Japanese Theatre Research Articles

Concerned Theatre Japan: The Graphic Art of the Japanese Theatre, 1960-1980 (CD-ROM) (review)

CONCERNED THEATRE JAPAN: THE GRAPHIC ART OF THE JAPANESE THEATRE, 1960-1980 (CD-ROM). By David G. Goodman. Krannert Museum and Kinkead Pavilion. Champaign: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1998. $34. Tokyo of the 1960s and 1970s is David G. Goodman's Paris, his moveable feast. Experiencing Goodman's CD-ROM, Concerned Theatre Japan: The Graphic Art of the Japanese Theatre, 1960-1980, is like dining with him and being well satisfied. suspect that many theatre scholars have been either too busy or too entrenched in traditional methods to make better use of new electronic media in teaching and in presenting their research, especially in light of what may be the most attractive and effective way to convey information for the use of students and other scholars. Goodman presents a shining example of what to emulate and build upon. He and his digital team have created a beautifully graphic and informative digital record, a work of art in its own right that will provide others with not only an excellent reference work but a tool for the expanded classroom experience. Seven years in the making, this CD-ROM--inspired by the short-lived but memorable journal Concerned Theatre Japan, which Goodman founded and edited--features a collection of more than seventy posters documenting modern Japanese theatre of the 1960s and 1970s. These posters were a component of the touring exhibition of the same name as the CD, originally mounted at the Krannert Museum of the University of Illinois during the winter of 1998. The works represent modern Japanese art itself: visually stunning designs indicative of the zeitgeist of postwar Japan and issues of postmodernity. In these iconic posters, images of pop culture, rock music, consumerism, Japanese history, and American political and commercial hegemony--as well as advertising strategies, obsessions with the West, and the essential loss of Japanese spiritual identity--are all woven into stunning tapestries of paper and ink. Concerned Theatre Japan as an interactive CD-ROM continues Goodman's work on documentation and analysis of this period with layered images, video clips, text, essays, and a lavish virtual museum of poster art of the Japanese underground theatre (angura). The experience of entering this CD-ROM is quite dramatic. That is to say, it embodies the hushed excitement and expectation of attending the theatre. A deep black frame fades into a textural brown that opens elegantly, with bold taiko (drums), a woman singing I fell in love with a man with no chin, and her stage whisper: cheezu o hitosara (a plate of cheese). Then comes a stentorian silence. With a wave of the cursor, the left-hand contents unscroll. The obvious first choice seems to be to click onto an overview of the period. The viewer learns that the 1960s in Japan was a time of unprecedented theatrical renaissance. At the cutting edge of the avant-garde was angura, rebellious spawn of the shogekijo (little theatre movement) and gutai (artistic forerunner of American happenings). It was a time of remarkable collaboration. Members of Suzuki Tadashi, Betsuyaku Minoru, and Ono Hiroshi's Waseda Little Theatre; Satoh Makoto, Kushida Kazuyoshi, and Saito Ren's Black Tent and Freedom Theatres; Kara Juro's Situation Theatre; Terayama Shuji's Tenjo Sajiki; Maro Akaji's Dairakudakan--all shared their political and artistic aspirations in close camaraderie with graphic designers Yokoo Tadanor Tomita Shin'ichiro, Kushida Mitsuhiro, Hirano Koga, Oyobe Katsuhiro, Uno Akira, and others. Although the posters had little marketing effect for the productions they advertised, they were performances in themselves--stunning montages of alternating social imagery and histo rical moment, East and West, eroticism and the agonized flailings of the impotent. Their posters are alive with color, text (as in newspaper ads), and movement. There is no shying away from the grotesque, masochistic, and misogynistic themes of the art and the theatre of the period. …

Ninagawa's Production of Euripides' Medea

The Japanese theater director Yukio Ninagawa, known for expressing his opposition to repressive politics in his productions during the 1960s, claimed that he staged the Medea because he wanted Japanese women to know that they could be as strong, as straightforward, as the character Medea. Japan, which has been the largest consumer of his Medea, was and still is a male-dominated society. According to Ninagawa, it is a country in which for a woman to be demure and weak is considered a virtue. 1 And yet, if you look closely at Euripides' Medea you might conclude that Medea, although strong, is not an ideal role model for women. 2 (This was the view of Leda Geh of the Singapore Sunday Star, who reviewed Ninagawa's production in 1992.) Ninagawa's Medea was enormously successful. It ran for more than 250 performances in Japan, in other parts of Asia, and in the West, even though all the performances were in the Japanese language. Between the first productions of the Medea in 1978 and the latest in 1999, Ninagawa played to oversold, sold-out, or virtually sold-out houses in Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, as well as in smaller cities throughout Japan. 3 The 1993 [End Page 1] production in Tokyo had a three-night run, in a theater with a capacity of eight hundred seats, which was on average 84 percent filled. 4 During a second tour to Athens in 1984, over a two-night run at the Herodes Atticus Theater (which has a capacity of six thousand people), fourteen thousand attended the performances. According to the producer Tadao Nakane (whom I interviewed in Tokyo on 15 March 1999), the audiences, including those sitting on the sides of the Acropolis, applauded so long and hard that tears came to his eyes. 5 In London, in 1978, Tokusaburo Arashi's performance of Medea brought him a nomination for an Olivier award 6 and, in the fall of 1999, Ninagawa served as the first non-English-speaking foreign director of the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of King Lear. Given these and other successes, it is clear that Ninagawa was able to bridge the gap between the West and East, on the one hand, by appealing to Western audiences with his Japanese productions and, on the other, by bringing a Western play to Japanese and other audiences. In this article I will consider how Ninagawa was able to take this ancient Greek tragedy and make it popular, not only with other Asian or non-Japanese audiences but also with those in Japan. He based his Medea on the poet Mutsuo Takahashi's 7 line-by-line adaptation of Euripides' [End Page 2] Medea. Not all of Takahashi's lines are used in each production; however, Ninagawa's productions of Medea, like his production of Oedipus the King, do adhere to the words of the text much more closely and fully than do Tadashi Suzuki's Bacchae or Trojan Women. Ninagawa infused his productions of the Medea with a very strong Japanese presence, consisting of elements drawn from Japan past and present. And it is these elements that I believe have helped ensure his success with Japanese audiences who (like us) bring their own cultural baggage to the theater. To demonstrate the Japanese content of the productions, I draw on a live performance of the Medea that I saw in Tokyo in 1993 and on my translations from the Japanese of both Takahashi's adaptation of Euripides' text and Tange Kazuhiko's translation from the ancient Greek. 8 I also draw on programs, playbills, the published notes of Ninagawa, and videotapes of productions. I hope to show how Ninagawa infused the Greek tragedy with a Japanese presence in the Tokyo production of 1993 and to note how that production differed from the version of his Medea performed in Athens in 1984. I place the Tokyo performance within its cultural context by pointing out the Japanese elements...

The Written Face (review)

THE WRITTEN FACE. Directed by Daniel Schmid. Brooklyn: Icarus Films. 89 minutes. Color. 1995. $440. This is a stunning, if problematic, documentary film centering on the great kabuki female-role specialist (onnagata) Bando Tamasaburo V, now available as a videotape from Icarus Films (32 Court Street, 21st floor, Brooklyn, NY 11201; www.frif.com). It contains no narration, makes no attempt to explain its goals, combines arty surrealism with straightforward interview-like comments from its subjects, and provides sequences that are among the most wonderfully evocative in any documentary focusing on traditional Japanese theatre. Whether it can be recommended for classroom use will depend on the students' level of preparation, the teacher's sensitivity and background, and the nature and goals of the class. It is a film that is easy to watch and appreciate, and one that is often puzzlingly, even annoyingly, ambiguous. Schmid focuses on the art of Tamasaburo, forty-five when the film was made, but does not show him in the conventional world of big-city kabuki. Only a specialist would be aware, however, that we are watching performances by Tamasaburo at the Yachiyo-za in Yamaga, or the Uchiko-za on the island of Shikoku, out-of-the-way provincial playhouses that Tamasaburo enjoys playing because they retain the traditional intimacy and architectural features associated with Edo-period theatres. Similarly, few viewers will be aware that an important dance sequence featuring Tamasaburo is not traditional kabuki but is a modern dance in nihon buyo style. In fact, the only classical kabuki sequences are scenes from Seki no To and Sagi Musume, the latter clearly influenced by modernist aesthetics. Often, as we view Tamasaburo dancing, the director cuts to odd scenes of the actor--in contemporary male clothing--exploring the theatre's ancient cellar, talking about the art of acting women, putting on his makeup or costume, or even sitting in the old-fashioned pit watching himself perform on stage. We are, perhaps, being reminded of the division between the actor and the roles he plays--although in Tamasaburo's case his offstage persona is often as intriguingly theatrical as his onstage face. Where, we wonder, is the real Tamasaburo? Then we realize that the actor's entire life is a construction designed to make him reach the levels of artistry necessary to achieve transformation into the women he portrays. …

Tokyo Notes: A Play by Hirata Oriza

Hirata Oriza's Tokyo Notes , which has had some forty productions since it won the thirty-ninth Kishida Kunio Award, Japan's highest prize for new drama, in 1995, toured North America in the fall of 2000. In its focus on the understated and ordinary, the play is an exemplary work of the shizuka na engeki (quiet theatre) movement prevalent in Japan in the past decade. In his introduction, translator M.Cody Poulton argues that while Hirata's theatre recalls the naturalism of early-twentieth-century shingeki (new theatre), the playwright's aversion to dramatic convention and overt expressions of emotion or ideological messages, as well as his use of colloquial Japanese, make him a significant voice in contemporary Japanese theatre.

Half a Century of Japanese Theater: The 1990s, Part 2 (review)

Half a Century of Japanese Theater: The 1990S, Part 2. Edited by Japan Playwrights Association. Tokyo: Kinokuniya, 2000. ix + 421 pp. 4,000 yen. (Distributed by University of Hawai'i Press, $40.)

The Man Who Saved Kabuki: Faubion Bowers and Theatre Censorship in Occupied Japan

As part of its programme to promote democracy in Japan after World War II, the American Occupation, headed by General Douglas MacArthur, undertook to enforce rigid censorship policies aimed at eliminating all traces of feudal thought in media and entertainment, including kabuki. Faubion Bowers (1917-1999), who served as personal aide and interpreter to MacArthur during the Occupation, was appalled by the censorship policies and anticipated the extinction of a great theatrical art. He used his position in the Occupation administration and his knowledge of Japanese theatre in his tireless campaign to save kabuki. Largely through Bowers's efforts, censorship of kabuki had for the most part been eliminated by the time he left Japan in 1948. Although Bowers is at the centre of the story, this translation from the original Japanese treats a critical period in the long history of kabuki as it was affected by a single individual who had a commanding influence over it. It offers details about Occupation censorship politics and kabuki performance while providing yet another perspective on the history of an enduring Japanese art form.

"Between Two Worlds": The Dybbuk and the Japanese Noh and Kabuki Ghost Plays

The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds by S. Ansky (Shlomo Rapoport) (1) the most renowned production by Ha'bimah (The Stage), Israel's National Theater. It premiered in 1922 in Moscow, staged by Ha'bimah, which was a Russian-Jewish company at that time, with the advice and support of Constantin Stanislavski. The play was performed in Hebrew and directed by the Russian-Armenian Yevgeny Vakhtangov shortly before he died. (2) Since then it has been staged more than one thousand times, reviving Vakhtangov's direction, and has become probably the most famous Jewish and Israeli play. The play's themes, structures, dramatic means, and theatrical elements show a remarkable similarity to those of many plays in the repertoire of Japanese traditional theater, especially of Noh, the aristocratic lyrical theatrical form that was established in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Noh draws its material from many sources and its form from ritual and folk dances. It is essentially a drama of soliloquy and reminiscence of the main character who in many plays begins as a reincarnation and then appears as a ghost. There are enormous differences in many respects between the backgrounds of this singular Western play, The Dybbuk, and the Eastern traditional Japanese theater and drama. Whereas the belief in dead spirits, reincarnation, and ghosts is quite common in Japanese thought, such beliefs were and still are not part of mainstream Jewish belief. The ritual that has always played an important role as a connection between beliefs and their artistic/performative embodiments is very developed in Japan but not in Judaism, in which belief is based mostly on verbal expression. Further, theater was discouraged in Judaism. The Dybbuk is therefore not a characteristic play in the Jewish or Israeli repertoire, and since few other plays deal with a dybbuk (a discontented dead spirit that takes possession of the body of a living human being) or gilgul neshamot (transmigration of souls), it is impossible to analyze this play as part of any dramatic genre. In spite of these differences, however, a comparison between various elements in The Dybbuk with those in Japanese Noh and Kabuki (traditional popular theater) ghost plays can provide a better comprehension of the various aspects of both this singular Western play and the traditional Japanese ghost plays. Belief in Dead Spirits, Reincarnation, and Dybbuks In Japan, belief in the existence of the soul, in spirits of the dead, and in reincarnation is ancient and widespread. The Japanese believe that the soul and the body are two separate entities, and this belief exists in both the original Shinto religion and the imported Buddhism that entered Japan in 552 C.E. and created a synthesis with Shinto in various elements. This synthesis, in turn, influenced the performing arts. (3) One of the expressions of this belief is the erection of two separate graves: one for the impure body and another for the soul. After death the soul (tamashii) wanders for several years until it is purified and becomes a quasi-god (kami) that resides in another world, beyond the sea or sky. It is there that the dead spirits become the ancestral souls. At the time of death, the soul of a person can become either an angered or a peaceful spirit, according to the psychological status of the person at the moment of death. Emotions such as jealous love or hatred will engender a very dangerous spirit. The spirit of an unmarried man or woman or of one killed in an accident will be disturbed after death and will face difficulty in entering the other world. Such hurt spirits can return to the mortal world and attack human beings. This belief led to the creation of various rituals aimed at honoring the purified spirits and at appeasing the disturbed ones so that they will refrain from doing harm. (4) The most important such event is obon, the Festival of the Dead nowadays celebrated in mid-August, during which the families prepare to welcome the dead spirits of deceased relatives, who come to visit. …

Androgyny and Otherness: Exploring the West Through the Japanese Performative Body

The way of the Western practitioner or scholar wishing to analyze contemporary Japanese theatre in terms of gender and culture is fraught with peril. How is it possible to apply critical theory without imposing Western perceptions or using master narratives that reduce and conquer the "foreign"? This essay focuses on a recurring figure in Japanese literature and drama--a hero of ambivalent sexuality and gender who uses a cloak of invisibility to pass through boundaries--and considers its use in three contemporary Japanese theatrical productions set in a historically distant, even "mythologized," West. This mysterious, caped man/woman character, whose antecedents can be traced to Heian-period literature (794-1185), is reflected in current Japanese pop art as well as in theatre, suggesting that gender slippage (the oscillation between received ideas of male and female within an individual body) can be used as a strategy to explore issues of cultural otherness. Such a strategy reverses the process of Western colonization of the East through representation (so vividly described in Edward Said's Orientalism). But it also provides a nondoctrinaire point of entry for the Western scholar to explore issues of gender and culture in the contemporary Japanese theatrical arena. [End Page 249] The Cloak of Invisibility Partings at Dawn, an anthology of gay Japanese literature published in 1996, takes its title from the twelfth-century courtly love story Ariake no Wakare. This tale concerns Ariake, a handsome young captain of the guards, who uses a cloak of invisibility to walk through the walls of the court residences. Ariake's secretive manner and mysterious charm attract both men and women. Indeed the emperor himself takes the captain as a lover. As their affair progresses, Ariake (who is actually a woman) feigns his own death, resurfaces as a "younger sister," is established as an imperial concubine, gives birth to the emperor's son and heir, and eventually becomes empress (Kahn 1996, 21). The androgynous figure at the center of Partings at Dawn reappears with slight variations in Japanese fiction and drama of a later era. From kabuki and no to present-day animated cartoons, a phenomenon sometimes described as "veiled gender performance" (Ridgeway 1999, 1) has been featured in theatrical performance, film, television, fashion, printed media, and contemporary drama, often through a charismatic central character who crosses boundaries of gender and geography to embody a sexual or foreign other. The tradition of a performer embodying both male and female characteristics is said to derive from indigenous religious practice as well as Buddhist observance (Leupp 1995, 174). In the seventeenth century, the new theatrical form called kabuki was initiated by the priestess Okuni, who performed a mixture of Buddhist rites and erotic comedy wearing Portuguese pants and a Christian cross. When women performers were banished from this performance art, the onnagata--men who took over the female roles--won an extraordinary degree of popularity due in no small part to the slippage between their biological gender and the roles they enacted. In The Love of the Samurai: A Thousand Years of Japanese Homosexuality, Watanabe and Iwata (1989) suggest that onstage androgyny in kabuki and no was a reflection of a society where sexual preference (at least for men) was not a matter of fixed polarity. The concept of sexual desire as a continuum rather than an opposition declined with the waning of samurai tradition, the dawning of the Meiji era (1868-1912), and the importation of European theories on sex and gender. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, a new form of androgyny was exhibited in the fashion, visual, and performance art of Japan. This is a period described by Donald Roden as a "transition from a civilization of character to a culture of personality" (1990, 54-55), a period reflecting many of the social changes of the gender-bending Weimar era in the West (p. 39). Today androgyny plays a central role in at least...

Zeami and the N?? Theatre in the World. Edited by Benito Ortolani and Samuel E. Leiter. New York: Center for Advanced Studies in Theatre Arts, 1998; pp. 177. Paperback.

Thomas Rimer's Fall 1992 Asian Theatre Journal article, “What More Do We Need to Know about the No ?” notes that, despite the blossoming of interest in the no during the decade of the 1980s, and, despite having the no as a tradition and living performance to both study and enjoy, scholars of the no miss a “certain understanding of the tradition in the larger perspective” (217). Though perhaps not responding directly to Professor Rimer's concern, Zeami and the No Theatre in the World successfully places no in a larger context of theory, aesthetics, and performance. The editors of this volume, Benito Ortolani and Samuel Leiter, both widely published and highly respected scholars of traditional Japanese theatre, note in their introduction that Zeami (1363–1443), the acknowledged founder of the no, has “become increasingly well known as one of the great figures in the history of world theatre,” and they “wish not only to encourage readers to more effectively appreciate and understand no drama through increased access to his ideas, but to recognize Zeami's place in the pantheon of theatrical thinker artists as one whose insights are surprisingly pertinent on a universal plane.” The focus of the text is firmly fixed on Zeami as the creator of an art form that is at once ancient and modern, Japanese and universal. Despite the brevity of Zeami and the No Theatre in the World, the introduction by Ortolani and Leiter and the eleven essays they edited for inclusion in the volume attain the editors' stated goals, and, in so doing, provide a valuable resource for generalist and specialist alike.

Cultural Frictions: John Romeril's The Floating World

Hailed as an ‘unruly masterpiece’, John Romeril's The Floating World is one of the few ‘new wave’ Australian plays representing Australians and their Asian ‘others’ to be restaged periodically since its première in 1974. Paying particular attention to productions of the play that have used Japanese theatre forms such as kabuki and bunraku, this article focuses primarily on the ways in which the spectacle of race has been coded performatively by different directorial approaches, and how various significations of race have been interpreted by the critical establishment. The fascinating stage history of The Floating World is treated as a barometer of Australian theatre's response to the challenge of representing cultural conflict, during a period marked by public debate about the desirability, and inevitability, of Australia's political, economic and cultural ‘enmeshment’ with Asia.

Gender and the Japanese puppet theatre

The manifestation of gender in the Japanese puppet theatre is also a study of men who depict male and female roles. The visual sociologist must take into consideration the intermeshing and communication of voice (tayu), with music (shamisen player) and puppeteers on stage in the dramaturgy of roles and their enactment. The researcher explores aspects of front and backstage as we learn about male and female role making and taking. It could be argued that women are fictionalized, idealized and subject to stylization, while men are allowed to be more free in their depiction of emotional variation. At the same time there is a long tradition of gender interpretation which contains sexual ambiguities and varied meaning levels. This research addresses the masked and unmasked aspects of the Bunraku theatre and the ways that maleness and femaleness can be visually and verbally conceived.

Lady Kaede in Kurosawa's Ran : verbal and visual characterization through animal traditions

This article deals with the characterization of the unique figure of Lady Kaede in Kurosawa's film Ran from within Japanese cultural syncretism, through using different verbal and visual elements of two animals - fox and serpent. The Japanese fox has always played a most important part in Japanese culture, and its ambivalent nature has become a leitmotiv, especially its supernatural power to transform itself into a human being. In contrast, the most important manifestation of the serpent in Japanese traditional theatre is that of the transformation of a human female into a serpent as a consequence of her jealousy. In the second half of Ran , Kurosawa skilfully interweaves both traditions, attributing them to Kaede after her husband's murder. He attires this character with two kinds of serpent-like costume, planned to reflect intensification of the serpent image through the different fabric designs and their different manipulation according to the dramatic context. Within this fixed visual image Kurosawa conceals the serpent-like costume with an outer kimono and then inserts a verbal fox image. Only in the last scene of the character's appearance in the film does Kurosawa combine and expressly manifest, verbally and visually, both animals' aspects.

Edward Gordon Craig and Japanese Theatre

Edward Gordon Craig's conception of theatre was stimulated not only by the European past but also by the Far East, especially the Japanese theatre. This influence can be claimed in particular for his endeavors to devise an aesthetic in which all the arts combined on stage to create a "total" theatre and in his emphasis on dance and color symbolism. Professor Lee's essay offers a detailed account of the myriad ways in which Craig was influenced by traditional Japanese theatre.

The Voyage of Contemporary Japanese Theatre (review)

The Voyage of Contemporary Japanese Theatre by Senda Akihiko. Translated by J. Thomas Rimer. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1997. xix + 306 pp. $45.00

Half a Century of Japanese Theater I: 1990'S Part 1 (review)

Half a Century of Japanese Theater I: 1990'S Part 1 (review)

Ehon Gappō ga Tsuji: A Kabuki Drama of Unfettered Evil

Early nineteenth-century Japanese theatre was dominated by the kabuki playwright Tsuruya Nanboku IV, who seized on the fascination with evil and the vendetta in contemporary literature to create a new type of kabuki play. This genre—of which Ehon Gappō ga Tsuji is the finest example—focuses on the role types of the handsome young villain (iroaku) and wicked woman (akuba) .

Erratum

The Journal's November 1999 issue (58.4:1141) carried an error in William A. Marotti's review of David G. Goodman's CD Concerned Theatre Japan: The Graphic Art of Japanese Theatre 1960–1980. At the end of the fourth paragraph, it states “… which reiterates the position of Yasuda Yojuro at the wartime “Overcoming the Modern” conference …” The sentence should read “… which reiterates the position of Yasuda Yojuro, propounded by Kamei Katsuichiro at the wartime “Overcoming the Modern” conference …”

Erratum: Concerned Theatre Japan: The Graphic Art of Japanese Theatre 1960-1980

Erratum: Concerned Theatre Japan: The Graphic Art of Japanese Theatre 1960-1980

Traditional Japanese Theater: An Anthology of Plays. Edited by Karen Brazell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. xiv, 561 pp. $52.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).

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Traditional Japanese Theater: An Anthology of Plays

Traditional Japanese Theater: An Anthology of Plays