Welcome to Japan; As Pacific Overtures arrives on Broadway this month, Adam Green gets a lesson in translation.

Unless you keep up with what's on the boards in the Pacific Rim these days, you probably have never heard of Amon Miyamoto, who, as it turns out, is Japan's leading director of musical theater, not to mention its biggest fan. Miyamoto first made a splash in 1987 with I Got Merman, a tribute to the legendary Broadway belter, whom he describes as "beyond imagination." Since then, he has staged Japanese-language productions of everything from The Sound of Music and Urinetown to Don Giovanni and The Hello Kitty Dream Revue (1 and 2). This month, Miyamoto realizes a dream of his own as he makes his Broadway directing debut with a new take on Pacific Overtures, Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's remarkable 1976 musical comedy about American gunboat diplomacy in nineteenth-century Japan.

The unlikely subject is the opening of Japan to trade with the West in 1853 and the aftershocks that transformed a feudally isolated "floating kingdom" into a modern industrial power. Weidman's lean, well-constructed (if episodic) book gracefully balances the historical and the personal, and Sondheim's gorgeous score, steeped in the idioms of both West and East, is witty, scathing, and mournful. In "Poems," the composer sets a series of haiku to the pentatonic twang of a three-stringed lute; in "Please Hello," he evokes John Philip Sousa marches, Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs, and Offenbach cancans for an intricately rhymed salute to cultural imperialism and mutual detente. Under the inventive eye of director Harold Prince, the original production-with a mostly male and Asian-American cast and eye-popping Boris Aronson sets-was a singular mix of Kabuki pageantry and Broadway razzle-dazzle.

When Miyamoto staged his critically lauded, somewhat more restrained version of Pacific Overtures at Tokyo's New National Theater in 2000 (and, two years later, at the Lincoln Center Festival), it was the first time the show had been performed by Japanese actors in their own language. Weidman remembers it as "thrilling." He says, "It felt just right-like the next step in the evolution of this American musical that looks at Japanese-American relations from a Japanese point of view." It's a step for which the 46-year-old Miyamoto seems to have been preparing his whole life.

The director grew up in Tokyo (his mother performed with the Schochiku Girls Opera Company, and his father ran a cafe popular with actors), where he discovered America through its song and dance. As a child, he says, he spent a lot of time alone in his room listening to Broadway show tunes. "I would play every record over and over-more than 30 times," Miyamoto recalls. "Images welled up in my mind, and even though I didn't understand English, through the music I could understand the drama and how the characters felt."

In his teens, Miyamoto saw dozens of Japanese-language productions of American musicals, among them My Fair Lady and Oklahoma!, and watched nearly every Hollywood tuner ever made. His first experience of a Broadway show, as it happens, was a Japanese television ...