“At last, the masterpiece 'Yakiniku Dragon' ('Korean Barbecue Dragon') is going to be staged again!"
The "!" that leaps up at the end of this sentence in a recent press release from the New National Theatre Tokyo surely reflects a widespread excitement on hearing that Wishing Chong's iconic trilogy of Korean-Japanese dramas is set for a mammoth March-June run at the NNTT — beginning with "Yakiniku Dragon," the middle one of the three.
Divided into decade-long periods covering the 1950s, '60s and '70s, each of these enthralling and entertaining plays focuses on family stories from among Japan's roughly 500,000 residents of (modern) Korean ancestry, an oft-maligned population collectively known in Japanese as Zainichi.