Hiro Kanagawa adapts a large-scale staging of Mark Sakamoto's moving memoir Forgiveness
Artful animation, scores of costumes help move between Japanese prison camp and internment trauma during World War II
Griffin Cork and Yoshie Bancroft; projection design by Cindy Mochizuki. Photo by David Cooper
Playwright Hiro Kanagawa
The Arts Club Theatre presents Forgiveness at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Theatre from January 12 to February 12
COVERING TWO CONTINTENTS and 30 years, Mark Sakamoto’s celebrated memoir of his grandparents during World War II was always going to be challenging to adapt as a play.
But when Vancouver-based playwright Hiro Kanagawa started to reframe the book Forgiveness for the stage just over four years ago, he could not have quite imagined the epic scale the production would take.
Now in the thick of finally bringing the Arts Club and Theatre Calgary coproduction to the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage, he marvels with a laugh: “It’s kind of preposterous what a technical challenge this show is!
“There are 100 costumes. There are 13 actors playing dozens of characters, and then animation and projections,” he explains. “I never imagined in all my wildest dreams that two of the largest theatre companies in Western Canada would go in and devote such tremendous resources to every aspect of the production.”
The Canada Reads-winning memoir puts two stories in parallel: that of Ralph, Sakamoto’s maternal grandfather, a Canadian soldier of European descent who spent years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp; and that of Mitsue, Sakamoto’s paternal grandmother, who was one of thousands of Japanese Canadians interned by the Canadian government during the war. It follows not just that trauma, but their journey to forgiveness when they had families of their own.
Aside from the technical demands of telling the story, its basis in real, human experience also lent some pressure to the task of Kanagawa (who penned the Governor-General’s Literary Award-winning Indian Arm, as well as the critically lauded Tiger of Malaya and The Patron Saint of Stanley Park).
“Responsibility is a word that has come up for me in so many aspects,” he relates. “One, there’s a responsibility to the source material. Two, there’s a responsibility to the people who love that original book. Three, there’s a responsibility to Mark and his family. And then there’s just the responsibility to write a good play, which means you do have to take liberties.”
One of the highlights of that journey for Kanagawa has been meeting Sakamoto and his family—including not just the author’s father and uncle, but former soldier and prisoner of war Ralph McLean, who passed away in 2020 at an astounding 97 years old.
Still, he says of the art of adaptation: “You can’t do a note-for-note rendition and have people really satisfied with that. You have to make it your own thing.
“More important is to reach the emotional core of what made the book successful in the first place,” he emphasizes, “and to me that was the tremendous courage of Ralph and Mitsue, their grace and kindness and faith in humanity and their love of family and love of home.”
Conveying those emotional truths yet also bringing to life the historical and geographical facts of the story led to working with projected video design and animation by Vancouver-based Japanese-Canadian artist Cindy Mochizuki.
“We wanted to emphasize that these events happened—I’m still shocked to find out that many people still don’t know about the Japanese Canadian internment, or the Japanese American internment,” Kanagawa begins. “Rather than lean on a mishmash of archival images and newsreel footage, it occurred to me that animation was a medium that could work better with theatre, which is also a more expressionistic medium.
“Cindy reminded us that animation made so much sense because Japanese Canadians had their cameras confiscated, so that so much of our visual understanding is from drawings and sketches that people made.” He adds that Canadian POWs also had to make surreptitious sketches of their experiences.
Meaningfully, a large body of Mochizuki’s work has investigated her own family history of trauma and displacement around the Japanese Canadian internment. That combines with the personal history of director Stafford Arima, whose own father and his family were interned in Slocan, B.C.
Together, they join a strong and inspired Japanese Canadian team on Forgiveness—one that also includes actors Yoshie Bancroft, June Fukumura, Manami Hara, and Kevin Takahide Lee, and that draws talent from both Vancouver and Calgary.
That has Kanagawa, who is also a well-known TV, film, and stage actor, reflecting on his own journey. He recalls a quote from celebrated Japanese Canadian author Joy Kogawa: “She said in an interview, ‘Lord, I’m so tired of being a professional ethnic.’ There’s no taking off the skin when you get home.
“When I was a younger man I really wanted to not be a ‘professional ethnic’,” Kanagawa explains. “I didn’t want to be pigeonholed into being an artist who would talk about Japanese Canadian experience or Asian experience. I thought that was one of the least interesting thing about myself and I felt I had so many other things to talk about and express.
“So for many years I didn’t engage with Japanese Canadian experience or history in my work. Now, partly because of my advanced age,” he continues with a laugh, “I occupy a more senior place in my community now, and also with anti-Asian hate and just the social and political divisiveness in the world, it became more important that I did engage in that aspect of my identity. And this project, fortuitously, gave me that opportunity. As I was writing it and putting this production together, COVID happened and all these events of the last two or three years made everything we’re talking about seem so much more vital and relevant.”
All that has given Kanagawa and his team the strength to push through the daunting final technical rehearsals for this ambitious premiere, which will travel to Calgary next. Says the playwright: “I’m in awe of the talent and the energy and hard work that so many people are bringing to this project. As they say, 'it takes a village'—and it really does take a small village to put this on, with all the artists and craftspeople and theatre administrators. So many people have put everything they have into this.”
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