Play “The Mistake”
I was recalling 2021 and will write about some of the episodes which have a strong memory for me.
©️Simon Richardson
My grandparents and parents survived the Second World War and started a new life soon after it ended. I’d heard war stories not so much from them directly but from people who were involved in the war in one capacity or another.
My father was in the Navy and served on the battleship Yamato and unbelievably trained as a human torpedo operative which was called “Kaiten” in Japanese.
With “Kaiten” there was room for essentially just one person inside. The hatches were opened and closed only from inside and secured by tightening the bolts etc. from outside. Regardless of the success or failure of the mission, torpedoes were not able to return once launched into the sea so in essence they were all suicide missions.
My memory is of my father talking about the war only a few times to me and I mainly heard the story from my mother.
My mother was in Manchuria ( a name which is now mainly remembered as an imperialistic state of the Japanese and is very contentious when it is used in this form. It is on the Chinese mainland) due to her father’s work before WWII. In the summer of 1945, they were caught by the army of the Soviet Union, and taken to a war camp and stayed there for more than one year.
After the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was obvious that Japan was going to lose the war, the Soviet Union broke the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, and started invading Manchuria which was a puppet government of Japan at that time.
Under such circumstances, those who become victims were not only military personnel but also just ordinary people going about their lives.
After much upheaval and the quite widespread war crimes of the time, most of my mother’s family miraculously survived and grouped together and retuned back to the port of Shimonoseki in Japan on a US cargo ship.
Tragically the atrocities still continued even after they arrived at Japan and my mother still has trauma from that particular experience with this in mind I have a strong sense of mission that I should tell this story to the wider public in the near future.
@Simon Richardson
The British actor/writer Michael Mears has written a play called “The Mistake”.
In the story, one protagonist Leo Szilard conceived the idea of a nuclear chain reaction which in turn led to the construction of the atomic bomb later on. Also a young woman who was injured and exposed to a high level of radiation in the attack in Hiroshima and a few other characters appear in this story, and they are performed by two actors, Michael and myself.
Since 2019, we have explored the story with a director, Jatinder Verma (ex artistic director of Tara Arts) and made a montage short film as well and if the pandemic didn't happen we would have toured the UK in 2020 but in November 2021, we had the very first ‘live & unplugged performance’ reading given to the public at the Peace and Justice festival in Edinburgh and thankfully the audience were very focused on the story and you could literally really hear a pin drop during it.
©️Simon Richardson
In truth this is a very painful but equally important story for human history. As an actor, I felt this condensed and charged air so keenly and relished every single moment and in live theatre, in time and space we definitely feel something much stronger connecting through body and soul with each other.
@Simon Richardson
At the moment we don’t yet know logistics and in what form the play will take and indeed where it will be shown but I do hope this powerful and important work will be brought to the attention of those who are eager to listen to its profound story.
A new dawn and a new year are coming soon and as always I wish more joy & laughter in the world.
Thank you for reading such a long blog.
Actor, Playwright, Long-Distance Walker
In these strange times of worldwide pandemic, where isolation has become the necessary norm, we are offering Connections in a Time of Isolat