Photo Coverage: Broadway Bound ALLEGIANCE Staged Reading, 10/25

[ooliveros]

Posted: 10/29/10 at 7:00pm

https://philippines.broadwayworld.com/article/Photo_Coverage_Broadway_Bound_ALLEGIANCE_Staged_Reading_1025_20101029

[nomdeplume]

Posted: 10/29/10 at 8:03pm

They have some heavy-duty talent there.

I don't agree that the subject is unknown, however, as there was a huge U.S. payout of compensation to interned Japanese Americans. While it may not have been close to recovering what some interned persons may have lost financially, it was still huge by government payout standards given that it was a voluntary rather than a forced payment and that even those who were infants at the time qualified for the payment.

For me, the story of what Japan's soldiers did to Filipinos and U.S. soldiers and civilians in the Philippines, the vile and systematic slaughter, rape and torture of hundreds of thousands of people, is a much bigger story. And it has not been fully told due to the physical destruction, loss of life and the unimaginable trauma following, which pushed the gruesome details into a shunned silence as far from consciousness as possible, to enable the poor survivors to walk forward in their lives.

And in an immense scandal happening right now, the majority of Philippine Supreme Court justices (chosen by former President Arroyo) are supporting one of their own's plagiarism which twists the intellectual work of foreign legal human rights experts to deny relief and compensation to elderly women who were forced to be sex slaves by the Japanese military in WWII. At least there are two decent Justices on that court, both women and the newest a President Benigno Aquino appointee, who have scathed both the deceitful reasoning of the majority and the plagiarism.

I am thinking this, though seemingly unrelated to the American Japanese side of the story, might be a great talk-back for after show because both scenarios involve issues of human rights regarding Asians and WWII and it is a startling current event in the Philippines.

You can't just say that the U.S. decided to take this action for the purpose of being big, bad racists. The U.S. was responding to the decimation of its Pacific fleet and airplanes by a surprise Japanese attack in Pearl Harbor one day, and the Philippines the next and a quick Japanese move to conquer and dominate Asia, Southeast Asia, even the Pacific islands.

I was told by an elderly Filipina, whose grandparents had been slaughtered by the Japanese during WWII in the backyard of the hotel in which I was staying in Manila, that the Japanese were especially angry at the end of the war because the Filipinos hated them and liked the Americans better and that the Japanese were tremendous racists who believed the Filipinos should have preferred them to the Americans because Filipinos were also of an Asian race.
Filipina Sex Slaves of the Japanese and Philippine Supreme Court Scandal Updated On: 10/30/10 at 08:03 PM

[wonkit]

Posted: 10/29/10 at 8:04pm

Looks intriguing but since when is a "staged reading" a reading on a stage? Isn't that just a reading?


Updated On: 10/29/10 at 08:04 PM

[canmark]

Posted: 10/29/10 at 10:28pm

I think this is an important story to tell and wish the show much success. My own Japanese-Canadian parents were interned in Canada, despite being children at the time, born in Canada. So I know something of the lessons of this type of story.

Despite this show being about a lesser-known aspect of American history, it is very timely. Following a catastrophic event (Pearl Harbor), Japanese-Americans (and Japanese-Canadians) were looked on with suspicion, despite being natural born citizens. We might see a parallel today in that, following 9/11, Muslim-Americans are looked on with suspicion by some people. Look at the outrage over the "9/11 mosque," despite the fact that it is a to be a community center built by and for American citizens.

So, just as Japanese-Americans (men, women and children) had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor and certainly didn't deserve to be stripped of their rights as citizens and sent to interment camps, let's not do the same to people who had nothing to do with 9/11.

We must not let hysteria deprive us of reason and fairness--and whether people are Muslim or Mexican, Irish or Jewish, Catholic or gay... or any combination: we can't discriminate against an entire group for the actions of others.

And these politicians who are whipping up fear are doing the same things that the politicians did those many year ago... and the result was that an entire community of citizens were imprisoned for doing nothing wrong.

[nomdeplume]

Posted: 10/29/10 at 11:54pm

Enemy aliens would not have rights. So I think part of the question was determining who your enemy aliens or enemy sympathizers were or could be and later the question became how can you do that with persons born in the U.S. or who have become citizens (though theoretically a citizenship gained under false pretenses could be revoked). With German Americans it was much harder since Germans had been in the U.S. for centuries in large numbers and had intermarried a lot such that a quarter of the population then was part German. The Pennsylvania "Dutch" for example, are not Dutch but Deutsche, of German descent.

The Japanese were more recent immigrants. Not all Japanese, even those born in Japan, were interned. There were too many in Hawaii to intern. Some of them even worked at the Navy yard and were present during the Pearl Harbor attack, and continued to work there during the war, though under the presence of an armed guard. Where you lived made a difference.

In both cases numbers made a difference.

I don't know how far the comparison goes to the situation of Islamic/Islamist terrorism. You aren't really going to have an "enemy alien" comparison with the Islamists, as for one thing, it is not a question of an enemy nation or nationalism (except for some who claim this idea of a great world Caliphate they want to create). Other Moslems say the Islamists are not Moslem because they misinterpret Islam. To the extent there was a racial component to the Japanese internment, Moslems and Islamist terrorists can be and have been many races, so I'm not sure of the comparison there. Plus, if the interpretation of a particular religion is underlying terrorist acts, then infiltrating or working with the religion's adherents to locate the extremists would become the way to find them, wouldn't it? Is that discrimination or common sense? Which would mean that "discriminating" in such a situation to solve a problem would not be an unlawful act. So then you have to define what kinds of discrimination are unlawful. And on it goes. Well, that's democracy in its ongoing process of evolution.

It's certainly a good question to ask how far can and should a nation in wartime protect its interest in surviving versus the interests of its individual citizens. The draft versus conscientious objectors, for example.