Context: Japan, North Korea and the Real Abductions
A Play Rooted in Documented Events
Understanding The Great Wave as political theatre requires knowing the history it is built on. Between 1977 and 1983, North Korean agents abducted Japanese citizens in Japan and overseas. The Japanese government has officially confirmed 17 cases; campaigning organisations and some academics put the number higher. These citizens were taken to North Korea and used as language teachers — teaching Japanese to North Korean operatives — and as identity sources for undercover agents operating abroad. The operation was a documented function of state policy, not an aberration.
The most widely known case is that of Megumi Yokota, who was 13 years old when she was abducted in 1977. Her case became the public face of the abduction issue in Japan and internationally: her parents spent decades campaigning for her return, and her story was documented in books, films and parliamentary hearings before and after the 2002 Pyongyang Declaration. The Great Wave is not a biographical account of Megumi Yokota or any single individual, but its research roots in these documented cases are central to how the play functions theatrically. When a director stages the abduction scene, they are staging something the audience knows — or should know — was real. This is the basic condition of documentary theatre: the audience’s knowledge of the real events is part of the theatrical experience.
Between 1977 and 1983, North Korea abducted at least 17 Japanese citizens (Japanese government count) for use as language teachers and identity sources. The 2002 Pyongyang Declaration was the first official acknowledgement that these abductions had taken place.
Cold War East Asia: The Political Context
The abductions took place within a specific Cold War geopolitical context. North Korea in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a tightly closed state with no diplomatic relations with Japan, operating under the leadership of Kim Il-sung. Japan, an American ally with a functioning democracy and a rapidly expanding economy, was the regional contrast: open, prosperous, constitutionally pacifist. The Sea of Japan — the body of water that separates the two countries — was the border through which the abductions were conducted, using small, fast boats on dark nights near isolated beaches.
For a set designer, the political geography of the play can be communicated through the stage itself. A traverse or traverse configuration might represent the two countries as occupying opposite ends of the stage, with the sea — the border — as the acting space between them. A director working in this configuration would be making a staging argument: that the two worlds of the play are literally separated by water, and that every cross-cut transition is a crossing of that divide. A thrust stage might bring the Japanese family sequences close to the audience, making their grief immediate, while the North Korean sequences are played at the farthest reach of the stage.
Japan in the 1980s and 1990s: The Domestic Context
The Japanese family sequences of The Great Wave take place against a backdrop of significant social change. Japan experienced a major asset bubble in the late 1980s; after it burst in the early 1990s, the economy entered a period of stagnation. The families of the abductees spent these decades campaigning in a Japan that did not always want to hear about the abductions — official relations with North Korea were diplomatically awkward, and the Japanese government’s response to the abduction cases was slow and, many families felt, inadequate. A costume designer staging the Japanese family scenes might use the distinctive civilian clothing of 1980s and 1990s Japan — subdued professional wear, practical domestic layers — to ground the audience in the specific social world of families living alongside an unresolved national trauma.
The contrast with the North Korean sequences is a design opportunity. If Japan is warm, domestic and textured — layers of fabric, ambient household sounds, the soft pool of a domestic lamp — then North Korea can be its visual opposite: a world of institutional uniformity, flat surfaces, and the cold geometry of controlled space. A lighting colour palette that reserves amber and warm white for Japan and uses cool blue or neutral white for North Korea is a simple, legible visual grammar that reinforces the play’s structural argument every time a scene changes.
In September 2002, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il met Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in Pyongyang and acknowledged that North Korean operatives had abducted Japanese citizens. Five surviving abductees were permitted to return to Japan; others, including Megumi Yokota, were declared dead by North Korea. Her family and the Japanese government contested this. The Pyongyang Declaration was a rare moment of official acknowledgement that the abductions had occurred, but it resolved almost nothing for most families. In the play, this event is a structural hinge: it is the moment the audience has been waiting for, and Turnly stages the family’s receipt of this information as a dramatic climax whose resolution is partial at best. A director staging this scene must resist the temptation to treat it as a happy ending: what the Declaration gives the family is confirmation, not return.
Francis Turnly and the Playwright’s Context
Francis Turnly is a Northern Irish playwright of Japanese-Irish heritage. His father, a Northern Irish journalist, met Turnly’s Japanese mother while teaching English in Tokyo. Turnly spent six months researching the abductions and consulted language advisers. The Great Wave had its world premiere at the National Theatre’s Dorfman in 2018, in a co-production with the Tricycle Theatre (now Kiln), directed by Indhu Rubasingham. The Tricycle/Kiln Theatre has a long association with political documentary theatre — producing work that holds institutions to account through theatrical investigation — and this context shapes the production values and staging conventions that Turnly writes within.
For students, the playwright’s dual heritage and personal connection to Japan matter because they explain the emotional register of the play. Turnly is not a journalist reporting on a foreign case; he is a playwright with personal ties to the culture he is writing about. This gives the play a quality of given circumstances-level specificity — the domestic details of Japanese family life, the precise cultural weight of certain kinds of silence, the specific texture of grief across decades — that a more distanced political play might lack.
The play had its world premiere at the National Theatre’s Dorfman in 2018, in a co-production with the Tricycle (now Kiln), directed by Indhu Rubasingham. The Tricycle’s documentary theatre tradition shapes the production’s staging conventions: factual precision, minimal theatrical artifice, the audience as witness.
Students who treat The Great Wave as a family drama loosely set during political events miss the central analytical opportunity. The play’s documentary roots are not background: they are the reason the staging choices carry the weight they do. When a director signals the Pyongyang Declaration through a change in lighting state and the sound of a radio broadcast, the audience’s knowledge that this event actually happened amplifies the emotional impact beyond anything a purely fictional story could achieve. A student who answers context questions by describing ‘the difficult political situation between Japan and North Korea’ without naming the abductions, Megumi Yokota or the 2002 Declaration is unlikely to reach the highest marks. Specific historical knowledge, correctly applied to a discussion of staging or performance, is what distinguishes the strongest answers.