whole movement began to sort of remember the event where, quote, the younger sons went back to the neisei and said let's talk about this. i happened to be around that time and participated in that particular critical movement when this whole concept of asian america came about where there was an acknowledgement that these kinds of stories are important, they haven't been told and we should tell them. so, for me, it's a time when i began to ask my parents, i began to look around me, i began to research and i found that there was all this, i don't know if this is a word, dimensionality to the story that's inside of me, that's all around me and has always been around me. so it's only natural that when i would pursue a story, just sit down and begin to write, one, it was natural that the characters would normally be japanese american and/or asian american and it would be natural that those events that happened that were seminal, this is one of the core seminal events of a community that shapes everything from that point on. generation after generation. they continued to sort of float up and b

that's another world that i was intrigued by and the fact that there were neisei jazz musicians. also the no no boys, which i'm not sure if you are aware of, but one of the story lines in the play is about the character called chet monkawa and he was what was known as a no no boy. at some point everyone in the internment camp was asked to do this questionnaire and there were two questions, question 27 and 28, which basically said you were foreswear allegiance to japan and the emperor and will swear allegiance to america and that you will serve in the armed

oge, an excentric neisei who likes literature. i thought it would be an interesting thing to do. but after a while we did a reading and we realized as good an actor as gregory is, it was pushing his limits for him to play a japanese american character in the late 40's. >> i imagine him as being much older. >> in the course of writing the play and using various actors, he became younger. this chinese actor is more like a character in his mid to late 30's, excentric, a career bachelor who is into russian literature and who fashions himself kind of patterned after the japanese artists of the 30's and 40's. he has round sort of glasses and a braid. but getting back to the question of creating characters, for example african american characters, i'm also caution -- i had written another play called johann that was about an african american gi and a japanese wife that got married in post war japan. i wrote that play 20 years ago. i wouldn't do it for about 8 years or so because i just didn't feel comfortable about being a japanese american writing an african american character. you hav