 Happy Aloha Friday and welcome to Perspectives on Global Justice ThinkTech Havaí. This is your host Beatriz Cantelmo. Today we'll be covering one of the most challenging and unpleasant social injustices in the world, death penalty, also identified as capital punishment. The use of death penalty is cruel and inhumane and degrading. The reform it takes, hanging lethal injection, beheading, stoning, torturing or electrocution, death penalty is a violent punishment that has no place in today's criminal justice system and in any society for that matter. For death penalty is a symptom of a cultural violence, not a solution to it. Death penalty, both in the US and around the world, is discriminatory and is used disproportionately against the poor, minorities and members of racial, ethnic and religious communities. Since humans are fallible, the risk of executing the innocent can never be eliminated. Furthermore, the astronomical costs associated with putting a person on death row, including criminal investigations, lengthy trials and appeals, are leading many states to reevaluate and reconsider having this flawed and unjust system on the books. Yesterday, Washington State Supreme Court unanimously struck the state's death penalty as arbitrary and racially biased, making it the 20th state to do away with capital punishment. That's good news for the 8 that rolled inmates from there who will now get life in prison without release. Yet, that sentence is still in the books in 30 states. Taxes continue to execute to more prisoners than any state. 108 people since 2010, Florida executed 28 people, Georgia 26 and Oklahoma 21 in that time frame. According to Amnesty International, the countries where most death penalties take place are China, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan respectively. This month, the world was astonished to learn that the Arab and US national journalist Jamal Karhoshi was murdered inside the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. Right now, in Saudi Arabia, the government is cracking down on dissent by arresting people who speak up against the government, subjecting them to unfair trials, sentencing and long-term sentencing, including death sentence. Journalist Jamal Karhoshi left Saudi Arabia to travel to the US to avoid facing persecution amidst the wave of arrests in the country last year. And last week, he wanted to go to the Saudi Arabian consulate to get his divorce paper walk and never came out. Turkish authorities reported that he was murdered inside the consulate. So we give our shout out to the entire world, especially the US government, to hold Saudi Arabian government accountable. As a government, the US cannot be allies with governments who violate human rights, even if it means that we end up sacrificing money. The US are one of the main gun suppliers of Saudi Arabia. And these guns and munitions are the same ones that killed millions of refugees in Yemen, Syria. We have a moral and ethical obligation to hold human rights valuable before profit. Anyway, today, we are blessed with the presence of Tori Kinoshida and her students, Alakai, Kunehim, Noah Schutz, Daphne Hussain, and another student, Spencer McKinney. Yes. So let's learn about and discuss about cruelty theater and what it does about the student production that they have been walking on as a part of a theater class, a walking shadow. And a walking shadow deals with the tragic travesty of justice involving Myos Fuku Naga case, an 18-year-old Japanese Hawaiian man who was executed in 1928 in Hawaii. On that note, welcome to Perspectives on Global Justice. Thank you for having us. Absolutely. So I'm going to start with you, Tori, who actually is teaching these amazing students and is using cruelty theater as a medium to be able to do your work. So can you talk a little bit more of what cruelty theater means? Oh, theater of cruelty is an Arctodian concept, Antonin Arto, who was a French theatrical genius as it were. And he has a notion of action pushed against all limits. And it's actually a very utopian goal, because the idea is that violence enacted on stage or anything disconcerting possibly that's enacted on stage is ultimately going to purge the audience of those desires. This particular production is more expressionistic and docu-drama, but still that notion remains, I think, as a valuable idea, I think, in education, in theater, in the arts. That's so amazing. And how long have you been an lecturer at Wimbled College? Five years now, I think. Five years we were in London for a bit, and then we moved back, and it's been really wonderful because we're so lucky. Our students here are phenomenal. I mean, they are. They're phenomenal. Yeah, so we're transitioning to talking to our students, so we have Daphne and Noah. So hi. So I'm going to start with Daphne. Daphne, who's saying? So what are you majoring in now at the Wimbled College? Right now I'm working on getting my concentration in theater, which is now what Winnred offers So yeah, that's in the progress, and I'm also taking the 260 class production. And what about you, Noah? So it's... I'm kind of in the same program. We have a focus program that allows us to get an AA with focus in theater. That's what I'm going for now. I'm just picking up my last credits there, and I'm also in the 260. Yeah. That's nice. So I have a question for the two of you, students under, whomever wants to give the answer, fast, go ahead. So when you were first exposed to Fugnaga's case and the idea of coming up with a student production, what was your first reaction? And how much did you know about that penalty and about this case prior to the semester? Well, when Tari first told me about the play that we were doing coming up, it struck me as something that's going to be very hard to put on. It's an expressionist piece, and it's drawing a lot out of us. But it's meant to get the point across that, well, we're trying to give more light to a story that isn't normally talked about. And I'm all about that. You know, it wasn't taught in school, and I want to be able to bring that to more people. And I think that's amazing to be able to take something and put it into the light and show people that this is a part of our history. This did happen, and it shouldn't just be brushed aside. Right. What about Fugnaga? I actually knew nothing about the case of Miles Fugnaga and how everything went, and it was just an insane amount of injustice, and I am learning more things about it every time we have rehearsal. And it is bringing that awareness to mental illness, because there were very little cures at the time. There was nothing really to help someone who was suffering with it, and I think that's important and I'm very blessed to be a part of this production and to bring that awareness. Right. And so, Friotori, who actually wrote the piece and is now producing, and why did you choose this particular story and theme for this semester? Oh, wow. So this is, even though it's quite unheard of, one of the most famous historic Hawaiian criminal penalty cases. So even though we don't learn about it in school or discuss it too often, it is a seminal case, and there are so many different aspects to it. There's the immigrant experience. There is the idea of poverty and the social hierarchy that still exists and definitely still existed in Hawaii to an extreme extent back in the 1920s. Also education, death penalty, mental illness, the sort of travesty that was his trial. So there's all these different topics that are important and important for I think our society and definitely from an educational perspective. So I felt like staging it was very important. The hardest thing, oddly, was finding our focus because there's so many different aspects to the story. It's really an unrelenting tragedy. It's horrible thing after horrible thing happens to this poor kid, yeah, this poor kid. He was executed even though he was a minor by Hawaii legal standards. He was a minor. He was criminally, I mean, he was mentally, he was mentally, oh, in fact, Daphne, Daphne's character as the sister has a sort of a very important speech about it if you want to maybe share some of those. Yeah, let's talk about your character a little bit and you're a student. So basically, after he was officially convicted, there was only four days before he was sentenced to the death penalty. The jury itself was completely biased. There was only one Japanese American who was an editor of a newspaper that he had already written articles accusing Miles of murdering this boy, Gil Jameson. And so there was just a complete amount of just unfairness in the jury and his defense attorneys did not even try to move the trial so that they could get a fair amount of jury or at least wait a while before the articles went out so that at least new people would come in with a fresh mind. I believe, yeah. So not only there was the injustice of the criminal justice system, but the media at the time to disseminate the information to the public and making up for their mind before really considering all of the investigative work, if any, that really was going on at that time. Oh, yes. The star advertiser at the time called for the quote, formality of the trial. After the formality of the trial, he will get sentenced straight to execution. And by contrast, that same year that Miles Fukunaka was executed for killing Gil Jameson. Three men set a Japanese cab driver on fire and were only sentenced to 20 years imprisonment. And then another Japanese cab driver was bledged in the head with a hammer by a white male and he was only convicted of second degree murder. And then they let him go. So you see the disparity in social injustice in the criminal justice system back then. And I know what about your character in the play? You want to talk a little bit about it? Yeah, my character is Dr. Lockwood Merrick, who was the assistant professor of philosophy at University of Hawaii. And he studied the Fukunaga case as it was happening. And after it, he read letters from Miles and things like that. And he wrote a letter to the governor of the territory of Hawaii at the time, Wallace Farrington, calling for a stay of execution to say that they really hadn't studied his mind enough. They had three doctors look after him in a psychiatric exam that wasn't really a psychiatric exam. It was three doctors who didn't know much about psychiatry sort of giving their best guess. And of course, they were biased. So they didn't do the best job. And he points that out and he points out that he had experience with mental illness and criminally insane people. And he wanted to sort of give Miles a fair shot and to kind of explain why Miles did it and delve into how or what he was thinking. Right. And so, I do have a question for you in the making of this app, like, how much did you have to do in terms of research with actual documents to be able to support the development of each character and give more frame to the story? So after the research, actually, the hardest thing was the fact that it's a class. So I'm also trying to make sure that each student has an equal part because that's one of the things when we're in community college, you know, we take great pride in the fact that it's not like our, in our shows, there's like one star, you know, one star student and then everybody else is in the course. So all nine students in the cast have good sized roles. They all have lots of stuff to do. It's pretty equal. And then, so then that's, and so this is why in the play, all the lines spoken by Miles and these kings of shadows characters who sort of embody his mental illness. Those were all lines or words written or spoken by Miles himself. So I got the research together for that and then I used the other characters to sort of fill in the story. So in that case, there's a lot of summarizing and, you know, it's not quite exact, but everything's Miles, the Miles Fukunaga himself, the character of Miles Fukunaga himself, all the words he speaks are his own. Right. That's really, I mean, how many students total do you have in class for this semester that's covering this? This semester is just 10, actually. It's just 10. I mean, backstage. How amazing. How intimate to be able to go for 10 students. Well, I have to take a minute break, but we'll be right back. Thank you so much for coming here. Thank you for having us. I will be there next week with both of you and the other eight students. Yeah. Hello. My name is Stephanie Mock, and I'm one of three hosts of Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Food and Farmer series. Our other hosts are Matt Johnson and Pomai Weigert, and we talk to those who are in the fields and behind the scenes of our local food system. We talk to farmers, chefs, restaurateurs, and more to learn more about what goes into sustainable agriculture here in Hawaii. We are on a Thursdays at 4 p.m., and we hope we'll see you next time. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea is on Think Tech Hawaii every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join me where my guests talk about law topics and ideas and music and Hawaii Ana all across the sea from Hawaii and back again. Aloha. Welcome back to Perspectives on Global Justice Think Tech Hawaii program. This is your host Beatrice Cantelmo. And we are here back with Tori and two new students who joined us for this last segment of our episode. So we have Noa, Kai, I'm sorry, Noa just left, Kai and Spensa. So let me start with you, Spensa. What is your major and what is your role in this play? In this play I'm playing one of the kings of shadows, which is to Alakai's character, Miles, the manifestation of his psychosis. So it's the human embodiment of his mental illness. And I will ask him about that. And Alakai, so you are Miles. Yes, I'm playing Miles Fukunaga in our show. Wow, that is quite an honor and quite a responsibility. So give me a feel of what is it like to play Miles, a character, and as it evolves in your practice, what have changed for you personally in Alakai? So when I was told that I was going to be playing this role, I did some research into the case and into the life of Miles. And it's such a tragic story because growing up, all he wanted to do was study and go to college and go to school, but he was from a very poor and a very large family growing up in Hawaii in the 1920s, where if you weren't white, you really didn't have a word in. And so through playing this character through his life all the way up through his execution, I feel that personally it's been a very gratifying experience. And it's been very fulfilling, I would say, to be able to give a voice to Miles and portray him on stage when he wasn't able to really have his own voice when he was going through his own life when he was alive. Right. May I ask how old are you? I'm 22. You're 22. So you are a little bit older than Miles when he was 18 and this was happening. Were you born and raised here? Yes. I was born and raised on Oahu. I've traveled a few times, but I've never lived anywhere else other than right here in Oahu. So in many ways, I think the rendition of being able to give someone a voice after 90 years of so much injustice is just so amazing. And so there you are. 10 students walking in this amazing play. And so before this semester, how much did you know about death penalty and the criminal justice system, not only in the United States but globally, but also in Hawaii? So I didn't actually know too much. I've always been personally anti-death penalty. I don't agree with it. But I hadn't done too much extensive research into it before being a part of the show. But I still haven't put in tons of effort globally, per se. But I did a lot of research into how the death penalty was used in Hawaii. And it's really tragic that it was always so skewed towards people of poverty, people who were minorities, people who didn't have as much in life. So it's. Which is very much the body of those who end up in the death row, the poor, the destitute, the mentally ill, the minority groups, the racially and religiously persecuted individuals, not only in the United States but across the globe. So as students, when you think about majoring in arts or doing something with theater, what does you hope really? And as you get out of school and get into everyday world, what would you like to do with these skills to be able to give continuity to what you're starting? Because this is quite a legacy. Yeah, for sure. I want to be a professional actor, but that seems secondary to the goal of what I want to do with my acting skills, which is I want to do any kind of work, whether it's paid or whatever, just to combat injustices, to combat stigmas. What we're doing with this play, commenting mental health stigma, just really trying to remedy some of the world things that happen in the world. I mean, whatever. I feel very passionately about a lot of the issues we're talking about in this play, a death penalty in restorative justice, maybe, or moving toward a system where we don't punish people because there's so much wrong that happens in that sense. More towards rehabilitative models as opposed to punitive as we do have it now. What about for you, Alakai? I've always thought that theater and the arts in general are the best way to, like Spencer was saying, get awareness out for different issues and really educate the community and bring people together. And regardless of how I go about it through my acting experience, after I finish my major, I too want to make sure that I can do something more, not just strictly for entertainment, but help raise awareness for different issues, help raise awareness for different problems and injustices in this world. So use it to make the world a better place, as it were. That's really amazing. Your students deserve all A-pluses, see that they're very powerful. Tell her. You see how there is an instructor. Tell me about that. But, you know, so, I mean, like, I think arts have such a special way, and there are so many mediums to be able to convey, messages that a lot of times what we try to do through grassroots organizing, we may not be able to move or reach people, you know, whose hearts. And, you know, so, I'm just so grateful, you know, that, you know, at such a young age, you're already thinking about how to make that bridge happen in your day-to-day, you know, routine. We're beyond the semester in this class. So, well, a little bird told me that I'm the International Hawaii Chef, and we'll actually join two of your presentations, I think on the 20th of October and on the 26th prior to the play. 21 and 23. Oh, the 24th. Oh, sorry, the 21st of August, I'm the 26th. And so, you know, like, did you even know that there was a, you know, I'm the International Hawaii Chef in Onoahu? Yeah, yeah, I think we knew that. That's neat. And so, well, there might be opportunity to, you know, bridge and extend, you know, like your passion for arts, you know, to be able to do social justice, you know, in so many ways. That's really, really neat. And Dori, so, what is your hope as the community is invited to attend, you know, this marvelous student-led production? What do you hope that the viewers and the community in general and say, okay, I'm gonna take one of these days, you know, and come over and watch the play. Oh, goodness, I have quite a few hopes because one, theater is absolutely the most amazing art form. I just have to say that. It is, it is because it's the only art form that uses all the different fine arts. You need to know literature, you need to know music, you need to know movement, you need to know visual composition. And it's also a social art form. It's a social art form, so it can serve its community in such a precise way. Millions of people may see a film and, you know, forget about it, but because fewer people can see a play, it's ultimately always quality over quantity. And so if you really move those fewer people and they remember the lesson forever, because I do, as the students have all said, I definitely agree that artists have a moral responsibility to serve their society. And so with this particular show, because it's our own story, it's a story from Hawaii for this community, the, you know, community living on Oahu. It took place right here in Oahu. I hope there's, the audience leaves with an awareness of the sort of path we've taken and how far we still need to go, how injustice, especially in the death penalty is, as you mentioned, you know, Hawaii is a microcosm for how, you know, the story, Miles Fukunaga's story is a microcosm for how it's used globally. You know, in Hawaii, historically, only one white person was executed before it became legal in 1956. Everybody else was a minority and poor, right? And does that absolutely reflects what is happening globally with it, right? And so an awareness of our own history and also mental illness, raising awareness and sympathy for that as well, as well as sort of agency as one of our themes, both cultural and mental. And so that our stories need to be told that we all need equal representation, basically. And I hope they're not horribly, too horribly, I mean, it's a very sad story. It's a very sad story. We're gonna say something. No, I wasn't gonna say anything. Oh, I have a quick question for you before we wrap up. So, like, you played the voices and the psychosis of Miles. So before, you know, you started playing these roles, what was your awareness of mental illness? Oh, my goodness, that's the right question. Awesome, I like it. So actually, so. Yeah, just a second, so to bear that. So actually, no, this play is opening on the four year anniversary of my first hospitalization. Incidentally, I was psychotic and I've been psychotic, so I'm very aware of the challenges that come with representing this type of illness. And so it's something that kind of petrifies me in a way. Actually, I'm very wary of creating a stigmatized representation of this very specific mental illness that Miles has. But I'm hopeful and I trust in Tari's vision that we are creating something that will educate people and enlighten people and help them see what people like me go through, you know? Especially what people like me have gone through historically. And especially people like Miles have gone through, you know? You add different layers like the fact that he's a Japanese-American that just makes his situation that much more difficult in Hawaii at that time, you know? So. I'm just so proud of you for not only, you know, coming out publicly about your brain disorder, but, you know, for the strides you had to, you know, go through, you know, in your life path, you know, at such a young age to be able to not only be, you know, get to times with your diagnosis, but also be stable and productive and that you are so much more than a diagnosis. There's the full you. And I'm just, you know, even more excited, you know, for this play. So, well, I can't believe the 30 minutes have passed. So I wish I could interview you guys when I can get up or come back, you know, as soon. And I hope our viewers really enjoy the, you know, this beautiful gift and go to Wynwood Community College theater at the opening starts for the play on the 19th. The 19th. Yes. And can you tell us the schedule a little bit? Yes. So we're going to have two weekends of shows, the 19th to the 27th. We have Friday, Saturday, Sunday, the first weekend, and then Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, the second weekend. And the 4 p.m., it's 4 p.m. on Wednesday and Sunday and the rest are 7.30 and it's 80 minutes long. So it's a very compact experience. Well, this concludes our episode of our Perspectives in Globe Justice for today. Thank you so much, our viewers, for watching us. And until next time, I hope we hope.