Christ, what an asshole.

Look, there's only one country that's had cities destroyed by atomic bombs. This performance was explicitly referencing that specific historical event. The cultural context is relevant; they just didn't do their homework. The right thing to do now is apologize for not doing the homework, and then engage in the dialogue, not try to claim some sort of trancending purity of intention. "We wanted to do art in Seattle about Japan, but we have no interest in Japanese culture in Seattle" isn't the right answer.

I have no interest in the glass bomb, but I strongly, strongly recommend the Wing Luke tour. If you just go to the museum and walk around, you miss 90% of the story. The curtain, the store, and the rooms upstairs -- one for each of the successive waves of early immigration to the ID -- Filipino, Chinese, Japanese.

The sad fact is that Japantown is killed, by the freeway, by Yesler Terrace, but mostly by the internments, and the diaspora after the return. Almost all of what's left is ghosts. You can see some of those ghosts at the Panama Hotel Tea House as well; the photos on the wall, the reminiscences of former residents, the maps of where they lived and worked and shopped. Japantown is elsewhere today, or nowhere, really. The Chinese may be next, as they age and/or move away; the ID is going to be a white hipster enclave in twenty years.