‘Fire’ Tells of Japanese Americans’ Heroism

As dramatic subjects go, a playwright couldn’t hope for much better than the Army’s 100th Battalion and 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the primarily Japanese American units that during World War II became among the most decorated in U.S. military history.

Edward Sakamoto, a Los Angeles playwright whose work has been seen regularly at East West Players, has turned historical record and interviews with about 40 veterans into “Our Hearts Were Touched With Fire,” a dramatization of the 100th/442nd’s heroics. It made its area debut over the weekend at the Japan America Theatre as part of activities honoring WWII soldiers of Japanese descent.

Ambitious, educational and, ultimately, powerful, the play deserves another, longer run in Los Angeles. This is history that we all should know, for the lessons it teaches as well as its proud outcome. It makes us marvel, above all, at the patriotism that these soldiers held for a country that subjected them and their families to undue suspicion, hostility and internment.

If the show returns, however, it first needs to be streamlined from its nearly three-hour-and-15-minute running time, and its drama as well as its humor need to be punched up. As it stands, this history pageant of a play is getting by mostly on the inherent power of its subject, not Sakamoto’s presentation of it.

The Hawaiian-born Sakamoto devotes much of his play to three buddies from the islands (played by Michael Sun Lee, Thomas Isao Morinaka and Shaun Shimoda). Happy-go-lucky guys we first see on a boisterous nighttime frog-hunting expedition at home, they become heroes of the 100th and 442nd. Woven into their exploits is the story of a Bay Area family imprisoned in an internment camp and the fates of its two sons--one who enlists in the Army, the other who makes a stand at home (Tadashi Kondo and Dennis Y. Takeda, respectively).

A key scene in the second act recounts the 442nd’s proudest--and most tragic--hour, as it broke through German lines in France to save more than 200 members of a trapped Texas battalion. Staged by James A. Nakamoto as a belly-crawling advance along the front of the stage and then up the broad, stepped “hill” of Joseph D. Dodd’s set, the scene chillingly depicts the extraordinary loss of life that purchased that victory.

Sakamoto devotes so much time to boot camp, then to a protracted postwar follow-up, that he inadvertently slights such achievements--relegating them largely to a list intoned at the show’s conclusion. He also is prone to repetition and didacticism, the deletion of which would enable his drama to build more swiftly and organically.

Nakamoto achieved a fairly smooth staging with his enormous, 35-member cast, though the actors, in many cases, were unskilled and unfocused. The most notable exception was Sun Lee as “Froggy” Kumata, one of the Hawaiian trio, who charted a compelling path from unfocused good-time guy to the very rock upon which America is built.