Cast of the MRTE production of The Cocktail Party

Poster for the UH-Mānoa production.

Fay Ann Chun (Yōko) has a Master of Fine Arts degree in dance from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Scripps College. She has studied and performed with Dances We Dance, Bluewater Dance Company, and Tangentz Performance Group.

Dann Seki (Mr. Uehara) and Fay Ann Chun (Yōko).

Dann Seki (Mr. Uehara)  (Mr. Uehara) is a stage and screen actor and storyteller. A member of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, he has appeared in numerous plays on the stages of most of the theatres in Honolulu. His TV and film credits include many productions filmed in Hawai‘i, including Hawaii Five-O, Lychee Thieves, The Informant, Max’s Special Delivery, Lost, Hawaii, North Shore, Baywatch Hawaii, Magnum, P.I., Crowfoot, And the Sea Will Tell, and Savage Beach. Developing as a storyteller since 1994, he has performed at various venues on Oahu and the Neighbor Islands.

Ben Moffat  (Mr. Miller/Ben Miller) is a freelance performer, storyteller, and writer based in Hawai‘i and Wisconsin. A founding member of the dance-theater troupe Monkey Waterfall, he taught theater at Windward Community College for over twenty years.

Nyla Fujii-Babb  (Helen Miller/Police Officer) has been a storyteller, actress, voice-over talent, and producer for over forty years in Hawai‘i. As an actress, she has appeared on stage for the Kumu Kahua Theatre Company, the Honolulu Theatre for Youth, the Japan-America Theatre, and the Emerson Majestic Theatre. Her television credits include voice-over narration for the KHET/Tom Coffman production of Nation Within: The Overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, the Biography Hawaii series Koji Ariyoshi, and Tom Coffman’s The First Battle: The Battle for Equality in War Time Hawaii. Most recently, she was in the Mānoa Readers/Theatre Ensemble’s productions of Dharamvir Bharati’s Andha Yug and Musings of Mystery and Alphabets of Agony: The Work of Edward Gorey.

Nyla Fujii-Babb (Helen Miller/police officer) and James Phelps (Mr. Morgan/Ben Harris).

James Phelps  (Mr. Morgan/Robert Harris) is following in the footsteps of his musician and educator father and has been a percussionist and educator for over fifteen years. His music has allowed him to travel extensively throughout North America and Canada. Currently a music specialist at Waiau Elementary in Pearl City, he enjoys sharing his musical talents with kids.

Doug Kaya  (Mr. Yang) teaches communication courses at Leeward Community College and is a senior mediator with the Mediation Center of the Pacific.

Dennis Nishihara  (Mr. Ogawa) retired from the Department of Education after serving as a counselor on Maui, Moloka’i, the Big Island, and O‘ahu for over thirty years. He was named Counselor of the Year by the Hawai’i School Counselor Association in 1979, and in 2005 was given HMSA’s Ola Pono Award for services to the community and the Hawai’i Counselor Association’s Counselor of the Year Award.

University of Hawai‘i Press

Our publisher, UH Press, has a beautiful new website as well as blogs on its books and journals. Posted at the book blog is an announcement of the world premiere of Ōshiro Tatsuhiro’s The Cocktail Party, first published in Living Spirit.

MANOA Journal at 2011 Okinawan festival

We participated in the 2011 Okinawan festival at Kapi‘olani Park by selling copies of Living Spirit and Voices from Okinawa. Hosting us in the cultural tent were Joyce Chinen and Lynette Teruya, of the Center for Okinawan Studies. Our thanks to them and to all who supported HUOA and us by purchasing copies. We sold almost a hundred thanks to their generosity.

Frank Stewart and Katsunori Yamazato, editors of the Okinawan volumes.

Living Spirit featured in Ryukyu Shimpo

An article by Frank Stewart, coeditor of Living Spirit, appeared in the August 8, 2011, edition of the Ryukyu Shimpo, a newspaper published in Okinawa. Madoka Nagado, a graduate student in the English department of the University of Hawai‘i–Manoa, translated the piece into Japanese for the newspaper.

Living Spirit at Okinawan festival

Copies of Living Spirit and Voices from Okinawa will be sold at this year’s Okinawan festival (Sept. 3 and 4 at Kapi‘olani Park). Editors Frank Stewart and Katsunori Yamazato will be at the festival, signing copies. See coming issues of the Uchinanchu newsletter and Hawai‘i Herald for details.

World premiere of The Cocktail Party

The play by Oshiro Tatsuhiro based on his Akutagawa Prize–winning book will have its world premiere in Hawai‘i. There will be two performances in October: the first at the Hawai‘i Okinawa Center (in Waipio) and the second at Orvis Auditorium (on the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa campus).

This is the third in a series of events MANOA Journal has produced with the Manoa Readers/Theatre Ensemble and UHM Outreach College. Other sponsors include the UHM Center for Okinawan Studies, the University of Hawai‘i Japan Studies Endowment, and the Manoa Foundation. Sponsor of the HOC performance is the Hawai‘i United Okinawan Association.

The UHM event will include a panel discussion of the humanities issues in the play. This portion of the project is sponsored by the Hawai‘i Council for the Humanities with support from the “We the People” initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Mr. Oshiro will be participating, along with Frank Stewart and Katsunori Yamazato, the editors of Living Spirit.

We’ll post more information on this wonderful event as we get closer to the performance dates.

Living Spirit

We are very happy to announce the summer 2011 issue of MANOA: Living Spirit: Literature & Resurgence in Okinawa. A companion volume to Voices from Okinawa (published in 2009), Living Spirit is a collection of compelling prose and poetry representative of the Okinawan renaissance that began in the 1960s. Katsunori Yamazato, who worked with us on Voices, again serves as guest editor.

The authors include Kathy Foley, Kawamitsu Shinichi, Makiminato Tokuzo, Matayoshi Eiki, Medoruma Shun, Nagado Eikichi, Nakawaka Naoko, Nobuko Miyama Ochner, Oshiro Sadatoshi, Oshiro Tatsuhiro, Sakiyama Tami, Takara Ben, Tamagusuku Chokun, Unna Nabii, Yamanoguchi Baku, Yonaha Mikio, and Yushiya Chiruu. Photographs by Higa Yasuo from his book Maternal Deities comprise the art. The images are of sacred religious rites conducted in the islands by women.

The contemporary fiction includes three recipients of Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize—Oshiro, Medoruma, and Matayoshi—in addition to Nagado, Nakawaka, and Sakiyama, who has been nominated twice for the prize.

Other works include contemporary and traditional poetry, drama, songs, and essays. The modern poets are Yamanoguchi, Kawamitsu, Yonaha, Makiminato, and Takara. Playwrights are Oshiro and Tamagusuku. Traditional pieces include ryuka by Yushiya and Unna, folk songs, and shaman songs. The essays are by Oshiro Sadatoshi, Foley, and Ochner.

One major thing that makes Living Spirit different from Voices is that we worked with translators in Okinawa and the United States: David Fahy (Univ. of California at Davis), Hitoshi Hamagawa (Okinawa Christian University), Kyle Ikeda (Univ. of Vermont), Ochner (Univ. of Hawai‘i), Madoka Nagado (Univ. of Hawai‘i), Tomoko Shinjo, Takuma Sminkey (Okinawa International University), Buntaro Taira, Wesley Iwao Ueunten (San Francisco State University), and Yamazato (Univ. of the Ryukyus).

Our thanks to everyone for helping to make this beautiful book possible.

Children, I’m singing you the story of Miyako
the beautiful, the blue, the deepening indigo,
and the red soil made from crushed bodies
that lay down their genealogy of bones
—Their spirits are whispering to you: all of this is what is.

from “The Ocean of the Dead” by Yonaha Mikio

Generous support for Living Spirit was provided by the Hawai‘i Council for the Humanities, Hawai‘i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, Manoa Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, University of Hawai‘i Center for Okinawan Studies, and The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. Special thanks to Dexter and Valerie Teruya for their support.

If you would like to order a copy, you can do so at the University of Hawai‘i Press website or MANOA’s.

A Gem of a Review

Karleen C. Chinen, editor of the Hawaii Herald, reviewed Voices from Okinawa in the August 21, 2009, edition of her newspaper. Subtitled “A Gem of a Book for the Eye and the Soul,” the review begins with these stirring words:

Every time an elder passes, a library is lost.

This African saying came to mind as I read the personal essays that make up Voices from Okinawa, the latest edition of Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing.

Thanks to the foresight of co-editors Frank Stewart, series editor for Manoa Journal, and Katsunori Yamazato, professor of American literature at the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa, an important part of five “libraries” has been preserved in a collection that captures the Okinawan experience in the post-plantation era. In their own voices, Hawai‘i Okinawans June Arakawa, Philip Ige, Mitsugu Sakihara, Jon Shirota and Seiyei Wakukawa share their experiences as Okinawans.…

Together, the writers’ stories paint a well-rounded picture of Okinawan identity—their love for their music and dance, but also the issues that have conflicted them. Voices is a journey inside the heart and soul of the Uchinanchu.

Photo by Christina Liu.

Chinen summarizes some of the pieces and quotes from others, ending her review with the reflections of Stewart:

“Each of these people deserves a prominent place in the memory of Hawai‘i as a community of immigrants. Their stories are all different, but each shows the resilience of Okinawans to persist in bettering themselves and the community as a whole.”

Mitsugu Sakihara (third from right) shown here with then Lieutenant Governor Mazie Hirono (photo courtesy of K. Chinen).

Our deepest thanks to Karleen Chinen for bringing Voices to the attention of Hawaii Herald readers.

Mensooree (Welcome)

Voices from Okinawa is the summer 2009 issue of MANOA, an international literary journal published by the University of Hawai‘i Press. Over 200 pages long, Voices features the following:

• three plays and an essay by Jon Shirota, a Nisei novelist and playwright born in Hawai‘i;
• two essays by Mitsugu Sakihara, an Issei university professor and historian;
• an interview with Seiyei Wakukawa, an Issei journalist, historian, and activist;
• an interview with June Hiroko Arakawa, a Kibei Nisei who was a prominent community figure;
• an essay by Philip K. Ige, a Nisei writer born in Hawai‘i; and
• art from the Sakamaki/Hawley Collection of Hamilton Library, of the University of Hawai‘i.

To purchase a copy, please visit our order page.

This blog, Voices from Okinawa Online, has been created to bring attention to

• MANOA’s summer 2009 issue;
• writing by Okinawans and Okinawan Americans; and
• Okinawa’s literature, culture, and history.