Japanese Drama Research Articles

Decolonizing Japanese TV drama: syncopated notes from a ‘sixth grader’ researcher relocated in Taiwan

Decolonizing Japanese TV drama: syncopated notes from a ‘sixth grader’ researcher relocated in Taiwan

Male Bonding and Female Pleasure: Refining Masculinity in Japanese Popular Cultural Texts

Over the past few decades, alternative constructions of masculinity have entered the Japanese popular cultural scene. These definitions are slowly chipping away at traditional constructions of gender and creating new subjectivities through which men and women may choose to define their gendered identities. This article explores some of these changing constructions through a case study of 1 particularly popular male celebrity, young male actor and singer Kimura Takuya. Examining his appearances on various Japanese media sites-from television dramas, to popular magazines, to concert videos-this article attempts to identify the different codes of masculinity emerging from Kimura's diverse characters, and considers their possible significance within the larger Japanese popular cultural environment in which they are distributed and consumed.

On Shimizu Kunio's Play: May Even Lunatics Die in Peace

Inoue Yoshie's article, "On Shimizu Kunio's Play: May Even Lunatics Die in Peace" (Shimizu Kunio "Kyojin naomote Ojo o togu—Mukashi Bokutachi Aishita") is published in Twentieth-Century Japanese Drama II (Nijusseiki no Engeki II —Nihon Kindai Gikyoku no Tenkai), edited by the Japan Modern Theatre History Research Group (2001). This comprehensive collection of criticism by twenty-eight critics covers fifty-one playwrights and their plays written between 1946 and 1973. Beginning with playwright Hotta Kiyomi and his play Untenko no Musuko (The Son of a Machine Operator, 1947), the book treats works by noted playwrights such as Mishima Yukio, Abe Kobo, Tanaka Chikao, Kishida Kunio, Kubo Sakae, Betsuyaku Minoru, and Terayama Shuji. It also discusses playwrights who are not so well known overseas such as Yamada Tokiko, Suzuki Masao, Mafune Yutaka, and Nakano Minoru.

Prefiguring Cantonic Time: Temporal Categories in the Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound

The significance of time as one of the underlying organizational principles of Pound's Cantos is widely recognized in terms of Bergsonian simultaneity, Odyssean nostalgia, temporal vortices, and historical imperatives that are caught `on the barb of time'. (1) Rather than seeing a continuity between such elements and Pound's earlier poetry, Peter Nicholls argues that the temporal schemata of The Cantos represent a radical shift in Pound's treatment of time and relates this shift to his discovery of Japanese drama in the papers of Ernest Fenollosa: `These Noh plays suggested to Pound a structural conception of time which would allow him to progress from the momentary intuitions of Imagism to the complex and extended structures of The Cantos.' (2) The contrast here between the miniaturism of the strictly imagist poems and the epic canvas of The Cantos is convincing in structural terms, but prompts enquiry as to whether the poetic significance of time in The Cantos is in fact radically different or if the temporal categories in the earlier poetry in some way prefigure Cantonic time. The most explicit pronouncement concerning time in The Cantos occurs in Canto 74 in the context of the cage at Pisa: `Time is not, is the evil, beloved | Beloved the hours brododaktulos' (p. 458). A considered interpretation of these lines is required if we are to characterize Cantonic time effectively. In his seminal discussion of time in The Cantos, which takes its name from Pound's own phrase, Daniel D. Pearlman comments on these lines: `Coupled with this moral assertion that is evil is the metaphysical assertion that Time is not', (3) a reading that requires a fairly convoluted philosophical elaboration to explain the obvious contradiction: how can time be evil, if it does not exist? Pearlman's interpretation is based on the assumption that `Time is not' is a syntactically complete entity with an existential form of the verb `to be'. This is the generally accepted reading, affirmed, for example, in Alfredo Rizzardi's powerful Italian translation: `Il Tempo non e, il Tempo e il male, mio amore' where the translation of `beloved' as `mio amore' rules out any other interpretation. (4) Unlike Pearlman (and Rizzardi) I read `beloved' as the complement of a copular form of the verb `to be', `Time is not beloved', which is parenthetically interrupted by `Time is the evil'. The second line, `Beloved the hours brododaktulos', by means of a rhetorical chiasmus then provides a condensed contrast between unbeloved (capitalized, abstracted) and the beloved hours of a `rosy-fingered' Homeric dawn with which it is juxtaposed. This reading not only circumvents the apparent contradiction in the text but also embodies two of the most important temporal aspects of Pound's thinking: revulsion at the irredeemable ravages of time and celebration of the caught moment cherished. The occurrence of `Time is the evil' at Pisa is a reprise from Canto 30: its context there is reinforcement of the notion of redemptionless time. The pronouncement is instantiated by the case of Pedro of Portugal whose wife Ignez was murdered in a court intrigue. Pedro later had her body exhumed and paid court to by `the Lords in Lisboa' (pp. 147-48). Commenting on Ignez's first appearance, in Canto 3, Carroll F. Terrell notes that she represents `the overlapping of the past into the present, a discrepancy between the fine image held in the mind and the actual fact of the rotting corpse from the past, as may occur when time, for a mind like Pedro's, has stood still'. (5) Ignez is effaced by the inexorable passage of time. While Pedro's strategy for evoking the past is a madness none of us would want to be driven to, Terrell's remarks remind us that time redeemable in the mind, the power of memory, is central to any discussion of time's significance in Pound's poetry. Pedro's exhumation of Ignez is a temporally displaced reenactment of the past exemplifying the larger temporal dislocations of The Cantos which Nicholls attributes to the influence of such reenactments in Japanese drama. …

Features Unique to Classical Chinese Drama as Compared with Japanese <i>Kabuki</i>

This paper compares Chinese drama in its late-mature period with Japanese drama of the early modern era. It was in the Southland of China, in so-called Jiangnan, that Ming dynasty drama went from its fully-developed to its late-mature stage, giving birth to what have been termed the“four great southern dramas”(sida nanxi):“Lute”(Pipa-ji), “Thorn Hairpin”(Jingchai-ji), “White Hare”(Baitu-ji), and“Killing a Dog”(Shagou-ji). In Japan, it was in Edo-period Kyoto and Osaka that kabuki progressed from its fully-developed to its late-mature period, one marked by the appearance of the“three great kabuki plays”(san dai-kabuki):“Exemplary Calligraphy for Initiation into the Secret Art of the Sugawara School”(Sugawara denju tenarai kagami), “Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees”(Yoshitsune senbon-zakura), and “The Treasury of Loyal Retainers; A Copybook of Models”(Kanadehon Chushingura). Both groups of plays represent the maturest dramatic work of the region economically and culturally most advanced in each country. Through their comparison, the following distinguishing features of Chinese drama emerge.

Noh subtlety for the British

Traditional Japanese drama demonstrates how cultural background influences the way we read emotions, reports Henry Gee.

The Woman with the Flying Head and Other Stories (review)

If you're seeking a typical Japanese drama, look elsewhere. As the title of this book suggests, the situations depicted in Kurahashi Yumiko's The Woman with the Flying Head and Other Stories are far from ordinary. The first story, "An Extraterrestrial," takes us into the lives of a brother and sister who keep an alien in their room as a pet and lover. In "The Trade," an exceptionally handsome man's face is stolen and he is stuck with the visage of an ogre until he can steal someone else's good looks. The equally surreal title story is about a man's rape of the body of his adopted daughter while her head is away visiting her beloved.

Avatars of Vengeance: Japanese Drama and the Soga Literary Tradition

Avatars of Vengeance: Japanese Drama and the Soga Literary Tradition

Avatars of Vengeance: Japanese Drama and the Soga Literary Tradition

Avatars of Vengeance: Japanese Drama and the Soga Literary Tradition

Avatars of Vengeance: Japanese Drama and the Soga Literary Tradition. By Laurence R. Kominz. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 1995. xiii, 282 pp. $42.95 (cloth).

Avatars of Vengeance: Japanese Drama and the Soga Literary Tradition. By Laurence R. Kominz. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 1995. xiii, 282 pp. $42.95 (cloth). - Volume 57 Issue 2

Avatars of Vengeance: Japanese Drama and the Soga Literary Tradition

Avatars of Vengeance: Japanese Drama and the Soga Literary Tradition

Producing the Harrowing of Hell and Last Judgement plays in a Japanese Buddhist drama style.

Producing the Harrowing of Hell and Last Judgement plays in a Japanese Buddhist drama style.

East Asia - Laurence R. Kominz: Avatars of vengeance: Japanese drama and the Soga literary tradition. (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, no. 13.) xiii, 282 pp. Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1995. $42.95.

East Asia - Laurence R. Kominz: Avatars of vengeance: Japanese drama and the Soga literary tradition. (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, no. 13.) xiii, 282 pp. Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1995. $42.95.

Avatars of vengeance: Japanese drama and the Soga literary tradition

Avatars of vengeance: Japanese drama and the Soga literary tradition

Avatars of Vengeance: Japanese Drama and the Soga Literary Tradition

Avatars of Vengeance: Japanese Drama and the Soga Literary Tradition

Alternative Japanese Drama: Ten Plays

Alternative Japanese Drama: Ten Plays

Reflecting on Nō

The producer of experimental theatre in Prague explains her approach to the themes of the female demons as depicted in her dance performances. She avoids direct imitation of Japanese forms and seeks instead to express Japanese themes using European cultural idioms. It is the movement and symbolism of the classical No play which fascinates her above all. She considers that these constitute the very essence of theatre. She attaches great importance to the “theophany of the body”, to the magic of the “here and now” of theatre. In this context she touches upon the myth of the Androgyne and discusses transvesticism in the theatre: the angel and the demon — these are both androgenic. This Prague producer aims to show that recollection and fate in Japanese drama are by no means alien to the central European mentality, permeated as it is with a suppressed mysticism.

Alternative Japanese Drama

Alternative Japanese Drama

Alternative Japanese Drama: Ten Plays.

A major renaissance in Japanese theater occurred in the 1960s. During this period, the implications of Japan's prewar actions as well as its postwar materialistic course were interrogated with fierce intensity. Nowhere was the depth and dynamism of this cultural questioning more clearly expressed than in theater. Fueling the explosion of seminal theater activity that took place was the generation of young artists who are the focus of Alternative Japanese Drama.Foreword by J. Thomas Rimer

Origins of Modern Japanese Literature.

Since its publication in Japan ten years ago, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature has become a landmark book, playing a pivotal role in defining discussions of modernity in that country. Against a history of relative inattention on part of Western translators to modern Asian critical theory, this first English publication is sure to have a profound effect on current cultural criticism in West. It is both boldest critique of modern Japanese literary history to appear in post-war era and a major theoretical intervention, which calls into question idea of modernity that informs Western consciousness. In a sweeping reinterpretation of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Japanese literature, Karatani Kojin forces a reconsideration of very assumptions underlying our concepts of modernity. In his analysis, such familiar terms as origin, modern, literature, and state reveal themselves to be ideological constructs. Karatani weaves many separate strands into an argument that exposes what has been hidden in both Japanese and Western accounts of development of modern culture. Among these strands are: discovery of landscape in painting and literature and its relation to inwardness of individual consciousness; similar discovery in Japanese drama of naked face as another kind of landscape produced by interiority; challenge to dominance of Chinese characters in writing; emergence of confessional literature as an outgrowth of repression of sexuality and body; conversion of samurai class to Christianity; mythologizing of tuberculosis, cancer, and illness in general as a producer of meaning; and discovery of the child as an independent category of human being. A work that will be important beyond confines of literary studies, Karatani's analysis challenges basic Western presumptions of theoretical centrality and originality and disturbs binary opposition of West to its so-called other. Origins of Modern Japanese Literature should be read by all those with an interest in development of cultural concepts and in interrelating factors that have determined modernity.