Miles Inada: Professor of Art

Miles Inada is a Professor of Art at Southern Oregon University where he teaches courses in 2D and 3D animation, comics and picture books, and digital design. His animated work has won awards at the Atlanta Film Festival, Riverrun International Film Festival, Berkeley Video Festival, Rochester International Film Festival, and Film Fest New Haven, and has been seen at numerous film festivals in the US and internationally. He is the creator of the comic “Arms and Ether” and (with Evan Carroll) the animation film “Legends from Camp”, both discussed in this podcast. He is currently creating a 3-D interactive game based on “Arms and Ether” and the character he created, Majax. 

For more information on his current work, visit: armsandether.com

Music by Manpreet Kaur @manpreetkaurmusic

www.sacred-truths.com

Transcript

[Music] Sacred Truths with Emmy Graham. In Kundalini Yoga, there is something called a subtle body that is closely connected to the soul. When strong it gives us mastery, calmness, subtlety. When we express ourselves subtly, when we are refined, we connect to our authenticity, our soul's purpose. Sacred Truths examines this drive to express one's truth authentically. How do people connect and live by the guidance of their subtle body? Sacred Truths, first person accounts of finding meaning in life. This is Emmy Graham. [Music]  

Miles Inada: I think part of it is trying to come to terms with what is the world that we actually live in, what's going on. Because my experience here in Ashland is not mirrored in the history and the... It doesn't really connect with the internment camps. It doesn't connect with all of these horrific war stories. Even just going back to the Iliad, it doesn't seem to have a place in our consciousness in the way that it should. The atomic bomb. And, I think that's what ‘Arms and Ether’ is trying to address on some level, is the horror that we come from and are heading into and are currently doing. But that somehow eludes the most basic consciousness. [Music]  

Sacred Truths with Emmy Graham. My guest today is Miles Inada, a professor of art at Southern Oregon University, where he teaches courses in 2D and 3D animation, comics and picture books, and digital design. His animated work has won awards at the Atlanta Film Festival, River Run International Film Festival, Berkeley Video Festival, Rochester International Film Festival, and Film Fest New Haven, and has been seen at numerous film festivals in the U.S. and internationally. He is the creator of the comic, Arms and Ether, and with Evan Carroll, the animation film Legends from Camp, both discussed in this podcast. He is currently creating a 3D interactive game based on Arms and Ether and the character he created, Majaks. For more information on his current work, visit armsandether.com. I spoke to him in Ashland, Oregon, in the fall of 2024.  

Hello and welcome to Sacred Truths. This is Emmy Graham, and today my guest is Miles Inada. Miles, thank you so much for being here today. 

Miles: Thank you for having me. It's great.  

Emmy: And, we have Nick Oredson with us today, our collaborator on Ask a Dude. And Nick is here during this interview as well. Thanks, Nick. Welcome.  

Nick: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.  

Emmy: So, Miles, you are the creator of a cartoon called Arms and Ether. It's a comic. It's a comic book, and you published it in 2004. And I recently found out about this cartoon, and I find it very fascinating, and it's hard to know how to begin to speak of it. The main person is someone who is armored up. He is constantly wearing armor, and he goes about his day. He drives a tank to work, so do all the men in town drive things like tanks to work. And he goes to work, and his job is warfare, basically, and then he comes home, and he comes home to kind of a normal, middle-class, suburban life. A nice little ranch house, a wife and a kid, and I don't want to give it all away. It's a very fascinating comic. There's so much in this comic. Why don't I just begin with you telling us how this came to be. Arms and Ether, how did this begin for you?  

Miles: Well, I did it way back in 2004, and it was right after I had finished animating Legends from Camp, which was an animation about the Japanese American internment camps based on my dad, Lawson Inada's poetry. Right after I finished that, pretty quickly, I jumped into doing this comic. Just kind of came out of my head, almost like fully formed or something. Like, it happened pretty fast. And in a funny way, it might subconsciously kind of be about updating what I had been working on with Legends from Camp to the present. That felt like something that was historical, kind of in nature, and it was about my dad's experience, and then how I was kind of internalizing and thinking about his experience. And, so, this, in a weird way, was kind of a sequel, maybe, to that work. I'm currently working on a video game about that character, but 20 years later.  

Emmy: Before we talk about Arms and Ethers more, let's just talk about the animation, film, Legends from Camp that you made. Tell us more about your father's experience. He was in these camps, and he is a poet. Can you tell us about his experience with his family?  

Miles:  Sure. Yeah, my dad was born in 1938, so he was an extremely young kid, you know, when World War II broke out. He was, what, three and a half, four years old, and essentially kind of came to consciousness in a lot of ways in the internment camps. And so, he's written quite a bit about that experience, in his poems, his books of poetry, “Before the War”, his second book is “Legends from Camp”, and his third one is “Drawing the Line”, and each of those books has sections that deal with his kind of memories, recollections, and thoughts on that experience. Yeah, he's a poet. He taught at SOU for many, many years, and was the Oregon Poet Laureate for many years. Yeah, so we had this opportunity, there was something called the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund that was giving grants for work related to the camps. So, we got a grant to do this work that helped get it off the ground. I was working with my friend and colleague Evan Carroll, who lives out in Cincinnati, so we developed the animation together. So, there are some things that he refers to in the stories that kind of get woven together, that kind of nightmare dream narrative of that piece. And so, it's about this child, kind of representing my dad. One of the key moments in the film is that he goes from kind of the regular everyday life in the camp at night. He has basically a nightmare where he's taken into another world, but it's still the camp. But it's the camp kind of in a vaster sense of, it’s tied in with this legacy of warfare and America and Native American history as well as Japanese American history. Because one of the key aspects of the design process of Legends from Camp was that we went out to visit Tule Lake, which is close to here, out by Klamath Falls, and that's the site of an internment camp. Not the one my dad was in, but we went out there and it's right next to Captain Jack's Stronghold, which was the last of the American Indian wars. So, the last war was fought there and it was again and yet another in this endless litany of tragedies of that story. And so, the Modak tribe and how they resisted, they fought there and they were eventually shipped out to Oklahoma after that. And so, the proximity of those two things being right together kind of reminded us of sedimentary rock. There's all this great lava rock out there. They were resisting in the lava tubes that were there. They had that's what the stronghold was. And so, this idea of how these layers of violence and oppression and history kind of get crunched down and ground into and kind of become the soil of contemporary practices. It's what we live and breathe now.  

The boy is transported into this dream world that's like that, where he sees this kind of vision and this kind of mandala phantasmagoria of all of these different incidents. But he's a kid, he can't make sense of it. And it's a nightmare so he's trapped in this world and everything kind of looks like the barracks and the camps except it's all bigger and kind of crazier. He's confronted by - there's this Kappa, kind of based on the Japanese folk creature - who's there. But he's kind of a menacing, like gnarly version of that. Like not the fun. Like they can be kind of they can be both you know. And then the kappa has this companion who's this kind of snake creature but who has the head of General DeWitt who was the general that was behind the order to do the internment camps. The two of those creatures, end up chasing the boy through this kind of nightmare world and they catch him. They throw him down in a chair and they rip his head off. I think it's not like gory but it's horrific, and they rip his head off and they reach into their filing cabinet and they pull out a skull and then they slam that down on his head. And then they open up the trash shoot and he falls out of the trash shoot and he lands back in the real world of the camps. And I think that's relevant to Arms and Ether now that I think about it. Well, this character has been--we don't know what's happened to him we just know that he has this helmet head that has guns on it. He has two giant eyeballs and that's his head. He doesn't take it off when he goes to bed. We don't know what's underneath the helmet. I didn't know it was underneath the helmet when I did that comic. And, I was very comfortable just saying, ‘oh that's his head’. And, I think that's just come up now with the game that this character is being decommissioned, at this point. So, he's going to find out what that's all about. Which in a sense bookends, nicely what happens in Legends from Camp where the character is his head is replaced.  

Emmy: For people who may not know, after the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7th, 1941 anyone of Japanese ancestry were classified as enemy aliens. And on February 19th, 1942 Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed an executive order so the U.S. Army had authority to remove civilians - forced removal and incarceration of 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry living on the west coast to one of 10 concentration camps in desolate remote parts of the country. They had to leave behind their jobs, their homes and their lives and they were held there till the end of the war. And many of these people were not able to come home to any home or job or anything--they lost everything. And so, this happened to your father and his parents. I did see the film. I did watch the animation and it's haunting, haunting, haunting. I interpreted it as the boy didn't die but he had his soul ripped out of him, that's how I interpreted it. And so now he's a little boy walking around in this skeleton body. He's alive but he's not really alive. It's extremely dramatic and haunting and I find it so fascinating - I hadn't put together the head imagery that in Arms and Ether your main character, we never see his face. He has this kind of almost humorous tank like armor over him. He even eats through it and he sleeps with it on and he showers with it on. And, I wanted to direct our attention to Arms and Ether because there's parts of it that are very humorous. It's incredibly disturbing, unlike the animation, which is 100% disturbing. Arms and Ether has a lot of humor in it and all the men are in armor but some of them are in really archaic armor like, I don't know, old Vikings and old sailors. And, the men are just weary and defeated but the guy does these normal things. Like, he goes to the diner and orders breakfast and he has this mental commentary about tomorrow he'll be better, he'll eat healthier, he'll work out. Let's just talk about some of the humorous aspects to the comic.  

Miles:  Yeah, you know I think humor has always been a big part of my work. I've always been attracted to that and I think even Legends from Camp has some of that in it, it's kind of slap sticky at moments. I think I was really influenced by cartoons when I was a kid like Warner Brothers stuff like Yosemite Sam was like some kind of talisman for me or something as a kid. There was something about his kind of rage or something, but his kind of useless rage that was always being thwarted. I think creatively for me I don't necessarily know what I'm doing while I'm doing it. I don't have an agenda or a message that I want to get through consciously, but I think making it the idea evolves out of that process that--there's a lot of instinct in it. I think that that cartoon violence is a way to talk about it in a way, I keep coming back to the example of art being a kind of trojan horse. You think about the trojan horse, it's this craft you create, this wonderful outrageous thing and say, “Hey, we made this horse for you.”, and everyone's like, “Great. That's awesome.”, and so what ends up working is this kind of deception, but it's based on artifice and something different. And so, art I think has that quality that you go, oh great there's this horse, I'm attracted to this and you let it in and then something else comes out of it that you don't understand when you let it in. It transforms you from the inside out.  

Yeah, so the humor I think that there's a lot that comes out like all the violence that he commits is funny in a way and that the violence that he's subject to is funny, it's comedic and it's drawing on those traditions but the interpretation of it is quite dark. 

Emmy:  Looking back at it now, do you think this came out of general violence from World War II? Do you think it came out primarily from the internment camps? Do you think it was many different pieces happening? 

Miles:  That's a great question. I think it was the whole thing. I think it was that every time I've started to do some kind of work around that theme, I can't escape just the totality of history and this kind of endless parade of hate and destruction that just runs through everything that people have ever done. How do you talk about that? That's what happened to Legends from Camp was that, well here's one outrage that ties so quickly into everything else. It's hard to even keep them separate. There's this overarching thing behind it.  

So, you mentioned in Arms and Ether, the anachronistic nature of the world, that it's basically it's contemporary Ashland except he's driving around a tank that's based on a World War I tank. And, there are like Hessians and Hoplites. And, he's anomalous because he has this giant Howitzer on the back, some kind of 88 millimeter-like artillery piece on his, that's installed on his back. He has these little anti-aircraft guns on his head. And yet, he carries like a shield and a sword. It's like a Roman gladius. And, he wears a little man bikini, and has this ridiculous chest armor. It's kind of just a big cast iron piece, it kind of looks like something, if you took the Monitor and the Miramax from the American civil war and made it into something you can wear around, something kind of that stupid, you know. So, he has little sandals. So, it's kind of absurd.  

But that's always been my experience studying war. Because I think war was always something, that as a man growing up in that time, I was a kid, a boy, I was really fascinated by and really drawn to, on some level. And, that kept going because whether it was, you know, we read Red Badge of Courage in junior high or in college, reading the Iliad which really was an eye-opener. I was like, well, that's not any good. That sucks. I mean the writing is great. The poem is great. But the situation that describes is really horrific. It's a nightmare and in a way, it doesn't seem to really get through in the way that it should. I think part of it is trying to come to terms with what is the world that we actually live in, what's going on. Because my experience here in Ashland is not mirrored in the history and it doesn't really connect with the internment camps. It doesn't connect with all of these horrific war stories, even just going back to the Iliad, it doesn't seem to have a place in our consciousness in the way that it should. The atomic bomb. And, I think that's what Arms and Ether is trying to address on some level--is the horror that we come from and are heading into, and are currently doing, but that somehow eludes the most basic consciousness.  

Emmy: The main character never takes off his headpiece. He takes off some of his armor but he sleeps with his headpiece, and he even showers with some of his armor on and things like that. What is really pointed out to me is how men all are armored up. Every man in the comic is armored up, and we meet a few women and they look very normal. They're very nice. They're refreshing. They seem gentle and they just seem lovely, not over the top lovely, just very normal. And, ah ahhh, a little breath of fresh air here.  

Nick, you've also spoken of how you can relate to that feeling of ‘Ashland is not a war zone’ but you feel the remnants and the idea of having to go out there with all your armor on, metaphorically speaking. Do you want to speak to your impressions on that? 

Nick:  Yeah, I think that one of the themes of Ask a Dude is denial, where whatever you want to call it, the self-awareness is saying, “Oh yeah, you know we solved the equality thing, and this is an egalitarian culture.  We're in democracy. It's very peaceful. When in reality, on the energy level, there's incredible violence happening all the time. Almost every interaction is infused with harm and shadow and violence, like it's everywhere. If you're not tuned into that layer of violence then it's easy to just kind of go along, just like what you're saying, like there's violence everywhere, and, it's not in the consciousness. That's an exact parallel with the Arms and Ether themes which is part of one of the things I like so much about the connection between the Arms and Ether themes and the Ask a Dude themes. You know, if you're tuned into it and you are aware of this shadow masculine energy everywhere, then you just see it everywhere. But if you're not, you don't. And, it's the same thing, because what I interpreted in Arms and Ether was that we are a martial culture. That's what we do. That's our main, in terms of how history will look at America primarily, we are a war-making machine. That's our legacy. That's not what I learned in school. That's not what I see the self-image of America. The self-image of America is a beacon of hope and democracy for the world. We're universally loved throughout the world as a beacon of democracy. Yet, you know, I grew up during the Vietnam war and that was definitely not how the Vietnamese viewed America. And, almost every year of my life, we have been somewhere in the world not spreading democracy, and not being a beacon of anything. We've been murdering people in huge numbers. So, there's a disconnect between our self-image as a nation and what we do as a nation.  

And, I think Nakazawa’s approach was to graphically represent what he saw - the horror of what he saw explicitly, overtly, in a really disturbing way. Arms and Ether said, we're going sneak attack here. We're going trojan horse. But it's just as subversive. Arms and Ether is deeply subversive. And, that's a really important word to keep in mind. That's what I saw it as. I was like, wow, you're calling out a martial culture. Where the energies are there, the symbols aren't there. But the energy is definitely there. We're sitting on land that we just killed everybody and took it. I mean that's what we did. That's what SOU is sitting on--territory that was other people had lived for 20,000 years. I don't see any of them around here. I wonder where they went, you know, they're dead. So that's the energy of this place, is murder.  

Emmy: I want to bring in WWII, because it seems like that is part of it too--that we inherited. We didn't grow up during WWII. We weren't alive then but our parents were. They were affected by it. I just wonder if that plays into it as well. And, I also want to bring in the point of in Arms and Ether, the main character goes and picks up his son from daycare, preschool, and his son has little armor on but they do all these normal things. They play and they have popsicles and they  have a nice little time. They go home and they have dinner, and they do the dishes. It's like normal family life but everyone has this armor on. So, I just want to ask that question about the impact of WWII on our generation. We weren't even alive then, none of us. 

Miles:  Well, you know, when people talk about WWII, one thing that I'm inclined to say is, don't forget about my favorite: WWI. Just in the sense that growing up in America, we don't have a lot of awareness of WWI. The WWI is still very much in the awareness, kind of, for better or for worse, of a place like England, because the scope and scale of it was so much more horrific. World War II, I don't know, how much anyone really graphs WWII on any even functional level or something. I don't think anyone has any idea behind it, you know whether you were there or not. But the story of it is not the story that we're taught or that we hear or that we've read in books. That's not the story of WWII in my eyes. Not that I have the real story and I'm going to tell everybody about it.  It's more like, the vastness of it and the inescapability of it and the horror of it and how it's a continuation. There's a really good argument you could make historically for not distinguishing between WWI and WWII. That would make more sense, I think to me, in studying what WWII was. Because I think WWII, it's kind of seen as almost the beginning of something but then you go to WWI and you're like, well, that also doesn't make a lot of sense. I mean it doesn't. It doesn't but then you have to keep going.  

That's kind of the experience that I, that's where Arms and Ether, kind of comes out of is that, there's no beginning. There's no end.  It hasn't stopped. We don't know when it started. It's here. It's out of control. It permeates everything that everybody does and experiences.  

And yet, Nick, I think you talked about this, it's not the ‘real’, it's not the truth. You know war is not the truth somehow. It's not inescapable. But you really have to say, it's like, I'm not going to be able to do much until at least I have some understanding that this is here. I think that's what we're being confronted with every second. It's like we're just being fed the story that it's not happening. Don't worry about it. It's not your problem. And, that can be really frustrating for everybody because it's not like, okay, I'm not going to do that anymore. I want the truth because it's not available. It's not. It's just not there and we're living in the middle of a gigantic problem. 

Nick: Yeah, I really like that question. To me, it feels like the circumstances of WWII and the role that America played in WWII was enough to feel like a match for the fantasy that America has about what it is. It was a set of circumstances where the fantasy of America, its view of itself as a beacon of freedom, could actually play out; and could go on and on deconstructing the motivations of America and talk a lot about what possible other motivations and that an interest that America was pursuing and how it pursued that war and the cold war after that. I think the important part is that it fit our fantasy of ourselves. It like lit up the American psyche in this way that feels like it's still lit up. It was finally proof that we are what we think we are, and it created this kind of mania that carried us through Korea and carried us through Vietnam, these utterly catastrophic adventures, and Iraq and the middle east. And so, that is really what stands out as the WWII echo, even though I agree too, it's everywhere for everybody all the time. I agree for sure the echoes of it, just like the echoes of the depression. You know those are echoing right around everywhere all the time. But particularly that part about the American fantasy, just lit up something, that's still fully lit up, and appears to still be guiding policy on a big scale, huge things there.  

Emmy:  Miles, when I first saw Arms and Ether, when I was flipping through it, about halfway through it, I kept saying: why is this so familiar? Why is this so familiar?  And, it occurred to me that it really reminded me of Japanese manga. As a young woman, I lived in Japan for a year.  At that time, I didn't know anything about Japanese manga, but I saw a lot of it in Japan, in Tokyo in particular, and I was just, there was a lot of violence in it. I didn't know what to make of it. These businessmen wearing business suits, reading these comics, on their way to work. It was like, wow, what is this stuff?  And, now, I think it's more well known. But as I really scrolled through, it hit me, it reminded me of the work of Keiji Nakazawa, who is a famous manga artist. And, in my podcast that I did on Hiroshima, I talked about my visit to Hiroshima in 1987. And, I juxtaposed it with his life story. He was an atomic bomb survivor, when the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, he was six years old and he survived it. And, his story is, briefly, he became a manga artist and he was haunted, of course by his past, all that he saw on that horrible day and all the days that followed.  And finally, at some point in his career, he found an editor who said, you have something to say, I want you to do this story.  And it turned into a 13-volume series on his story of Hiroshima. Manga is often just what he calls disposable comics. You read it; you throw it out. His, however, you want to keep it. It's amazing. His manga is absolutely devastating. And, there's so many similarities to what you have put in your cartoon like, the focusing on the eyeball and the big words: Die! Die! Die! You know, when he's in there fighting and the gore, but as you said, it’s not supposed to be gore, it's comical. In Nakazawa, as the gore is not supposed to be funny at all, he's just drawing what he saw, what he knew.  

So, I’m just really intrigued by all this this kind of generational trauma of your father and his parents in the internment camp--what happened that day on Hiroshima; what the United States did in WWII. Do you have anything you want to share on that? 

Miles:  I think what Nick was saying before too, about the kind of the triumphalism that the American story took from WWII and still is with us today.  That story that doesn't really fit with the atomic bomb, you know, dropping a bomb over civilians, a heavily populated city of women and children. And so, again that feels like one of those things: Is that not all we need to know? If we could take 15 or 20 seconds and just kind of think about Hiroshima that should kind of do the trick, you know, as far as not having these same stories in our head, but it doesn't quite work that way.  It seems like there's more of a process to it. So, when I read “Barefoot Gen”, I was blown away. I thought that it was like one of the most incredible things I'd ever read in my life.  

Emmy: That's Keiji Nakazawa's book, called “Barefoot Gen”.   

Miles: It was also interesting like you mentioned, Emmy, about how anomalous it was in the manga world at that time. That this editor was kind of a miracle that he was like, ‘um, you ought to do something about this,’ and it wasn't like, and we're going to make a million bucks! It wasn't the motivation. And, it certainly wasn't his motivation to talk about it.  And then, I was also really interested in the role of other students--young people and the translation of that work and how it, kind of, that was the big thing that proliferated out into the world. Because there was no interest in it, you know, outside of Japan certainly.  And, that was really kind of a labor of love. And, I think almost that kind of endeavor to tell a story and spread the story without some kind of hope of remuneration.  And, kind of, it's almost hard for us to comprehend in America we're so tied into that we don't even realize how much that pervades our lives. And so, that was extremely powerful - anytime to encounter something like that that's not coming from that place. 

 One of the other things I thought was so fascinating about “Barefoot Gen” was the character as a child, his little brother;’ with him and his dad and his mom.  Within the family dynamic, it's like any other family except these kids are born into this horrible suffering of the war. You can't read it without breaking down, every other page. But the rawness of how he tells that story is what stunned me.  It's so raw. But in this way, that makes it so recognizable and again the drawings are humorous, for lack of a better word. They’re cartoony. The interactions are slapstick-ish on some level even though they're just a nightmare. You know what's happening when it comes to the atomic bomb that kind of falls away. But the thing that I was trying to say is, that his father is against the war which - that's not on--that wasn't on from Japanese Americans. It was, I mean, there were people, “No-No Boy”, the novel by John Okada, is about resistors to the internment camps and resistors to the draft from within the camps in Japan.  No, you know people that supported the war, all the war crimes.  The Japanese committed all that horror of that, that whole story. And I think that's more to the point of WWII, is to say how his father suffered for what he believed within Japanese culture.  So, it's not like the Japanese figured it out--they're great. No, it was the same thing. It's the same dynamic. I think that was so powerful in that book.  It was very raw.  And, it's a really raw experience to read that book. I mean, I think everyone should read that book.  

Emmy: Day of Remembrance. This is something that's held every February by Japanese American communities around the United States, as a reminder of the impact of the experience of the internment camps on families and community in our country.  And, it's also meant to educate others on the fragility of civil liberties in times of crisis; and the importance of remaining vigilant in protecting the rights and freedoms of all. Would you tell us about your experience this year?  As I know it, you attended a Day of Remembrance with your dad, Lawsen Inada, and your son, at Tulle Lake, which is near Ashland. And, I believe your dad was a keynote speaker. Would you care to share on that today?  

Miles:  Yeah. It was, it was a very powerful experience to see the scope and the scale, and to hear the stories that are coming from the people that were there. I picked up a few books about the kind of people that kept journals or recorded their experiences during the internment camps. It gives me some hope. You know, to have these learning get-togethers and sharing and listening and recognizing. That might be the biggest thing is really recognizing that this happened and is happening. And, to see myself as part of that history and to see my son as part of that history too. I think that is very powerful. That it's something that's ongoing, yet it's been kind of referred to as a pilgrimage. So, to take the time and energy out of your normal routine to disrupt that--go somewhere else, be somewhere else, see people that you don't see all the time it, starts to build a different identity for yourself.  

So, it's funny I think about the idea of interpellation I think it's, i n t e r p e l l a t i o n, so not ‘interpolation’, like on the computer, but it's how you are addressed. So, my name is ‘Miles’, and someone says, “Hey, Miles”, I'll turn my head. But if someone doesn't know my name, they say, “Hey.” If we're walking on the street and we hear someone go, “hey”, and turn, we're being interpellated differently. Or, when a woman or race, that whole thing, you know there there's so many ways to be interpellated, to be addressed.  What's interesting about it to me, is that how it doesn't have anything to do with what's going on in your internal self, you're just being addressed as a member of a certain class or a threat or a potential problem or a consumer or like, hey you, like, buy these cookies or something.  

That's part of the triumphalist story of WWII. Like your dad could have seen himself as I'm a coarse air pilot. That's a way of interpolating yourself, is you see yourself that way. And so that's, I think, that's a key of the whole masculinity conversation. Is it's you're being addressed that way but you're also addressing yourself that way. And so, I think once we start to let in other stories from people that are not a part of the triumphalist narrative that changes us irrevocably.  So, “Barefoot Gen”, it's about the people who had the bomb dropped on them. And, if we can identify with that story, it's over.  We're not going to see the action of dropping bombs on cities as great anymore. But it's not. It's just not going to be that, and you see how men going back to kind of the themes you guys were talking about in the podcast, you see how it's a mask. You are disconnecting the wiring that you have to be empathetic in order to get the job done. And, it's so basic. We kind of know that, but I don't think we know it in terms of our identification. And, I think that's what's happening when the story changes. Our perception of our self, changes of who we are.  

So, like Arms and Ether probably would not have been written by a woman. It probably wouldn't have been written by, I don't know, like, a Native American. Why would they write that. They're like, yeah, I know this,  I don't identify with that story.  I don't identify with militarism. I've been on the wrong end of this. But I think what I was getting to, unbeknownst to me, was that, I'm identifying with the--I have the wrong story in my head. I ought to know better, but why don't I? You mentioned the role of women in Arms of Ether, that they're there. They don't have these disfigured masks on, they're not part of the fight, in a sense. I didn't even do that consciously. It's not strictly speaking, like true, like some kind of theoretical critical level. But I think in the context of the comic, I think it anticipated a process that I've been going through of seeing how I'm kind of shot through with these narratives that include the gender narrative, military triumphalist narrative, or all these things. I'm kind of run through with this. And, that as I listen to other narratives, my narrative changes.  

Emmy: Wow, that's so well said. There's so much in everything you just said. I'm just getting a sense of what I learned by looking at Arms of Ether, what I learned about how men feel. Like just wearing the armor and going to war in some kind of metaphorical sense. That's what you're doing. And you're right. I don't think a woman would ever draw it. But her Arms of Ether would be a whole different story that perhaps you never saw. Like really? That's what women have to do every day? I didn't know. And it occurs to me, my preliminary understanding of World War II, and especially Hiroshima, was about a little tiny inch in a textbook in high school once. And, when I went to the museum in Hiroshima and read from the Japanese perspective what had happened, it was eye-opening. I had no idea. I like what you say when you change the story, you change your perspective. I think that's why these things are so important.  

Miles:  Reading that book, I think it goes back to the idea that what we've been saying all along kind of about why is the world this way? Like we read "Mouse" by Art Spiegelman, right, about the concentration camps in Germany, we read about these things and we go, well, this is bad. Like this can't happen again. We read "Bearfoot Gen." We read "Roots" or something. Or we read, like we see these things, you're like, oh my God, no. But why are we still here? Why is this still happening? We can only answer that through really looking for the answer and like really opening ourselves up to something different, to hear different voices. And, oh we won't hear those voices unless we want to listen for them. And even when we do, the old story is still there. It's so powerful because when you hear other people's stories and you hear about their experiences and you're starting to go, oh, that's where something else opens up inside of us.  

Emmy:  One more point I want to make and this is a little bit more humorous, but in your comic, your main guy, he wears these little flimsy underpants and sometimes his rear end is hanging out. And, it's hilarious because he has no protection. Do you want to speak to that? (laughter) 

Miles:  Yeah, I think that was a huge part of, as a child growing up and thinking about war and spending a lot of time thinking about the experience of war and kind of grappling with the idea of like, I might just be called up to fight in a war. I think that the narrative, again, reading the Iliad, the Iliad is amazing if you haven't read it. The graphicness of it and the specificity really stayed with me. That is it. I think that's what it means to be a man. There's the kind of the story of being a man of like, you’ve got to do it, you’ve got to get out there and do your duty. And then there's the actual experience of it, which is a complete, just it's catastrophic. It's like it doesn't match the expectation of what it means to be a man. It just doesn't. There's a lie that overlays. It's about the mechanized industrial nature of what you're participating in that has nothing to do with heroism and all those types of things, and the scope and the scale of it. In a way, that starts to point to the story that we don't really grasp, that we don't really understand is like our vulnerability--that we're identifying with the wrong side. The triumphalist narrative is not the narrative of people like us. And so, these narratives don't serve us. I think the vulnerability is the whole thing. It's what we don't understand about ourselves. To do what we do, we can't know about our own vulnerability.  

I remember reading Roald Dahl's autobiography called “Boy”, where he describes being a fighter pilot in World War II. He does a good job, I think, of describing it, of how horrible it was to have his friends killed in these machines, and how quickly it happened. And, how it was just awful and how you could do it, until you couldn't. Because if you didn't know what was really happening, you could do it. But once you figured out what was actually going on, he said I couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't go up there and do what I had to do. It was too awful. It was so dangerous. The danger of it. I think the vulnerability of the characters about that, is the sense of you're being exposed. And also, just that it's kind of obvious and kind of ludicrous from the outside sometimes. It's easier to see from the outside than from the inside. It's kind of in a sense, it's almost the hope that seeing his child, you mentioned.  He picks his kid up from the Montessori daycare and he's got the helmet already attached to his head. He doesn't have the guns yet. But that's really tragic. It's that idea of being marked early for this life and being implanted with these kind of ideas even though you're this vulnerable little child.  

Emmy:  Right, we know what that child's going to grow up to be.  

Miles: Yeah, yeah.  

Nick:  I think vulnerability is the key word. If I look at that image of him, a part of him, is heavily armored and ready to get after it. This is a heavily armed and armored guy for part of him. But then there's this other part that's got nothing, that just has underpants. (laughs) When I think about my experience doing men's work or in men's groups, it's just perfect. That image is just perfect. Someone will come in and you can just tell professionally, they're just deadly people. They're organized and they know what they're doing and they're really ambitious and they're really successful. But as far as connecting with their spouse, connecting with their children, getting their own emotional needs met, they have nothing, zero capacity. And it's really painful for them, that experience is painful to have such a big void to be hyper-capable in this one context and then just not even equipped in even a remedial way around these really important things. But it's not useful. So, I think that juxtaposition of being just so formidable, armored up and then offensive capability too, like the ability to just lay waste to a circumstance that requires that. And then just in other contexts, just completely naked, just nothing, no ability to get their needs met at all.  

Miles:  When I did Arms and Ether, I was just doing a lot of stories about these kind of war-based people on this anachronistic anomalous time. And, one of them that emerged was this character that I eventually kind of called, Nakes. He's naked. And so, he's a guy, he's naked. He just has a helmet, 'cause, he just has like a metal top, like just a regular soldier kind of medieval helmet or something. And then he has a spear, and otherwise he's just naked. That character is more obviously afraid. He kind of represents that man that's just put out. It's like, I don't want to be here. I don't know what I'm doing. This is the role that I've been given. I have to like be a man now. And so, Majak's the main character of Arms and Ether, he's the upgraded version of that. Like he's done it right. Like he's had a successful career. And so, he has slightly more armor and armament around him, but he's still a sitting duck for whatever. But so, I think that was a big part of it. And the idea that this is kind of the progress from birth, you're born, you're just a naked child. And then, one of the early images is of these hands that you don't see who they are or handing this little kid in a crib helmet, like the one that Nakes has. And so, he's really attracted to this helmet and he wears it and he runs around in it. And it just does regular little kid stuff except he's wearing this helmet. And then, I was thinking about him growing up and being a teenager, a young man is still just having this kind of helmet, they give him the spear. But it's not like innate to who this person is. It's not who we want to be. It's not who we naturally are. It's kind of what we're being made into. As I started to do the video game, I didn't know this before I started to do the video game. But I was like, oh, that's Majaks when he's younger. That's my character. Yeah, that's kind of what I think is that, that's who he was when he was younger. There's going to be something about that in his decommissioning. There's going to be some recognition of that possibility, that hope of that kind of return to something more like, oh, yeah, vulnerability is good. We want to learn to be vulnerable. We want to learn to embrace that. And that's where something different can enter.  

Emmy: Wow, it's profound. Right. And then your current project, back to Majaks and he's 20 years older.  

Miles: Yeah.  

Emmy:  And so, he's figured out a few things, maybe. And this is now a game? 

Miles: Yeah.  

Emmy: Can you tell us what we learn about Majaks? Is there a story? When you say game, is there a story? 

Miles: Yeah, it's very much a narrative game. So, it's going to be, it will feel like a continuation is what I hope. But you're playing as this character. So, it's a third person as they call it. So, you're controlling Majaks. You walk around as Majaks and you see him in the game world and where he is and what he's doing.  

About three years ago, four years ago, I started to feel this, for lack of a better word, idea emerging out of: oh, yeah, there's something here. I need to do something with this. And it was about, there was something about change. And I think it was probably really as dull as just, oh, I'm getting older. I'm different. But it was also kind of born out of this almost like desperation of like feeling afraid on some level of the change. And yet there was also this kind of like hope or this momentum that was still coming from being younger. I just had this idea that started to emerge in my mind of a character sitting in his house and he's sitting in a chair in the living room and then the chair explodes and he flies out the roof of the house and then it like lands on the Willamette River. So, he goes from Ashland to the Willamette River and then he's got to come back. So, he's got to figure out how to get back, mayhem and misadventures ensue from that. And then I think it just started to tie in with other experiences in my life that, and I looked back at all the stuff I had done for Arms and Ether, which I didn't understand at the time. And I went, oh, that's what this is about. I didn't know that when I was doing it. It's like, I can only see it now. And that's part of it is the vulnerability. So, as you get older, it becomes really clear. He had inklings of that, this character.  

Emmy: Sure.  

Miles: But I think he has to experience it as some kind of break. He's going to be broken on some level. That the world around him, which was already broken and horrific and nightmarish, has become much more so for him.  

Emmy:  So, let's talk about this performance piece that you did, Miles. And Nick, you were part of this as well. Performance art piece you did with this character from Arms and Ether, Majax. Nick, do you want to share your take on it, from your perspective?  

Nick:  Sure. Yeah. It's one of my favorite stories from this whole thing. Last fall, about a year ago, Miles was working on the game. And part of working on the game was making the character of Majax from the comic book, the 2D flat character from the comic book transposing that into a 3D animation environment. Because the video game or the game has a lot of 3D animation in it. So, he transposed that character. And that was one of the first things I saw him do for the game. It was in 3D, and it was moving. You know, it was dynamic. This guy was sitting there, standing there, turning his head, and had the sword and the gun and all the things up. Seeing it moving in 3D, I thought, I have to make that. I have to make that costume for Miles. And so, I made the helmet. And I was very excited about it. I gave Miles the helmet for Christmas. And then I think a little after that 

Mile: Yeah, there was an Arms and Ether moment, which was, I had driven my tank down to the former site of the Beanery, as he does in the original Arms and Ether. I parked my tank. And then I said, someone said, hey, Miles. And it was Candace Latia, who was doing this show, was doing a performance piece called, ‘Over 40: a living exhibit for young people, and those obsessed with staying young.’ And she said, “Hey, do you want to be in this show, with this performance piece?” And I was like, “Yeah, I have this costume.” Because of the costume, I was kind of ready to go. I had been primed for doing performance.  

Nick:  We had not much time, like a week. And I thought, well, I have to make the sword and the shield. Then it would pop. That would make this thing pop. And then we got the sword and the shield together. And then we went up there. And I did the show. I was your armorer.  

Miles:  Yep, exactly. It was good to have an armorer. [laughter]  

Nick:  I've never been an armorer. Yeah. That was great.  

Miles:  Yep. Candace had set this choreographed, this piece, that was-- it was a big circle on the floor. Took up most of the room. Within that circle were smaller circles. And so, each participant had a circle. And within that circle, you had to have a picture of yourself when you were young. Have something to do. It could be reading a book, or it could be whatever. And then when you felt like it, you could get up and walk a certain way and enter the larger circle and walk around the perimeter of the larger circle as much as you wanted. And then you could reenter the circle and go back to your circle and sit back down. So it wasn't like a performance, like acting. You were supposed to just be naturally doing something. And so, there were all these other people that were doing things. Some people were looking at old photos, and then some people would sing, or they would just kind of do something that was related to the theme. I didn't know what to expect. It was kind of funny to show up with this ridiculous--because I'd never done anything like that. It was really intense. And I think that the performance itself was just intense. Like Candace's piece was like, really kind of heavy duty. Like, in a way, she's working with some kind of alchemical process. So, what happens when you bring people together, put them in a room, invite an audience around with these parameters? What goes on? And then something kind of happened in that process that really kind of gave me some clarity about the game. Because what I would do is I would walk around in this armor with the sword and the shield and walk around slowly around the circle. That was really wild. When I sat down on this little-- I had this little tiny bench - that was powerful. There was something about that that was like, oh, this is literally a mask. Like, I was aware of literally being encased in this thing. And it's like, people can't see me. And so, the first time that I took it off was really emotional. And then I had the comic of Arms and Ether. I had a copy of that, so I could take it out and read it. I had a sketch pad so I could draw.  

Emmy:  On the front page of Arms and Ether, he is reading his own comic! 

Miles:  That's right. You're right. [laughter] Which, of course, I didn't even realize that, absolutely. So, it was like this weird prophecy.  

Emmy:  Foreshadowing.  

Miles: Yep. It was this weird prophecy. And then I also had a photo of myself when I was in college and I was in a band. And I would look at that. And I also had a copy of Taro Yashima, who's a Japanese-American children's book writer and illustrator, “A Seashore Story”, maybe from the early '60s, that I read as a kid. That was actually a big influence on Legends from Camp for me. One of the incidents in Legends from Camp is basically taking a kind of response to seashore story. And so, I would read that. And that's a very-- that's always been a really powerful book for me. So, it was really emotional. I was feeling it this whole time. It was really powerful. The meaning of my own work came down to me. It just was like, you did this. And I didn't know that.  

Nick:  First off, it was just fun. It was a complete engagement with the unknown. But then actually being the armorer, I mean, there was something resonant with our history or past lives or I don't know what was going on. But there was some energy there of like, I am your armorer, man. And this is serious. [laughter] I had a glue gun. I had a bunch of kind of ridiculous tools. It wasn't like normal armorer tools. But it was still like, OK, I got my tool box. I got a thing. And I got this guy ready. He's going out there. And so, I took it really seriously, which is hilarious in hindsight. But then the circle was probably 20 feet across or 30 feet across. But there were 12 other people. I mean, a lot of other people had set up-- every one of them had set up this whole very complex, highly symbolic little environment that they were sitting in. And so, at one point, once I got you armed up and ready, I kind of left. And then I came back. And there were all these just regular looking people, completely just regular civilian looking people.  

Miles:  No one else was cosplaying at all. [laughter]  

Nick:  Not at all. It was, you see, in a cosplay convention or something, it's everyone, right? Miles was the only guy. [laughter] So, it was just perfect. I mean, you couldn't have possibly-- if we would have thought of a publicity photo for the game, there's no way we could have come up with anything that hilariously perfect. Just Miles sitting there reading his comic off the cover of the comic, like re-enacting the cover of the comic in this kind of public--that moment, I will never forget. Seeing you in that, sitting there in your helmet. That was incredible. But then talking afterwards, your description of taking it off and how much of a buffer that helmet was filtering out this really emotional piece that was going on, it wasn't just a regular public experience, like just going out and walking in Lithia Park with his helmet on. He was in the middle of this lots of really intense emotion. And so, we made this as a symbol. This was a metaphor, this armor. But we had somehow crossed over into a literal transition into an actual thing that created an actual experience. That blew me away. And then just thinking about armor, the way that wearing armor distorts our experience of the world, both what's coming in and what's coming out.  

Miles:  Yep.  

Nick:  It's a two-way distortion. And so, if we're talking about the process of taking off our armor back to the metaphor of taking off our armor, our emotional armor, or whatever you want to call it, we need to be ready for both, for people to perceive us very differently in an unfiltered way. And then, our experience of everything is just different. We can't predict how different it's going to be.  

Emmy:  Yeah, I mean, that's just so powerful. And we've been talking this afternoon about men and their armor. And it blocks the emotional reality of the people around you. It blocks maybe the difficult emotions. And it makes one vulnerable, of course. That's a really fascinating story, that you got to live it, be it, be your own character.  

Miles:  The first time I took my helmet off, I was like in tears. It was so intense.  

Nick:  Just one other piece was that the theme of the performance piece was aging. And that's a major theme of the game.  

Miles:  Yep.  

Nick:  And so, it just so happened that was another resonance.  

Miles:  Yeah, and I think that answered a question that I always had, that I didn't know that I had, which is, who is underneath this helmet? Oh, I am. I think I didn't know what that meant before. Emotionally, I didn't know what that meant. There was something about that, crystallized it in that moment. Oh, this is different. Oh, this is good. It gave me some kind of different experience of myself and my work.  

Emmy:  It also speaks to how art allows us to see these parts of ourselves that we wouldn't see if we didn't stop and step out of it. It's almost like you said, the Day of Remembrance. And you stopped and stepped out of it. And I love that you had the book from your childhood. And it kind of give you the full scope of your life and your art and who you are, who am I. And it was all there. That's sort of what my podcast is about, Sacred Truths, finding meaning in life. And for you, it happens through art. For many of us, it happens through art. But what a beautiful way to do it. Well, Miles Inada, thank you so much for joining me today on this podcast.  

Miles:  Thank you so much for having me. It's really been wonderful. It's so nourishing to have a chance to have this conversation. So, thank you so much.  

Emmy:  And Nick Oredson, thank you so much for joining us today as well.  

Nick:  Thank you. This was an absolute treat. I'm so glad to be here and have this conversation. What a great day.  

Emmy:  Thank you both so much. [music playing]  

This is Sacred Truths with Emmy Graham, music by Manpreet Kaur at Manpreet Kaur Music. My guest today was Miles Inada. For more information, please go to armsandether.com. Please visit our website at sacred-truths.com. Thank you for listening. [music]