AustLit

'Yoji Sakate’s Honchos Meeting in Cowra (Cowra no Hancho Kaigi) (2013–14) and Mayu Kanamori’s Yasukichi Murakami – Through a Distant Lens (2014–15) are two recent Australia–Japan theatre productions that unearth non-mainstream histories of the Japanese in Australia. The author participated in Yasukichi Murakami – Through a Distant Lens as a dramaturgical consultant during the development phase of the project in early 2014. Japanese names are written here in the English way: given name first, followed by family name. Yoji Sakate is the award-winning playwright and director of the Tokyo theatre company Rinkogun. Honchos Meeting in Cowra was written and directed by Sakate in Japan, and it toured to Australia in 2014 to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the escape of Japanese Prisoners of War (POWs) in 1944 from a prison camp in Cowra, a small country town located 320 kilometres west of Sydney. Mayu Kanamori is a Japanese-Australian photographer, performance-maker, and playwright. For the above work, Kanamori looks at the history of the northern Australian towns of Darwin and Broome in the pre-WWII period through the life of Japanese photographer and businessman Yasukichi Murakami. Murakami died at an internment camp in 1944, and his remains were later reinterred in the Japanese War Cemetery in Cowra. Kanamori honours Murakami’s legacy through this play about her search for Murakami’s lost photographs. It toured around Australia during 2014 and 2015. These theatre productions have been discussed in mainstream reviews positively, as conversations between the past and the present in the context of ethnically diverse expression in contemporary ‘multicultural’ Australia. Through a close analysis of the reviews on the works of Sakate and Kanamori, I highlight the difficulty of sharing cross-cultural collective memory in the context of a paradigmatic multiculturalism.' (Introduction)