The National Theater Concert Hall’s ninth International Theatre Festival has focused on works about the struggle for survival in the face of political differences, historical disputes, gender clashes and death.
At the Experimental Theater this weekend as part of the festival is an unusual work by a Korean born and raised in Japan, Chong Wishing, whose Children of the Ocean (海的孩子們) is a play without words about the last major battle of World War II, the US military’s struggle to capture Okinawa.
The battle began on April 1, 1945, as the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet and more than 180,000 US Army and Marine Corps troops invaded the island as part of Operation Iceberg, the plan to occupy the Ryukyu Islands ahead of the final push for the main Japanese islands. The battle lasted until June 22 and was one of the bloodiest of the war, with a huge attrition rate among US forces, Japanese Imperial Army troops and Okinawan civilians.
Photo Courtesy of Lim Young-hwan
Children of the Ocean, which premiered in 2016 on Okinawa, recounts the grieving and terrifying memories of the battle, but utilizes humor and music to reduce the horror and try to heal historical wounds with laughter.
Chong envisioned it as a requiem to children who lost their lives in wartime, but has said it is “dedicated to adults who used to be children, and children who have no time to become adults.”
Chong is the grandson of immigrants who moved from an area south of Seoul when the Korean Peninsula was under Japanese colonial rule to Japan for work. His father was 15 when the family made the move.
During World War II, his father was a second-year student at Hiroshima Teacher’s School — now known as Hiroshima University — when he was drafted into the Imperial Army and sent to the officers’ school before becoming a military policeman.
After the war, Chong’s father wanted to return to Korea with his mother and sister, but the boat carrying the family’s belongings sank and they lost everything, so he decided to stay in Japan, where he started a refuse collection and salvage business in Himeji. He built a squatters’ shack on top of the outer wall of the moat surrounding Himeji Castle, part of a shantytown of other poor Koreans and Japanese, where he raised his family of five boys.
The 61-year-old Chong graduated from what was then called the Yokohama Movie and Broadcasting College and worked for several film and theater companies as a writer and director before going freelance. He has writer and directed for film, television, theater and musicals.
His family used to be considered “Chosen,” or North Korean, in Japan, but Chong changed his nationality to “Kankoku” or South Korean, when his play Sennen no Kodoku (A Thousand Years of Solitude) was performed in South Korea, although he does not speak Korean.
He said his entire family later switched their citizenship as well, and that his father did so because he wanted to be buried there when he dies.
Chong has used his experiences growing up as a third-generation Korean in Japan, as well as his father’s wartime experiences, to create characters in his previous works, some of which focused on the lives of Koreans in Japan, including 2008’s Yakiniku Dragon (Korean Barbeque Dragon).
He has said his works focus on people considered minorities, and contradictions in society, because that is the world that he grew up in, while he attributes his use of humor to having grown up in the Kansai region, which is known for its love of comedy.
Children of the Ocean runs about 95 minutes without an intermission.
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