we went to go see a play called "umi kara buta ga yattekita" (pigs from the sea) over at el camino community college in torrance. it is a historical musical about how the okinawan community in hawaii sent back aid to okinawa right after world war 2 in the form of 550 pigs. it was hosted by tamlyn tomita (the love interest in "karate kid 2" and one of the women of "the joy luck club") and i was surprised to learn that her mother is okinawan. she served as the english speaking host and there was a man who served as the japanese speaking host. tamlyn tried to throw in japanese now and then and it was pretty bad. she had a really difficult time pronouncing some names but in her defense, those were uncommon, unusual names. i was a little bit interested in the play because it has a guest role played by george takei, not that i was ever a "star trek" fan (mr. sulu!). i was interested in it because takei plays general douglas macarthur(!). his appearance was very, very brief. he spoke only a few lines. the reason macarthur was in the play is because he gave the ok for the us military to transport the pigs to okinawa.

i thought the play was unique because there were sup-titles--not sub-titles as the titles were above the stage. i heard there would be subtitles and wondered how they would do it. it was just a big LED type board that displayed english. this was the 8th and probably final performance of the play. the first 6 times were in okinawa and the 7th time was in hawaii. most of the cast were from okinawa but some of them were local for this performance only.

the introductions took about 1 hour before the play even started. it took so long because they were in both english and japanese. it was just person after person giving thank you's to the same people! the play was sold as a musical but it was mostly dialogue with a few songs thrown in. the songs weren't so great but they were bearable. it was more exciting towards the end when they played "jin jin". it was really weird at the very end when everyone got on stage and started dancing okinawa-style, including george takei!

takei + sunglasses + hat + pipe = macarthur