I signed the kids up as soon as they were eligible, but we hadn't yet used the TeenTix program until this weekend. I received an email last week about a special presentation of "The Journal of Ben Uchida" Citizen 13559" at Seattle Children's Theatre. We have seen many a great production at SCT, and jumped on the opportunity for four tickets for a total of $20 to the show. An added bonus? There was a catered Japanese dinner for FREE following the show, as part of an effort to facilitate conversation on the topic of the U.S> WWII era interment camps.
I'll let CJ tell you a little bit about the play.
In 1941, the Japanese government attacked the American military station of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. In response, then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, requiring American citizens of Japanese ancestry to relocate to various internment camps around the country, bringing only what they could carry. The last of the camps did not close until March 1946, several months after World War II ended.
On March 2nd, I attended a play at the Seattle Children's Theatre, titled The Journal of Ben Uchida (TJBU). TJBU primarily follows Ben Uchida, a fictional character interned in Mirror Lake internment camp (a fictional camp) alongside his family members and several other families.
After the end of the play, the cast members gathered back on stage to pose questions to the audience (for example: "What would you do with property that you couldn't carry with you?") After posing the questions, the audience was invited to ask questions. The questions were mainly regarding the special effects used in the production.
After the end of the play, fifty of the audience members (including me) were invited to an upstairs Japanese dinner, where discussion about the themes in the play and how they are relevant to modern society were encouraged. At our table, an example of a discussion point that I brought up was as follows:
In Germany, sites of concentration camps still exist, and are regularly visited by Germans and tourists alike. Meanwhile, In America, the sites of various camps built for Japanese-American internment are largely ignored, assuming they still even exist. Heather (a diner at our table) pointed out that one of the camps in Alaska had apparently been bulldozed to make way for a parking lot. I suggested this disparity may be due to how history is written by the winners, and while the German government may have been forced to preserve the camp sites post-war, the American government chose to slip the Japanese-American internment camps under the rug.The play was riveting. The story of internment camps is not new to us. We've seen George Takei's "Allegiance," attended Densho events, and read about the unsavory history online. But this production was SO powerful to the point of being overwhelming at times.
Below, CJ chats with actors following the production.
LIFT OFF: About 9:30 at night on March 5, we watched coverage of HISPASAT 30W-6, a SpaceX mission involving a Falcon 9 launch of the Hispasat 30W-6 satellite to a Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO). The launch was from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The Hispasat 30W-6 satellite.
Per a SpaceX press release, "Hispasat 30W-6 (previously Hispasat 1F) will be located at 30º W and serve as a replacement for the Hispasat 30W-4 (former Hispasat 1D) satellite, providing television, broadband, corporate networks and other telecommunications solutions. Built on the SSL 1300 satellite platform, Hispasat 30W-6 is expected to have a useful life of 15 years with 10.5 kW power and a multi-mission payload distributed across 40 Ku band transponders, 6 Ka band beams and 10 C band transponders."
Unfortunately, due to unfavorable weather conditions in the recovery area off of Florida’s Atlantic Coast, SpaceX had to forgo attempting to land Falcon 9’s first stage after launch on their "Of Course I Still Love You" ship.
No comments:
Post a Comment