A Stunning Symphony for an Ugly Order

By Leilani Polk

On February 19, 1942, a little over two months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an order that authorized the evacuation of all persons deemed a “threat” to national security, the majority of whom were Japanese American citizens. Over the next six months, more than 100,000 men, women and children of Japanese ancestry were moved from the West Coast and confined in isolated, fenced and guarded relocation centers farther inland known as internment camps. This incarceration of Japanese Americans without due process and flagrant abuse of these citizens’ civil rights was an appalling mark on American history, an ugly moment of distrust, racial prejudice and war hysteria, not to mention a failure of political leadership. It finally ended on March 20, 1946, but wasn’t recognized as an unconstitutional blunder until 40 years later, when President Gerald Ford officially repealed Executive Order 9066. In 1988, Congress issued a formal apology and passed the Civil Liberties Act, which awarded $20,000 each in reparations to more than 80,000 Japanese Americans.

As the 80-year anniversary of the incarceration approaches, the Seattle Symphony teams up with Kaoru Ishibashi to present a full orchestration of his 25-minute work informed by those ugly times: Improvisations on EO9066. Opening the program is Beyond the Hills, a Seattle Symphony commission and world premiere by Japanese American composer, Paul Chihara, which grapples with Chihara’s lived experience as a victim of this executive order. The program, conducted by Norman Huynh, concludes with Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4.

EO9066 was conceived from a commission. A classically trained violinist who makes vibrant, glittery pop music with symphonic elements under the moniker Kishi Bashi (a simple mash-up of his first initial and last name), Ishibashi was approached by Miami’s Nu Deco Ensemble in 2017 to put together a piece, and he used Executive Order 9066 as his launch point. A research trip with a group of Brown PhD students studying the topic took him to a handful of internment camp sites and sparked his musical improvisations. Calling on his capabilities as an arranger, orchestrator and songwriter, he weaved together this raw material into the commission that became Improvisations on EO9066. He debuted it with Nu Deco in 2018, pairing the powerful score with projected archival footage and photos by the likes of Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange, as well as on-location video from his travels.

Reflecting on the personal costs and vast geographic legacy of the Japanese Incarceration, the multimedia work ebbs and flows with the feelings and experiences Ishibashi imagined these people endured — but it’s not all the bleakness and despair you might expect.

“My initial response was to do something heavy and dark,” he explained. “But that just got to a point where it sounded debilitating. I wasn’t happy creating it. So, I focused on the more positive sides of the story. Being resilient against this kind of discrimination, the stories where you learn how powerful these people were to escape that reality, to be able to shield that kind of trauma from their children for so long, and to face assimilation, shedding their culture, their bravery and resilience, and also the love stories … that’s how you can relate to that time. We see them as black-and-white photos that might seem dusty to us. It’s so far away, how do you make people understand? But if you look at the pictures, they’re of kids or families. Just like people you know, and that’s how you can appreciate what they were going through.”

EO9066’s opening movement, Introduction (Manzanar Improvisation 2) — Prologue: War (A Song for You), foreshadows what’s to come with a lone violin first plucked pizzicato style, then mournfully soloing as the rise of a symphony bolsters it in the background. The ringing of alarm bells amid gorgeous orchestrations, Ishibashi’s elegantly forlorn vocals spliced with FDR’s firm and unyielding wartime pronouncements over rising strings — this way of introducing beauty amid misery, hope and fortitude amid ugliness and injustice, is a thematic device employed throughout the work.

There are sonic touchstones of confusion and fear, the march of displacement and forced removal, the feeling of being uprooted and having to leave everything you’ve come to know for unfamiliar and desolate territories, the struggle and melancholy of identity loss, while somehow containing threads of positivity, daily lives lived and continued despite the incarceration, an attempt to behave normally and put on a brave face to keep from plunging into deep despair, of the need to stay sane and keep calm for the children.

The centerpiece stand-out, Chapter 3: Forgotten Words (Theme for Jerome), focuses on the erasure of one’s roots, that these incarcerated citizens were forced to give up their cultural identities. Ishibashi uses Japanese lyrics and musical elements in the movement, contrasting stark beauty with a profound sense of love, loss and resignation.

“When I went to Jerome, I started to understand that these people were really Japanese, culturally. They spoke Japanese, they ate Japanese food, but they largely had to suppress their identities, internally, because they wanted to fit in, and also, externally — they weren’t allowed to have Japanese reading material, unless it was a Bible. There was an assimilation program implemented by the government — if you wanted to leave the camp, you had to be as American as possible.” Ishibashi’s parents were post-war immigrants and for him, he said it was particularly heartbreaking because he loves Japanese culture and visits Japan frequently. The idea of living in a country that you call home but having to stifle your origin and your culture seemed devastating, especially the loss of language. “Many of the Japanese American descendants of people who’ve survived these camps, they don’t speak much Japanese. You lose something, you can’t communicate with your grandfather the way he wants to. From a modern context, our individual cultures are what makes this country diverse and interesting.”

Chapter 6: Summer of 42 closes the work with stunning drama and an imagined love story that brims with hope and optimism despite the sadness of its lyrics, finishing with Ishibashi’s spoken reflections on what it means to be American, belonging, empathy for one another and hopes for the future.

If ever there was a moment in time to reflect on Japanese American incarceration, its 80th anniversary and the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes following the Covid pandemic, here and now, with this symphony, is it.

2021–2022 Masterworks Season Sponsor: Delta Air Lines.

Kishi Bashi's performances are generously sponsored by Marco Argenti.

EO9066 is presented as part of the Seattle Symphony’s New Music WORKS initiative, which is supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

"Pictures of Executive Order 9066"

In conjunction with EO9066, Seattle Symphony presents “Pictures of Executive Order 9066,” a multi-media exhibition in Benaroya Hall’s Octave 9: Raisbeck Music Center. Award-winning filmmaker JJ Gerber in collaboration with singer, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Kishi Bashi explore the stories of those impacted by Executive Order 9066 in an immersive, selfguided video experience created especially for the interactive screen in Octave 9 and featuring photography by Dorothea Lange and oral histories supplied by Densho. Thursday, January 27, 11am–1pm and 5–7pm; Saturday, January 29, 1–7pm; and Saturday, February 19, 1–7pm. General admission is $12 (free to EO9066 concert goers).