Performing Marginality: The Place of the Player and of “Woman” in Early Modern Japanese Culture Yoko Takakuwa (bio) The economy of our culture can be analyzed in terms of what it has excluded in its (hi)story (histoire)—what meanings are marginalized in the textual system we inhabit. During the Edo era (1603–1867), the Tokugawa shogunate adopted a policy of seclusion in 1633 and carried it out by 1641, in order to interdict Christianity and protect home trade. Japan closed the door from then until 1854 when America forced the country to open up to foreign intercourse. It was in the course of the radical cultural paradigm shift at the turn of the sixteenth century that a woman originated Kabuki, which was developed into the most popular (and scandalous for the shogunate) entertainment representative of Edo culture for almost 260 years. Kabuki is precisely a child of the times, nurtured within the closure of Japanese culture as a result of the national policy of seclusion and exclusion of the other (strangers). Some questions arise. After Japan isolated itself from the world outside, who became the marginal other to be excluded within the economy of early modern Japanese culture? What kind of place was regarded as the margin? In this essay I propose to consider the problem of marginality in the light of current poststructuralist theory. I shall give a brief account (récit) of what are called “historical events” until the birth of the Kabuki theater, and then focus on the place allocated to the Kabuki player and the onnagata (the Kabuki female impersonator) as “woman” and their contradictory implications as the marginal other ideologically excluded in the shogunal system of differences. I It was Furyu (unusually elaborated decorativeness) dancing that led to Kabuki dancing and, later, to Kabuki. Furyu dancing became very popular in the age of wars. It originated in the religious ritual whose purpose was to console the stray souls of the dead killed in the wars and [End Page 213] see them off to the other world—outside the community. 1 People came to enjoy not simply dancing but also designing their “unusually decorative” dancing clothes and properties and making songs with clever words. It became a craze first in the then capital Kyoto after the Ohnin-Bummei disturbances (1467–1477), ushering in a century of warring states, and reached its peak in the mid-sixteenth century, involving a large group of people of different classes, including court nobles, feudal lords, and townspeople, as a dynamic outburst of people’s anxiety, zeal, and energy in the period of the country at war. In an unsettled society, people faced a crisis of identity, losing their firm belief in religion, and pursued worldly, though temporary, pleasures with a growing sense of anxiety about their life so close to death. The last and largest Furyu dancing was organized in 1604 by Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616), a founder of the Tokugawa shogunate, under the pretext of performing a religious service for the repose of a former ruler, the deceased Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–1598). Tokugawa plotted the dancing as an appeasement policy, to make a good impression on the part of the new ruler. In the previous year he had at last instituted the new but still unstable political system in the new capital Edo, the present Tokyo. At this historical moment of transition, a woman called Okuni (1572?-1620?) created Kabuki dancing, by improving her Nembutsu (Buddhist invocation) dancing as the successor to Furyu dancing. Coincidentally, Tokugawa and Okuni both launched their new enterprises in 1603, thus making Japanese cultural history. The word Kabuki is derived from kabuku which means “leaning” or “inclination” today, but which originally meant “out of orbit,” that is, unconventional or unusual. The Japanese Portuguese Dictionary edited by Portuguese missionaries in 1603 defines “kabuki” (cabuqi) as “to conduct out of rule, or act more freely than one is allowed to,” and “kabuki-mono” as an “eccentric person, who acts more freely than one is allowed to” (17–28). At the end of the sixteenth century, the kabuki-mono designated young men with “unusual” (but perhaps fashionable) clothes and hairstyles. Some of the men wore foreign...
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Jun 1, 2001
Daniel Goodkind + 1
Open Access