For over two decades, Portland Opera has presented 50-minute youth operas to students, families, and communities through its Portland Opera To Go program. Part of this program is the Our Oregon series, which began in 2022 and is intended to highlight invisible aspects of Oregon history, as well as its underrepresented communities.
This year, the Our Oregon series presents Shizue: An American Story, a World Premiere opera composed by Kenji Oh, with libretto by Dmae Lo Roberts. Shizue focuses on the life of Japanese American immigrant Shizue Iwatsuki, who relocated to start a new life on a Hood River strawberry farm and later was confined in a Japanese incarceration camp during World War II.
Like Shizue, composer Oh is an immigrant from Japan. “I’ve always thought about identity since early childhood,” Oh recalled. “Being Shin-Issei, I started exploring my identity as Japanese more than when I was in Japan.”
Oh and Shizue also share a love of tanka poetry. “Shizue Iwatsuki was undoubtedly the perfect choice in terms of my artistic exploration,” Oh said. “I have composed pieces based on tanka poems for choir, solo vocals, and even instruments.”
Drawing on stories from camp survivors, Oh imagined Shizue’s life. “One of the survivors I interviewed told me that her neighbor at the relocation center managed to bring a shamisen to the camp,” Oh said. “She told me she and other friends in the camp performed kabuki plays to entertain the elders.”
These stories were supplemented by old Japanese textbooks at the Japanese American Museum of Oregon. “In the early 20th century, the Japanese government compiled songbooks containing Japanese folk songs and newly composed songs,” Oh relayed. “Incorporating these melodies was a way to add extra context and emotional depth to the opera.”
The songs that Oh wove into Shizue include Fuji no Yama, or Mt. Fuji, composer unknown; Haru no Ogawa, or Brook in Spring, by Teiichi Okano; Kōjō no Tsuki, or The Moon over the Ruined Castle, by Rentaro Taki; Hana, or Flower, by Rentaro Taki; and Momiji, or Maple, by Teiichi Okano.
The Our Oregon series of which Shizue is a part is a departure from Portland Opera’s traditional youth offerings of English-language adaptations of operas in the standard repertory, according to Alexis Hamilton, Portland Opera’s Manager of Education and Community Engagement. “Several years ago, Portland Opera embarked on a reflective journey that led to us adopting a new strategic plan,” Hamilton said. “Folks wanted to put the ‘Portland’ back in Portland Opera and wanted us to do more new works and commissioning.”
Hamilton describes the Our Oregon series as a labor of love. “Oregon has a very specific and particularly virulent type of racist history,” she said. “I don’t think that many Oregonians, especially folks who have moved to Portland recently, thinking they were arriving in some sort of progressive Utopia, know about it.”
For Hamilton too, learning about Oregon’s ethnic history entailed surprises. “I remember when I first moved here and found myself wondering where everybody else was, meaning where were all the people who weren’t white,” she said. “As I started to avail myself of some of the amazing resources in town like the Oregon Historical Museum, I started to really learn about Oregon’s history, and about how ignorant many of us are about it.”
Initially, Hamilton envisioned a more chronological order of presenting Oregon’s history, beginning with the Indigenous peoples of the area. “However, after George Floyd’s murder, we felt compelled to switch gears, which led our inaugural Our Oregon piece to be about African American activist Beatrice Morrow Cannady,” she recalled. “That was the opera Beatrice.”
Now with Shizue, Portland Opera seeks to reengage with the Japanese American community. “Several years ago, Portland Opera programmed Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, a beautiful piece of the standard repertoire, and also a piece that has historically been and continues to be painful for many in the Japanese American community,” Hamilton reported. “The opera brought in Dmae Lo Roberts to consult, and she assembled this incredible panel of folks from the Japanese American community, survivors of the illegal incarceration camps, young people, activists, representatives of the Japanese American Museum of Oregon, just an amazing cross-section of individuals.”
Portland Opera attempted to listen deeply to the community. “That conversation was raw and honest and difficult,” Hamilton remembered. “I remember being emotionally overwhelmed at the end and I had a much deeper understanding of why folks felt the way they did about this particular opera and how it had been used historically. We looked at ways that we could potentially mitigate the harm of doing the piece.”
First, Hamilton asked Roberts to write a libretto. “I was intrigued with the educational value for young people not only to learn more about opera but the shameful period of history that isn’t taught much in most schools,” Roberts said. “And as a playwright, journalist, and theater director, I really jumped at the opportunity to write a libretto!”
Roberts started by consulting others, which Hamilton really appreciated. “The beautiful thing about working with Dmae is that she has a wealth of experience and many, many contacts in the Asian American community,” Hamilton said. “She was able to engage with the amazing Linda Tamura who suggested our subject, Shizue Iwatsuki.”
This idea to focus on Shizue Iwatsuki was inspiring for Roberts. “Historical narratives often focus on male experiences and I wanted to feature a woman’s perspective on this history,” she said. “I looked up Shizue’s poetry that she wrote in three different camps, and I knew then that her story and her poetry would lend a richness to the opera.”
Tamura then brought in Harry Iwatsuki, Shizue’s grandson, and later, other family members of Shizue, to further explore her life. “Dmae has been instrumental in helping to create an authentic process,” Hamilton said. “We have had two workshops and invited members of the community and invited feedback.”
Meeting Harry Iwatsuki was, for Roberts, the most emotional aspect of the project. “He showed us a bottle with an Ikebana flower arrangement made out of yarn, wire, and sticks,” Roberts remembered. “Harry said that his granny made that in Minidoka Camp with found materials.”
This was meaningful because there had been no flowers in the camp. “He described how she taught him that, in Ikebana, you need to have something above, that’s heaven, and below, that’s the earth, and then she pointed to him and said, and here in the middle are where we are,” Roberts relayed. “I felt chills when he told us this story, and I knew then that I would write that as a motif we would visit at the beginning, middle, and end.”
When it was time to create the music, Hamilton invited Oh and Roberts to meet on a Zoom call. “I finally met her in person at the libretto workshop in Portland,” Oh said of Roberts. “She felt like an older cousin I hadn’t seen in a long time.”
And like an elder family member, Roberts shared important information. “Kenji as a new Issei in America didn’t know a lot about the history, which can be shocking and emotional to Japanese Americans who don’t have that history in their families,” Roberts said. “I think you can hear Kenji’s emotional response, as well as his grounded knowledge of traditional Japanese folk music in his new exciting music.”
Oh and Roberts developed a collaborative working process. “I think a composer-librettist relationship is like a client-architect relationship, creating a libretto, like designing a house, together that accommodates the composer’s vision and ‘inspires a lifestyle,’” Oh said. “The process of making cuts allowed me to find creative solutions as I composed, which ultimately helped refine the piece.”
Overall, developing the opera was a two-year process. “The first year I worked on the libretto and crafted it for a reading with four Japanese American actors I had previously worked with,” Roberts said. “Then I reshaped the libretto after audience comments and reaction as well as the input of the actors, Kenji, and Alexis.”
Following the world premiere, Shizue embarks on a two-month, multi-city tour. “We will be in Hood River, where Shizue Iwatsuki lived and worked, and which harbored a lot of animus for the Japanese community,” Hamilton said. “We will get to offer a talkback there.”
The show will also visit small towns. “We go places that other organizations just cannot,” she explained. “We play gymnasiums and community centers, continuing care retirement facilities and gorgeous theaters like the Four Rivers Cultural Center in Ontario, Oregon.”
Roberts is enthusiastic about these plans. “I especially love Alexis’s care and concern for reaching out to youth about the importance and joy of opera,” she said, “as well as the whole mission to create new operas that finally feature BIPOC Oregon stories.”
Throughout the run, Lindsey Nakatani will portray Younger Shizue, while Chihiro Asano portrays Elder Shizue. Supporting them are performers Jietong Fu as Shizue’s spouse Kamegoro and Edward Tavalin as Various Men. “I just want to say how hard these four singers will be working on this tour,” Roberts added. “They have to carry the set, the props and costumes, and load and reload with each performance.”
And there will be at least 37 such performances, according to Roberts, who is still contacting educators and community organizations about the possibilities for additional shows. “I am so proud of this work,” beamed Hamilton.
Shizue: An American Story runs on October 4 and 5 at Portland Opera, The Hampton Opera Center, 211 Southeast Caruthers Street, Portland.
