CJA is a multi-disciplinary, multicultural theater company that produces new plays, re-imaginings of classics, and a hybrid theater form that merges stories and poetry with music and movement. We are committed to bringing audiences an original theater experience, blended from the Western and Eastern aesthetics that is our signature.  This artistic fusion is expressed in a different form with each production, through themes addressed--from specific, socially and politically relevant issues to abstract struggles of the human heart—music, performance style, and/or visuals.

(c) Makoto Wada

With its Laughter and tears, this is the greatest comedy of Japan's postwar era.
-Shinichi Maruya, Mainichi Shimbun

The pivotal emphasis rests less with the misery (of Hiroshima) than with the question of how we can survive the present and the future as human beings.
- Osamu Imamura, Asahi Shimbun

"People were killed in my place. I do not have the right to find happiness.” In the summer of 1948, Mitsue finds it impossible to allow herself to fall in love. Jizo is a Buddhist term that refers to a Japanese divinity who works to alleviate suffering and who is the guardian of unborn, aborted and miscarried babies.

Hisahi Inoue is a renowned playwright and novelist whose recent work will be presented at 2010 Lincoln Center Summer Festival. The Face of Jizo, written in 1994 was one of the biggest hits in Japanese theater and has toured and been produced in France and Canada and worldwide. It has became an inspiration to people to deepen their understanding of the meaning of Hiroshima. After his battle with cancer, he passed away in April of 2009.

Prologue from “The Face of Jizo” （Published by Komatsuza 2004)
by Hisashi Inoue

Hiroshima. Nagasaki. When these two are mentioned, the following opinion is increasingly heard. "It's wrong to keep acting as if the Japanese were the victims. The Japanese were the victimizers at the time in what they did in Asia." The second sentence is certainly on the mark. The Japanese were the perpetrators of wrong throughout Asia.

As for the first sentence, however, I remain adamant that this is not the case. This is because I believe that those two atomic bombs were dropped not only on the Japanese but on all humankind.  

The people exposed to those bombs, scorched as they were with the fires of hell, represent all people around the world in the second half of the 20th century. We are all unable to escape the presence of nuclear weapons.

For this reason it is not out of a victim's mentality that I write about this. Feigning ignorance of the human catastrophe that occurred in those cities would constitute, for me as one person among the more than six billion on the Earth, the immoral choice. 

In all likelihood my life will be over when I have finished writing about Hiroshima and about Nagasaki.

Visit the hibakusha stories website for more details about the festival