Philip’s Incarceration Story.
Though the incarceration was only a few years before I was born, it was never explicitly talked about. It was only referred to when my parents met a new Japanese American acquaintance. ‘What camp were you in?’ ‘Rohwer’. ‘Where were you?’ ‘Manzanar’. There would follow a polite exchange of family and friends’ names they might have known. Nothing beyond that.
I would learn in time that the camp referred to was Rohwer, in Rohwer Arkansas, one of 13 sites where all Japanese Americans living on the west coast were forcibly taken and held. Rohwer was where my parents were incarcerated and had nothing to do with vacationing in the mountains.
I would also grow to understand that much of my interior life was shaped by this unspoken event. Disruptive, buried under psychic scarring, it would author internalized behaviors of self-hate.
Years later I would begin writing songs and plays investigating this interior condition. That soon evolved thematically and practically into film and now the opera, Both Eyes Open, created in collaboration with NY-based composer, Max Giteck Duykers.
Both Eyes Open is the culmination of some 50 years of writing about Japanese America. And the incarceration. Nothing remains static. I have no interest in museum narratives. This production deliberately uses new music opera to reframe the experience of the performance. Make it fresh for the audience. Thematically it correlates history as having a living connection to present day anti-Asian, anti-immigrant hatred.
Both Eyes Open is intended to occupy the complicated space that is contemporary existence, full of contradiction and irreconcilable points of view.
How does one negotiate that space? In art?
Both Eyes Open does not offer a simplified resolution of justice over injustice. Instead, it acknowledges a deeper world of continuous conflict that we must now inhabit.
How does one negotiate that space? In life?
‘The rich rotting soil
Of fertile injustice’.
‘What will it grow?’
Copyright © 2025 by Philip Gotanda