Storyteller takes a deeper look, leading to discovering own ‘American spirit’

Stalking the American Dream while also dreaming your own personal dreams can get confusing. Especially when your cultural background doesn’t fully embrace all that dreaming.

Camas resident Rob Katsuno grew up in Los Angeles where his father was a missionary for Johrei, a Japanese “spiritual healing” sect. The main value father instilled in son was humility, Katsuno said.

“Accumulate hidden virtues. Polish your soul. He warned me about the dangers of money and ego,” Katsuno said.

Then Katsuno won a prestigious scholarship to a tony L.A. boarding school, where his assigned reading was Ayn Rand’s individualist, capitalist manifesto “Atlas Shrugged,” and his classmates were the progeny of “industrial titans” who lead companies such as Texaco and Firestone, he said. “It was total culture shock,” he said.

Katsuno went on to study both engineering and economics, and he worked as a jet engine designer and an investment banker before becoming a financial planner and retirement adviser. But even though he readily describes himself as an “anal-retentive, obsessive-compulsive, maniacally perfectionist control freak,” Katsuno started sensing that there was more to life than conquering details.

Long-term relationships with his clients made them feel like family to him, he said. And, he married a woman who is his complete opposite: a significantly “detail challenged” Brazillian, he said.

The marriage didn’t last, Katsuno said, but the clash of cultures sure taught him a lot about himself. Japanese are famous for hard work and discipline; Brazillians are famous for hard partying and irrepressible zest for life. Those may be stereotypes, but Katsuno said he found much truth in them.

“We saw in each other that which each of us lacked,” Katsuno said.

Spirit on stage

About six years ago, Katsuno said, he started catching the public radio shows “This American Life” and “The Moth,” and found himself spellbound by the sincere and revealing way featured storytellers puzzle through their own lives in search of insight. In the days before podcasting, Katsuno said, he started setting up timed tape recorders so he’d never miss a single episode.

All that storytelling and soul-searching rubbed off in a big way. Katsuno started writing comic tales about his life and marriage, and one of his stories surprised him by placing third in a “Willamette Writers” contest.

That sparked a serious desire to further improve his writing skills — and his honest thinking skills — in order to tell more tales of the uniquely “American spirit” he’s built out of the diverse materials of his life, he said.

“It’s been a six-year process,” he said. That first contest win “fooled me into thinking this was going to be easy.” Since then, Katsuno said, he’s taken writing classes and hired professional storytelling coaches; he’s also delivered live monologues in venues such as Portland’s Backfence PDX and last year’s Off the Page series, hosted by the Fort Vancouver Regional Library system.

He even hatched the idea of pulling his works together and staging the whole as a one-man show — starring a professional actor who’d generate some real buzz, not himself. “But finding a middle-aged Asian American actor for the role is hard. Even in Portland,” he said.

Then he discovered Greg Watanabe, a recent co-star with George Takei (Mr. Sulu of the original “Star Trek”) in “Allegiance,” a musical about Japanese-American internment during World War II. Katsuno learned that Watanabe would be in Portland this month to appear in the experimental show “Caught” at Portland Repertory Theater.

“I cold-called his agent,” Katsuno said, and delivered a script. Miraculously enough, Watanabe liked the piece and told him to hire a director for a staged reading. Katsuno eventually settled on celebrated freelance Portland director Adriana Baer.

When The Columbian spoke with Katsuno earlier this week, he hadn’t yet met up with his director and star for rehearsal. But he was feeling great anticipation about this professional, one-night-only performance of his own (mostly true, somewhat adapted) life story.

In Japan, he said, people “adopt norms” without questioning them. The American gospel, by contrast, is to “find yourself and be yourself,” Katsuno said, “but that’s a challenge also, because the bar is set so high. In America you are taught to pursue your passions with all your might, and do something great with them.”

In the end, Katsuno titled his script “American Spirit” because that’s what liberated him to question both sides of his background, and start writing out the answers, he said.

“I love this country and what it stands for,” he said. “And, I have a lot of questions.”