in a contemporary opera.
Following his instinct, Kessner contacted the New York-based Hamanaka, and the result of their unique multi-year collaboration is The Camp.
“The concentration camps in the United States in World War II are a tragedy that Japanese Americans are still working to overcome and have recent historic relevance to the 12,000 racist attacks against Asian Americans nationally, as well as recent massive anti-immigrant threats,” says Hamanaka. “My own parents were in Jerome, but the incidents in the opera come from different camps—the arrest of Mr. Shimono, lack of medical care, food stolen from the kitchen, and conflict between political views of the inmates—but they hopefully reveal the humanity that connects us all.”
“My first opera,” Kessner recalls, “was written half a century ago, and yet I feel like my entire composing career was leading toward this opera, which sums up a lifetime of living among people whose lives were so impacted by a dark time in our nation’s history. Even though the events of this opera are tragic, there is a catharsis, a cleansing of the soul that takes place and is needed now.”
Kessner received a doctorate in composition at UCLA in 1971, and is now Emeritus Professor of Music at California State University, Northridge, where he taught composition and theory for 36 years. He maintains an active career as composer, flutist, and conductor. At an early time in his studies, which included a strong interest in Japanese music, he took up the shakuhachi, a Japanese longitudinal, end-blown flute made of bamboo. This instrument, as others used in Japanese music, is incorporated into his orchestra.
Listening to the opera, this background to the composer becomes evident to even a musically uninformed listener, who will immediately pick up the fusion of Western and Japanese instruments and techniques. The dominant attitude many internees adopted during their forced incarceration was one of forbearance, silent grit and internalized stoicism. Speaking out and protesting might bring down even further trouble. Many family members of the internees (like the woman sitting next to me) report that all through their growing up years they never even knew about their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences during the war. Twenty of her family members had endured the camps, which she only first learned about in a high school textbook.
This is an important point because the libretto and music of the opera are similarly restrained and temperate. Lovers of opera are accustomed to big, larger-than-life moments of passion in emotional solo arias, dramatic duets and rousing choruses. Instead, rather like Debussy and his opera Pelléas et Mélisande, with its pronounced Orientalist modalities, Kessner’s score, gorgeous as it is with its mixed tonalities, is even-paced, speech-like, generally non-melismatic (i.e., one note to a syllable), and non-virtuosistic—no trills and fancy roulades of spectacular vocalism.
Perhaps the average operagoer expecting such vocal display would miss these features of the standard opera repertoire, and lament how few moments of levity or humor are in the action. These qualities of The Camp may serve as a deterrent for future productions, for however well-intentioned it is, and however skillfully written, it is absent the high drama audiences anticipate when they purchase a ticket to the opera. It might find its place among operas geared toward student production.
A scene in the opera recalls the two questions asked of internees (especially of the men): Question 27, Would they serve in the armed forces of the United States exclusively and obey official commands; and Question 28, would they forswear allegiance to any other nation or power? Nobu, Suzy’s boyfriend, answers yes and yes, and we assume he goes on to serve in the mighty 442nd Regimental Combat Team, comprised of Japanese Americans, which served in the European Theater and became the most decorated unit in U.S. military history for its size and length of service. (Presumably after war, when he returns home, he and Suzy will marry and start a family.)
But the opera misses something when it doesn’t also reflect the answers some men gave, out of conscience: no and no. These No-Nos, American citizens, could not bring themselves to swear allegiance to a government that had placed them and their families in a miserable concentration camp without any formal charges while their farms, boats, businesses and homes were hastily sold off or left unattended. Reference is made to an “underground” at the camp: Leaflets are left in the latrines, so there is some resistance. There’s also a movement to defend Mas, who’s been accused of stealing sugar from the kitchen. Theater thrives on conflict, especially the heightened drama of opera. A No-No among the mise-en-scène might have given some welcome spark and energy to what was left a somewhat predictable narrative.
On Feb. 19, 1976, Pres. Ford officially repealed Executive Order 9066. But it still took another two decades to achieve even a small measure of justice. On Aug. 10, 1988, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Congress issued a formal apology and passed the Civil Liberties Act awarding $20,000 each to over 80,000 Japanese Americans as reparations for their treatment. What Republicans could once do!
What a great achievement, to write and produce a major opera of these proportions! To take a solemn subject like this and make something holy and reverential of it for the musical stage. The opera concludes with the cast addressing the audience: “Whose turn is it next time, yours or mine?”
A talkback after the final curtain featured three women, all children of camp survivors, relating stories of some of the family members they learned from, and concluding that resistance and advocacy must continue. In this moment of extreme political urgency, with raids and roundups and protests making headlines every day, the audience seemed to agree—heartily. Final word: “Tell your story!”
Bravi tutti!
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