Telling Wat Misaka’s story in my play KILO-WAT helped me understand my own
By Aaron Asano Swenson
I am not a basketball guy.
What I mean by this is I’m five-eight on a good day. The part of my brain responsible for hand-eye coordination didn’t grow in until eighth grade, at which point I used it solely for evil (read: musical theatre). I’m not a sports fan in general, which means I’m definitely not a University of Utah basketball fan. This is not to say that I’m anti-basketball, unlike my partner Nathan. Nathan is a six-foot-three-inch, corn-fed specimen from an undisclosed location in the American Midwest who converted me to professional baseball through the simple act of taking me to a live game. When I asked him his feelings on basketball, he shrugged; when I asked if he’d ever been to a live game, he winced. “I understand why people like it, but the sneakers on the hardwood floor, with the sweat … it’s too squeaky. It’s a very squeaky game.”
We are not a basketball household.
So when Jerry approached me about writing a play based on the life of Wat Misaka, my first question was “who?”
Once Jerry laid out the basic facts for me, I was sold on the story. How could I not be? By the age of 25, Wat Misaka had led the University of Utah men’s basketball team to two national championships before being drafted by the New York Knickerbockers, making him the first Asian American — in fact, the first person of color — in the NBA. Even though the Knicks let him go after only three months, he was offered a position on the Harlem Globetrotters, which he turned down so he could finish his engineering degree. And all of this happened between 1943 and 1947, when anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States was at an all-time high.
By the end of our meeting, I knew the following: the play would be performed by one actor, it needed to be about 45 minutes long, and I couldn’t interview the subject of the play since Wat Misaka passed away in 2019. After several months, I knew a lot more about Wataru Misaka, his life, his accomplishments, and his tour of duty as a military intelligence officer during World War II. But I still didn’t know how I was going to tell his story.
I tried a few different approaches in a few different ways. The dividing line between myth and legend is vanishingly small for sports heroes in the U.S., so I thought about the story as if it were a traditional Japanese folktale. I tried writing it as a live recording of a sports podcast. I’m a fiend for trivia, so I played with the idea of framing it all as a pub quiz-style game. I even tried a few passes as a first-person monologue, which I had determined not to do at the outset — I didn’t know how to be sure what he might say. None of these approaches felt like the right fit. I liked little bits of each, but not enough of one.
In the end, it was that trivia helped me find my way — not surprising, since trivia may be one of the few places where the interests of “sports people” and “theatre people” overlap.
Before I continue, I’d like to acknowledge that I’m oversimplifying some extremely complex scientific processes in the interest of constructing a convenient metaphor. In my defense, A) I’m sorry, and B) I really wanted to do it.
You’ve probably heard that lightning takes the path of least resistance. And that’s not exactly wrong, but it’s not exactly right, either. It might be more accurate to call it “the path of best connection.” When a cloud has enough charge for lightning to form, it sends out tendrils called “stepped leaders.” They reach out in every direction, about a hundred and fifty feet at a time, at about 200,000 miles an hour. Each leader is basically testing a different route until one connects with the earth. When it does, a massive stream of opposite charge races back up along that connection to the cloud where it started in a burst of light. This power surge, called the “return stroke,” is what we think of as lightning. Not the process — the build-up, the exploring, the moment of connection. Just the part we see: this colossal, incandescent bridge between heaven and earth that moves so quickly our eyes can’t tell what just happened.
Connection defines us. Even when I’m the only one credited for part of a project, I’m not working alone. I can’t throw together a convincing color commentary for a sporting event. I can’t construct a garment from scratch. I can’t create a documentary film about Wat Misaka containing primary source interviews from experts in multiple fields, friends and family, and the man himself. I do the things I know how to do. I ask the questions I know how to ask. I use the resources I’m able to find; then I tell you what I found, how I experienced it, and what it meant to me. For nearly everything else, I look to the absurdly gifted people around me for guidance and inspiration.
My maternal grandparents, Hideyuki “Harry” Arita and Gail Kimiko Minamoto, were both born in the United States to immigrant parents. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the U.S. Army to remove Japanese Americans from “military areas,” which included the entire west coast. This forced relocation applied to both “issei” — “first-generation” immigrants born in Japan — and their American-born, “second-generation” children, or “nisei.” Harry and Gail met briefly before their imprisonment, and they continued their courtship through letters. My grandfather was released early from the Minidoka incarceration camp to a job in Northern Utah, and my grandmother joined him a few months later. They were married in Brigham City in 1946 and lived there briefly before relocating to California. None of the letters survived. We have no records of how they spent that time, or where. But Wat Misaka spent Christmas of 1946 with his family in Ogden, and the U’s victory at the NIT championship happened in March of 1947. Even if my grandparents never met Wat Misaka in person, they must have known who he was. Unfortunately, I’ll never know for sure.
My mother heard very little from her parents about their experiences during and immediately after the war. There are things we’ll never know, and that’s okay. In a lot of cases, it’s a blessing. The more you know, the more you carry. This is the cost of memories, of legacy. Parts of the story might change or soften with time, but I can’t begrudge anybody for wanting to set something down after carrying it for decades, or finding a gentler way to carry it so the weight doesn’t injure or kill them.
In the decades since my grandparents passed away, I have come up with dozens of questions I wish I could ask. I missed my opportunity, but there are other things I didn’t try, and I wish I had before I finished writing this piece. There were people that I could’ve talked to, who would’ve been able to pick up the phone when I called, who could’ve given me answers that illuminated things I couldn’t see, things I didn’t even know I was looking for. I didn’t think I could handle asking questions of people who really knew the answers. There were some answers I wasn’t sure I could bear. There are questions that will haunt us no matter who we are, that linger like radiation, invisible and slowly fading, damaging us on scales that we might not see or comprehend, unspooling our DNA and changing the parts of us that tell us how to be ourselves.
I will never meet Vadal Peterson, who was the head coach when Wat Misaka played for the University of Utah. Nonetheless, he taught me something important through the training he assigned to Wat and the rest of the team. The success of the University of Utah men’s basketball team was never just about strategy — it was about conditioning and teamwork. It was about preparing their bodies and their minds for unforeseen challenges. It was about trusting the work, and it was about trusting your teammates. We all live on to one extent or another through the recollections of others after we die. Much has been said about this by people more eloquent than I. But it’s equally important to remember that the same people carry us with them while we are still alive. It is so easy for us to lose ourselves in this world and its stories. When we forget who we are, they can remind us.
After lightning strikes, when the afterimage fades, we can only retell what’s been recorded. There’s no substitute for connection. You tell yourself you’ll get around to it until one day you can’t, because one of you isn’t around anymore. The dead don’t hold still for us. That was a mistake I made in my own life as well as in writing this show. Once someone passes away, it’s easy to assume that you can take your time making your peace, filling in the remaining gaps. But the dead don’t hold still. The distance between us and those who are gone keeps changing because we are constantly in motion. Our mutual orbits are distorted by the gravity of newer, larger things.
To tell this story, I had to tell my own — how I found my connection with Wat Misaka, and how he reconnected me with my own family. I can’t interview Wat Misaka. I can’t ask my grandparents to fill in any blanks. But there are still a few people I can talk to about them, who remember them as “Gail” and “Harry,” and not “Grandma and Grandpa Arita.” They can add color and detail to the versions of my grandparents that still live in my head and heart. That’s the miracle of community and communal storytelling. Even if I’ll never speak to them again in this life, I can still get to know them a little better because of the connections that still exist between us. There is still time for lightning to strike — to connect us across time and space, to illuminate our surroundings and the path ahead, if only for a short while.
Aaron Asano Swenson is probably best known for his portrayal of Hedwig in all three of Plan-B Theatre’s HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH. Public performances of the world premiere of his play KILO-WAT are February 14–16, 2025, in a Plan-B Theatre/UtahPresents co-production as part of the Stage Door Series at Kingsbury Hall (not at Plan-B’s regular home at The Rose). planbtheatre.org/kilo-wat
