How does someone do justice to the legacy of a larger-than-life local sports figure?
That’s the task Aaron Asano Swenson, a first-time playwright, had at hand as he embarked on writing “Kilo-Wat,” a play about University of Utah men’s basketball legend Wataru “Kilo-Wat” Misaka — the point guard who led the 1944 Utes team all the way to an NCAA championship win.
For Asano Swenson, it started with exploring a simple question: “Where does the legend end and the story begin?”
“How do we get through sort of what’s become the prevailing narrative,” Asano Swenson said, “to the stuff that lets us maybe see something about this person, or about the story, that we haven’t had a chance to see?”
The answers Asano Swenson found will come to light Friday, when “Kilo-Wat” premieres at Plan-B Theatre in Salt Lake City. The final production is a one-man show produced in partnership with UtahPresents.
Misaka’s rise to fame came during a dark period in the nation’s history, at the height of World War II when Japanese-Americans were being incarcerated at concentration camps throughout the United States. (One such camp, Topaz, was in Delta, Utah.)
Misaka — who, along with his family, was spared from being forced to an internment camp — would go on to break the color barrier in professional basketball when he became the first non-white player in the Basketball Association of America, which later merged with another league to become the National Basketball Association.
Swenson, who concedes he is not a sports fan, said when Jerry Rapier of Plan-B Theatre approached him about writing this play, he decided to approach the story from a point of general curiosity, not one of sports history.
“Since it was going to be a piece of theater, rather than a piece of sports journalism,” Asano Swenson said, “I wanted to keep that in mind and just remember that there are things that theater can do … particularly well.”
Connecting with Japanese-American roots
Asano Swenson is a fourth-generation Japanese-American, but his family never spoke about what they went through during World War II. Working on “Kilo-Wat” encouraged the playwright to look into his family’s history.
“Suddenly my own personal history overlapped with this,” he said.
Asano Swenson’s maternal grandparents met just before they were detained in separate camps in California and Arkansas.
“[They] continued their courtship through letters while they were incarcerated,” Asano Swenson said. Afterward, they were married in Brigham City and lived in northern Utah while Misaka was playing college basketball.
“[The play] definitely lit the fire under me to reach out to family members who are still alive and still with me to get an oral history going,” Asano Swenson said.
In his script, Asano Swenson hits on the contrast of Misaka’s rise to fame during a traumatic period for Japanese-Americans. The play is set through the lens of a fictional podcast called “This Asian American Life,” hosted by Japanese-American podcaster Kenji Kushida (played by Bryan Kido), who unravels the different threads of Misaka’s life.
(Sharah Meservy) Bryan Kido acts in Plan B Theatre's "Kilo-Wat."
Kushida shares details about Misaka’s family, the anti-Japanese sentiment they faced, his basketball career, and also Misaka’s military service, which Asano Swenson said didn’t come up in many interviews.
After winning the NCAA championship, the Utes came home for a three-day parade, welcomed by thousands of people at the train station. When Misaka got off the train, his mother had his U.S. Army draft notice in hand.
After the war, Misaka interviewed survivors of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings. Asano Swenson found transcripts and handwritten reports of these interviews.
The reports helped answer one of Asano Swenson’s biggest questions — how Misaka, who at that time was 21 or 22, felt about gathering this information from people who looked like him and had just suffered from such a colossal tragedy.
Asano Swenson details how Misaka felt conflicted about the experience in a portion of the play that cobbles together thoughts the basketball star expressed over the years.
“The U.S. Army thought that somehow it would make it easier, if it were people [of] Japanese descent conducting these interviews,” Asano Swenson said. “The alienation and disorientation of that entire situation just blew my mind, and that ended up being something that I wanted to look into.”
Folklore and facts
The play includes specific nods to Japanese culture — like the use of a hyōshigi, a musical instrument that is made of two pieces of hardwood connected together by a rope. Some of the script is in Japanese, too.
Asano Swenson said he used these cultural aspects as a way to explore the distinction between facts, folklore, myths and legends.
“Legends come from facts. They’re based in something that actually happened, and then gradually magnify, to illustrate moral lessons [or] embody culture,” Asano Swenson said. “The distinction between those gets really interesting when you’re looking at a story like this, where so many people participate in the living, retelling and hearing of the story. They all have different expectations for what it’s going to be.”
Floyd Mori, who once served as the national president for the Japanese American Citizens League, the oldest Asian American civil rights organization in the U.S., witnessed the legend firsthand.
“Like many kids, I had my heroes in sports, and of course, Wat was number one,” Mori said. “Being a period of time right after World War II [it] was very unusual to see [Misaka] and very inspiring to people like me.”
Eventually, Mori met and befriended Misaka, and was even with Misaka the day he died in November 2019.
“[He] was always a hero in the Japanese-American community,” Mori said.
“Kilo-Wat” is sold out and will show through Sunday. To join the waitlist, call UtahPresents at 801-581-7100.
