Seeing Our Lives in Sakomoto’s The Life of the Land
Essay by A. Rey Pamatmat
Spencer: …I kinda get dat feeling, you know, but I still neva make up my mind yet. Maybe, just maybe, time to come home.
Max: Hawai’i calls to her native sons to return to her shores.
In The Life of the Land by Edward Sakamoto, Spencer Kamiya, a 47-year-old aerospace engineer living in Southern California, returns home to Hawai’i and reckons with the consequences of getting exactly what his teenage-self dreamed. As he realizes the cost of these dreams—that freeing himself from the bonds of family and the boundaries of an island also diminished his connection to both—his extended family frets over his older sister selling her father’s dream (a family construction business), his younger sister following her career dreams to the Middle East and Europe, and his teenage nephew announcing that he’ll decline acceptance to Yale to pursue his dream of taking over his grandfather’s nursery.
It's the story of many families… and yet, it isn’t.
The history of Japanese Americans in Hawai’i has shaped each generation of the Kamiya family differently and the degree to which an audience understands that history determines how deeply they understand each character. Colonialism made the immigration of Spencer’s grandparents possible but also limited their options for livelihood and for their personal/financial independence. Statehood, access to citizenship, ethnic identity, and the post-WWII shift to a tourist economy made his parents’ construction business possible, which in turn made Spencer’s USC education on the mainland possible. The setting of the play in the 1980s raises myriad other issues related to ideas of ethnicity, nationhood, gender roles, education, and opportunity that, while present in the play, are never explicitly described. The play’s dialogue even transitions seamlessly from English to Japanese to Hawaiian as these pidgin (or Hawai’i Creole)-speaking characters would do with little consideration made for a non-Japanese-Hawaiian ear.
Aki: …Spenca, you believe one haole can make good mishime?
…
Spencer: Hmm, ‘ōno.
As universal as the Kamiya family’s struggles are, the specifics in their portrayal decidedly are not. But why should they be?
This wondrous combination of the universal and specific is central to the play’s enduring legacy. All Asian American playwrights (and theatre artists) wrestle with the question: who is this for? Whether I do it consciously or not, when I write I must ask, am I writing for a Filipino American audience? A broader Asian American audience? A BIPOC one? A universal one? Or am I just writing for myself? The answer, of course, is: “It depends,”—day by day, play by play. And if anyone tries to limit me or any of us and the target(s) of our expression then they’re racist (kidding, not kidding).
Sakamoto’s plays give us and our audiences an excellent template for a way forward by focusing so sharply on the specifics of the stories that the universal takes care of itself. I connect deeply to The Life of the Land despite being nothing like Sakamoto or the Kamiyas. I’m not Hawaiian. Not of Japanese descent. Not even third/fourth generation nor hetero nor a parent. Yet here are a just a few of the plays moments that resonate for me:
- HOMECOMINGS AND GOINGS AND COMING AGAINS: There’s a scene in which Spencer is surprised when his mother Fumiko tells him that his now deceased father did not feel abandoned by him when he moved to the mainland. I similarly felt that my own parents were hiding ill sentiment toward me, particularly regarding my adoption of a career in the arts and my moves far from home. I needed to be reminded, as does Spencer, that my parents valued my independence, even as they misunderstood my career. How could they not when they themselves moved halfway around the world to build a life utterly alien to their own parents?
- CULTURAL REVERENCE FOR THE QUOTIDIEN: 18-year-old Daniel has a profound reverence for his grandfather Aki’s nursery and as mentioned wants to pass up college to take it over. Meanwhile Aki himself admits that he only fell into being a nurseryman because he didn’t have as many options as Daniel does today. There are so many traditions, games, foods, dances, and aesthetics that I link to my own Filipino (American)-ness that my mother could care less about. To me, a sungka game board is a treasured artifact worthy of display; to her, it’s a game she never remembers the rules to. To me, a rectangular tin of Spam is a Warhol-soup-can-level cultural icon; to her, it’s high in sodium and should be avoided at all costs.
- SIBLINGS: Like many with close siblings, the dynamics between siblings and parents endlessly fascinates me. Why does the child most like their parents (Spencer) usually have to get as far away as possible from them? Why does the child that is the most misunderstood by their parents (Laura) often spend all their energies trying to connect? And how do you get to be the child who does whatever they want (Debbie) without thinking too deeply about what their parents think?
The ways in which audiences of any background could relate to the Kamiyas are endless. Yet these connections do not come from any attempt to make their stories universal. They come from every attempt to portray these characters’ unique idiosyncrasies and feelings. And isn’t that what engages us in everyday life? We meet people who are not like us, get to know them, and then discover the ways in which we connect. Why should we want anything less engaging from our time at the theatre?
In making plays about and for very specific people, The Life of the Land and Sakamoto’s other plays—including The Taste of Kona Coffee and Mānoa Valley, which document earlier generations of the Kamiya clan—record histories that have been buried and preserve ideas of America that are taken for granted or ignored. Although I am not a native of their shores, I enjoyed reconnecting with these classics through The Refocus Project and know future audiences will, too.
EDWARD SAKAMOTO (1940-2015) was born and raised in Hawai’I before moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career in journalism and playwriting. He wrote 19 plays depicting the Asian-Hawaiian experience. His most popular plays include Aloha Las Vegas, Our Hearts Were Touched with Fire, and his Hawaiʻi No Ka Oi trilogy (The Taste of Kona Coffee, Mānoa Valley, and The Life of the Land.) His plays have been performed nationally at Kumu Kahua Theatre (Honolulu), East West Players (Los Angeles), and Pan Asian Repertory (New York City). In 1997, the Hawai‘i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts and the Hawai‘i Literary Arts Council awarded Sakamoto the Hawaiʻi Award for Literature, considered the highest award for a writer in the state.
A. REY PAMATMAT'S plays include Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them (Actors Theatre of Louisville), after all the terrible things I do (Milwaukee Rep), House Rules (Ma-Yi), Thunder Above, Deeps Below (Second Generation), A Spare Me (Waterwell), and DEVIANT. His newest play, Safe, Three Queer Plays, follows the seismic changes in Queer America through a gay man of color’s life. Rey recently contributed to a collaborative libretto for Desert In, which premiered on the Boston Lyric Opera’s operabox.tv. His work has been translated into Spanish and Russian, performed in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Russia, and published by Concord Theatricals, Playscripts, Cambria Press, and Vintage. Rey is the former co-director of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, and was a PoNY, Hodder, and Princess Grace Fellow.
Spencer has returned home to O’ahu, Hawai’i for a family reunion after building a successful life for himself in LA since leaving 20 years ago. The family gathers to catch him up on all that has changed and Spencer starts to wonder what he sacrificed when he decided to leave the island. Can Hawai’i ever feel like home again after so many years away?
The Life of the Land is the third play in Edward Sakamoto’s Kamiya Family Trilogy, a trilogy that follows multiple generations of the same family over 60 years. The play was first produced by Pan Asian Repertory in New York City in 1987. The play as well as Sakamoto’s other work has been seen at theatres across the country.
To read the play: Hawaii No Ka Oi: The Kamiya Family Trilogy by Edward Sakamoto