By Mark Friedman, RL contributor, environmental and labor activist in the Torrance Refinery Action Alliance
There is a lot a musical about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II has to carry in the age of Trump. Allegiance, the musical utilizes a deep talent pool of under-utilized Asian American talent in song, dance and acting chops.
The cast of characters featured George Takei, of famed Star Trek Sulu, as well as phenomenal young actors Elena Wang, Ethan Le Phong, Hannah Campbell, Frank Suzuki and others.
Allegiance revisits the history that was set in motion by United States’ entry into World War II and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s issuance of Executive Order 9066, which gave the War secretary power to define military zones from which people could be excluded. Ultimately, 120,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast, most of who were native-born, were forced to abandon their homes and property to be relocated to inland camps.
The musical tells this story through the experience of the fictional Kimura family, farmers from Salinas, Calif. The Kimura family could just have easily been abalone farmers off the San Pedro peninsula or fishermen based on Terminal Island.
At a time when the current administration is continuing and escalating the policy of deportation of immigrants who have served in this country’s armed forces, ripping families with no connection to violent crime and the deportation of youth born in the United States, retracting the promise of citizenship.
Allegiance director, Snehal Desai, drew a clear line connecting the justification used to get Japanese Americans to comply with executive order during World War II and the policies the Trump Administration has used against Muslim Americans.
“In this era of Muslim bans and discriminatory immigration policies, there could not be a more vital and important time to bring Allegiance home to Los Angeles, and especially Little Tokyo, where so many still remember the day when the US government forced their families to leave their communities and homes.”
The family patriarch, Tatsuo (played by Scott Watanabe), built the farm from nothing and dreams of a better life for his children: Sammy (Ethan Le Phong), whom he’s pushing to be a lawyer, and Kei (Elena Wang), who ended up raising Sammy after their mother died. Further bonding the family is Tatsuo’s father (Takei).
Allegiance attempts to recall the anguish and conflict Japanese Americans where on the one hand, they felt the patriotic pull to “do their part” as Americans by enduring the war effort. The other side of that anguish, however, is the unwillingness to swallow injustice as Americans, born and reared in the United States. In Allegiance, this played out in the divisions between those who refused to sign a loyalty oath (Scott Watanabe) and those who chose to enlist in the U.S. Army.
There were divisions within the Japanese population, between those who refused to sign a loyalty oath (Scott Watanabe), and others who enlisted in the army to prove their loyalty to the United States (Ethan Le Phong playing a young George Takei). Those who refused to sign the loyalty questionnaire (designed to divide the community) were sent to special prison camps for “troublemakers.”
There and elsewhere they resisted, organized demonstrations in the camps, smuggled letters out to newspapers, burned their draft cards. Some were killed in the camps, especially at Tule Lake. Those who fought to enlist in the military to prove their patriotism were put in all Japanese regiments led by white officers.
Though prevented from serving in the Pacific theater, Japanese American regiments like the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion served with distinction. The choices they made aren’t much different from the ones immigrant soldiers who defended American interests abroad in our most recent wars.
Original songs interspersed with spoken dialogue gave the audience an appreciation for the actors’ capabilities while clarifying historical developments. While Allegiance aims to be a Japanese American story told by Asian Americans, it still recognized instances of the ally-ship of white workers. One notable portrayal was the white nurse (Natalie Holt McDonald) assigned to the camp who not only medically and later politically aided the family (although she was forbidden to), but ended up falling in love with the protagonist, as a youth, played by Ethan Le Phong.
Se Hyun Ho and Adam Flemming should probably win set design awards for their use of projected images that aided in providing continuity Allegiance’s storytelling. Among the imagery used was the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki—bombings that were justified as a means of hastening the end of the war. This was despite the fact that Japan had agreed to surrender through a Russian brokered peace.
The play’s narrative and songs were inspiring. The songs refrain “it is up to us to save ourselves. We are ready to fight.” A clear clarion for what all of us must do today in this decade long period of grinding assaults on working people, on our living standards and health and devastation of the environment.