Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo

Abstract

Routledge reissued the 2006 edition of Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo in 2017 as a part of its Performance Practitioner series; a Kindle edition was added. This is a co-authored work about two iconic Japanese butoh figures, Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo. It explores the biographical information and artistic practices of Hijikata and Ohno, founders of the butoh form of dance, and their influences on students who are still active as dancers and teachers to transmit their legacies. The book functions as a satisfactory guide in the English language for dancers and university students studying dance and postwar Japan. The book introduces a history of butoh from its birth while observing concurrent sociocultural and historical phenomena in contemporary Japan. English and Japanese glossaries of terms and illustrations are helpful.What is butoh? Sondra Fraleigh and Tamah Nakamura demonstrate how butoh can be light, going beyond the more common definition as the “dance of darkness.” They provide readers with an account of how Hijikata “uncover[ed] the dance already happening in the body” and went beyond the prevalent image of butoh as “post-atomic spectacle” (1). Butoh by Hijikata and Ohno was “human rehabilitation,” abandoning the formality of Western dance (2). Their free dance expressions were different from what American democracy implanted in Japan after World War II. Rather, butoh was revolutionary, echoing the Anpo protests in the 1960s against the renewal of the Japan-US Security Treaty. Current butoh extends a reverse convergent power to have the West learn Japanese spiritual and therapeutic techniques through art.In chapter 1 Fraleigh and Nakamura refer to Hijikata’s 1985 “Kaze Daruma” (Wind Daruma) speech as “the origins of butoh.” Hijikata is “a sole, surreal dead body” when dancing, like the body of Kaze Daruma, who visited his childhood house to eat charcoal at the hearth on a severely cold day in northern Tohoku (4). His body is also like the ancient Buddhist priest in Japan, Kyogai, who became Hi Daruma (Fire Daruma), whose body was covered with flame. Daruma is what Japanese people call Bodhidharma, a monk who brought Zen to China. Though the authors do not clearly explain it for readers, Hijikata is talking about dancing butoh as if cremating his body with wind and fire. The book’s challenge is to explain butoh-fu—Hijikata’s nothingness—using Zen’s nothingness. By doing so, Fraleigh and Nakamura open the door to a completely mysterious world of Hijikata’s butoh. This book demands training for readers to clear their mind and understand the authors’ poetic but nonunified and random style of discussion. Adopting the concept from the dance critic Ichikawa Miyabi’s “the body as spirit” and the philosopher Yasuo Yuasa’s Zen Buddhist concept of the body, the authors define butoh as “the body that becomes” (50–51). Yet it is also interesting to see how the authors look at butoh by tying Zen’s nothingness to Jungian belief and all European-isms—Dadaism, absurdism, and surrealism—and for Ohno, his life as a Christian and his thankfulness to God.Hijikata and Ohno, twenty years apart in age, experienced World War II in Japan and on the war front, respectively. They both studied German modern dance and shared the common goal to find their own dance aesthetics, from prewar military to postwar return-to-nature. The authors show us how Hijikata first encountered Ohno in urban Tokyo, how they experienced their yin-yang polarity (referring to Susan Klein’s 1988 book) and how Ohno’s fluidity and dynamism from the mother’s womb contrasted with Hijikata’s negativism that questioned death and sacrifice. Ohno’s possession spirit is not Daruma but the flamenco dancer La Argentina. Hijikata recognizes Ohno’s methodology of dance to hold what is modern and Western in his soul and body. Fraleigh and Nakamura stress the difference between Hijikata’s “life catches up with form” versus Ohno’s “form comes by itself” (31). For Hijikata, “Western dance is incompatible with his desire for a dance of flesh and blood.” Instead, Hijikata brought in Dionysus, a Greek god depicted as a foreigner, the otherness in Hijikata’s Rebellion of the Flesh (1968); thus, the West and the East met in Hijikata’s butoh (46).Beyond Hijikata and Ohno, the book introduces Yoko Ashikawa’s contribution as “a vessel” for Hijikata’s butoh-fu, “a collage of visual/poetic word images” generated for butoh movement (55). Though the authors call Ashikawa the third founder of butoh, readers are not able to hear her voice, as her interview is missing from the book. We, however, can hear Ohno’s female student Nakajima Natsu’s voice in her 1997 speech in Taipei. Her speech gave readers an answer to the darkness of butoh, inviting the Daoist (precisely not Buddhist) soul dualism of kon-paku, in which the living has both a kon spirit (a yang soul that leaves the body and goes to heaven) and a paku body (a yin soul remaining with the dead).The strength of the book is its primary sources that carry the voices of butoh practitioners—including Ohno Kazuo’s son Yoshito—through interviews with the authors, the translation of Ohno’s words in Kazuo Ohno’s World, and the translation of Hijikata’s words in the Spring 2000 issue of The Drama Review, edited and translated by Kurihara Nanako. The final chapter, which is dedicated to introducing workshop words and Hijikata’s dance experiences, is a valuable resource for dance practitioners to learn the methods of Hijikata and Ohno from their nine students. The book also contains a nearly comprehensive selection of secondary sources for butoh research; however, the list ends with its 2006 edition. Readers cannot see the ten-year-long development of dance scholarship in the 2017 edition. Unfortunately, the value of primary sources in this book may not be able to be updated. Hijikata Tasumi died in 1986, Ohno Kazuo in 2010, and Ohno’s son Yoshito in 2020. In other words, it is not possible for the book to have any more autobiographical information by them. The book remains a beneficial contribution to the future study of butoh, featuring both autobiographical memories from the deceased dancers and biographical memories from the surviving students of Ohno and Hijikata.