We have entered the age of the internet, where fast-paced communication and the rapid exchange of ideas across continents are not only a way of life, but also a means of survival. Globalization is the key to success. Change, or be left far behind. In Japan, however, where traditions are still very much intact, change has not come so easily. An example of this is the kabuki theatre, a classical form of theatre in Japan that has historically proven itself to be a tradition capable of adapting to its current environment despite various obstacles since its conception. It has also proven that it can accomplish this change with success, remaining one of the most important parts of Japanese culture and identity. Now, in a time where tradition no longer carries the importance it once did and where a modern globalized nation carries more weight in the public eye, Japan's cultural identity is being questioned. Whether or not kabuki can change to suit the times remains a question, but it seems that this may be one obstacle too great for traditional theatre to overcome, though it has taken small steps in order to find a way to appeal to a more progressive population.
There are differing accounts of how exactly kabuki originated and in what political environment it began, but all agree that kabuki has always been an art form that has faced government speculation and suppression. In Benito Ortolani's view, "Kabuki was born as an explosion of lust for life and extravagance celebrating the end of over a century of political chaos, interminable civil wars among ever-changing alliances of feudal lords, ever-recurring devastations, reprisals, and death, under an all-pervading feeling of fear, instability, and insecurity" (Ortolani 163). When three generals finally succeeded in bringing relative peace to the nation, an environment was created in which kabuki could flourish.
Kabuki can be traced back to the late 16th and early 17th century just before the beginning of the Tokugawa period, to a woman by the name of Izumo no Okuni, an "itinerant dancer who claimed association with Izumo Shrine." Okuni began dancing suggestive scenes to men along the banks of the Kamo River in Kyoto and also at bathhouses and teahouses that were popular at the time. Shrine dancers from earlier times had engaged in prostitution, so it is not surprising that groups of prostitutes began to perform Okuni's dances a few years later. An informal stage was eventually set up in 1612, and prostitutes began performing their dances on stage in shows known as Yujo Kabuki. In these shows, it was not unusual for a male performer to impersonate a female role.
The sensual and somewhat lewd nature of kabuki performances caused the Tokugawa shogunate to quick censorship, with the first major instance occurring in 1629. Frequenters of Yujo Kabuki shows were often middle class men, merchants and foot soldiers along with samurai including ronin who had become unemployed and who had traveled to the cities in search of work. The sexual nature of the shows often induced fights among the audience. Jealous suitors, hot-blooded samurai and foot soldiers fought over the female performers, and as a result female actresses were banned from the stage in 1629, with young male actors volunteering to take their parts. It was an attempt to keep kabuki alive and separate its more seedy origins of prostitution from the actual performances. In fact, "it served the government's objective of creating greater social order and stability by recognizing the various trades and affording them a degree of security and protection from competition by new operators" (Brandon et al, 7). The government reinforced the profession of kabuki actor and acknowledged kabuki as a legitimate form of entertainment.
The exile of women from the kabuki stage and the government's strict censorship of the theatre were the first steps in creating the kabuki that present audiences now view. In a further attempt to separate kabuki from prostitution, content of both the dances and of the plays was altered. Despite a few more setbacks to the theatre, kabuki became so popular that becoming a kabuki actor became an extremely desirable profession. Young men studying to be actors in Tokyo were so great that "it was inconvenient to keep them all in the theater teahouses or other houses in that quarter" (Brandon et al, 36). Audiences would gather for kabuki performances, and women would "often dress their hair and wear beautiful kimono to attract the eye of their favorite actors," who were revered by the public (Brandon et al, 24). Kabuki actors could set fashion trends with their clothing. It had become perhaps the largest and most influential form of entertainment in Japan.
Despite kabuki's many advancements as a publicly recognized form of entertainment, kabuki remained relatively informal. Playhouses were part of greater amusement centers within a city and were placed alongside other playhouses and other entertainers, ranging from fortune-tellers, sumo wrestlers, tightrope walkers, sideshows, animal fairs and more. Tickets were inexpensive, and audience members were allowed a great deal of interaction with the actors, because the small size of the playhouses placed audience members in close proximity to the stage. At the time, audience members were often familiar with all aspects of an actor's life. They knew of an actor's family lineage and where he had trained, and theatre-goers were often part of the performances for they would sometimes get up and shout long praises, known as homekotoba, to the actors. Unlike American theatre performances, it was not considered rude (and is still not considered rude) for audience members to shout out words in praise of skilled gestures and dances or the entrance of famed actors.
It was not until 1887 during the Meiji Restoration, when the Emperor and Empress of Japan first saw a performance, that kabuki began to enter the world of the elite and be honored as a form of classical and national theatre. Fifteen years earlier, in 1868 when the new government came to power, it began to build positive relationships with the Japanese theatres, something which had not happened in the past. Through the Iwakura Mission, the government realized how differently Western theatre was treated in regards to the state of Japanese theatre. To their surprise, "and initially horror too, some of the official entertainment [in Western business] took place at the theatre, something that could not be contemplated in early Meiji Japan...The Meiji government wanted for political reasons to impress the Westerners on their own terms. In Japan too the theatre would have to become a place where the elite gathered for entertainment. Japanese theatre had to become respectable" (Brandon, 6). As a result, the government asked the three main kabuki theatres to relocate. The relocation of the actual theatre buildings and the rebuilding of the theatres into more elegant, larger modern buildings caused a change in the tradition of kabuki performances. They were no longer the rowdy and intimate performances of the pre-Meiji era, but became more sedate and refined, and after the Emperor and Empress's initial visit, became a form of entertainment appealing to the upper class. The government had succeeded in making the kabuki theatre a respectable place to entertain foreign tourists and businessmen, while still keeping the traditional aspects of the performance intact. Kabuki today is, in fact, still viewed as the "typical theatrical expression of Tokugawa culture...which kept alive a memory and nostalgia for a past that was rapidly disappearing and dissolving into a new westernized society" (Ortolani, 162).
Kabuki continued to change throughout the years, as actors became either less or more daring in their acting styles and play content. The greatest challenge to the kabuki theatre since the Meiji Restoration happened during the Second World War, when the government found that they could use performing art as a tool in the war effort. Kabuki once more had to suffer fierce suppression from the government, which disapproved of romances and historical dramas that had previously been popular. Rather, the government encouraged kabuki plays to be "national dramas" meant to "enhance morale and strengthen the war effort" (Okamoto and Leiter, 18). The government even went so far as to create the Japan Touring Theatre League, so that touring groups could perform at a variety of places, such as factories, farming villages, mining operations, and military camps, all in the name of generating support for the war. Orders were passed down that even the dialogue be changed in a few plays to alter the meaning of sentences into ones which encouraged "loyalty, patriotism and selflessness despite death" (Okamoto and Leiter, 18). As the war continued on, kabuki actors were drafted into the military, and kabuki theaters began to close.
When kabuki actors returned to their professions and as the theaters reopened after the war, kabuki met with more censorship and oppression, but this time by the American government. In the "United States Initial Post-Surrender Policy for Japan" issued on Sept 22, 1945 the government states that:
Kabuki drama, with its feudalistic codes of loyalty and its treatment of revenge, is not suitable for the modern world. As long as treason, murder, fraud, etc., are publicly justified, and individuals seeking revenge take the law into their own hands are permitted to be shown, the Japanese people will be unable to understand the fundamental behavior governing international relations in the modern world. In the West, you cannot escape blame for the commission of a serious crime; at its very least, Western logic is predicated upon the distinction between good and evil, and is not dependent on a people's or race's sense of feudal loyalty. In order to assume their place among the nations of the world, the Japanese people must acquire through the entertainment and news media‹the fundamental ideals of a nation based on universal suffrage, respect for individuals, and mutual respect among nations. Japan's unique qualities of cooperation and autonomy, discernible in the family, must, during the course of the nations' reconstruction based on labor unions, form a part of Japanese life. With training in these basic concepts, it will be possible to provide a dramatically special background..." (Okamoto and Leiter 49).
Plays were heavily regulated and in one recorded incident, Japanese police followed by American MPs ran on stage to stop a production which had a single line of dialogue unfavorable to their position. After the incident the Civil Information and Education Section issued a directive stating that plays containing themes and content such as vendettas, revenge, nationalism, distortion of historical facts, segregation, feudal loyalty, suicide, death and cruelty, antidemocracy, etc were banned from the stage. To enforce this, plays had to be checked by the government before they appeared on stage (Okamoto and Leiter, 59). The end of Kabuki censorship came with the liberation of the play Chushingura in October 1947, which became instantly popular and opened with "long lines of ticket buyers snaking twice around the Tokyo Gekijo" (Okamoto and Leiter, 114). Kabuki had managed to remain one of the leading forms of entertainment in Japan by adapting to the challenges it was presented with. It could still manage to attract large crowds and remain popular.
Although a good deal of scholarship has been done in regards to kabuki's journey from the past to the modern day, no scholarship exists to tell of the changes that have taken place since the success of post-war kabuki to the present day. Chushingura opened to throngs of people, and tickets for the remaining shows sold out quickly. Now, however, kabuki can be seen by many people as a dying art, and very rarely can one expect to see lines of ticket buyers issuing from the box office of a kabuki theatre. The reason for this can be attributed to a number of things, mostly the influence of the West and the changing modernist attitudes of the very large younger generation. It seems unlikely that kabuki can adapt itself, like it has in the past, to fit this "hip, modern" Japan of the future.
A tourist on the present-day streets of Japan might encounter a variety of stunning images. In the summer, it is not unusual to see young Japanese women with long bleached blond hair wearing excessive amounts of makeup, large dangling hoop earrings, "fashionable" yet revealing tube tops and mini skirts, with extremely dark "tanning salon tans." Nor is it unusual to see men and women of all ages taking pictures, typing messages and e-mailing on cell phones in the train. A tourist may also see more "traditional" images, such as women in kimonos shopping in the markets, or Shinto priests walking down the streets of Kyoto, although these images happen less frequently. What becomes instantly apparent when visiting Japan is the high degree to which Japan has been influenced by the Western world and also the highly consumerist nature of the country. In Tokyo, gigantic TV billboards accessorize a large amount of buildings, as do neon signs and grammatically incorrect English phrases and slang. Movies like the 1982 hit "Blade Runner" starring Harrison Ford even depicted the future of Los Angeles as a place not unlike Tokyo. It does not seem surprising given the "modern" image of Japan that its youth have become progressive, and that kabuki faces a challenge quite different from those it faced in the past. Kabuki no longer has to contend with government oppression but instead has to find a way to become appealing to a new audience and compete with other forms of entertainment that have become increasingly popular in Japan.
During my six months of studying abroad in Japan, I was given the opportunity to experience a number of Japan's "traditional" activities, one of which was a Kabuki performance. Although I was captivated by the performance, perhaps because of the novelty and perhaps because of the idea that I was experiencing "traditional Japan," the majority of my study abroad classmates were not impressed. Most left after the first hour of the performance. I instead chose to stay for the entire three hours. On my most recent trip to Japan, I again went to kabuki performances, one of which lasted five hours. I was by far the youngest member of the audience, with most theatre-goers being fifty years of age or older. For more than half of the performance, many audience members were asleep and the theatre was half-full, if even that. Scenes in the performance were not the action-filled, highly stimulating scenes found in movies, and therefore had the tendency to lose a viewer's attention if he/she had no interest. During my visit, I also had the opportunity to shadow a friend who is studying to be a kabuki actor.
Kirk Kanesaka, a Japanese-American political science and philosophy student who will graduate this spring from UCLA, is the most legitimate example of kabuki's attempt to modernize itself and somehow appeal to a younger generation. Kirk is American, but is studying to be a kabuki actor at the Shochiku-za in Osaka. His admittance into the school is the first of its kind, because traditionally kabuki acting is a profession only available to Japanese citizens, and usually only to those who have a long line of kabuki acting in their families. Kirk is the first American to be allowed into a kabuki school of acting, and this title has placed him in the middle of the debate on how traditional Japan's traditions should remain, and if it is necessary to change traditions in order to gain wider popular appeal. He has had more than one encounter with Japanese people telling him that they do not want foreigners in their theatre; even though he was accepted as a student by the Shochiku-za in Osaka, the kabuki theatre in Tokyo refused to admit him despite the backing of his mentor. He has appeared on NHK television programs and has been interviewed by a few magazines and newspapers.
Whereas the theatre of the past overflowed with young men studying to be kabuki actors, Kirk's class has a total of six students, including him, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four. The younger students dropped out of school after completing junior high because they did not like studying, and they hope to become wealthy and famous through kabuki. The problem, however, is that they are immature and disrespectful, and will most likely not become the kabuki actors that they envision. They have yet to be picked by a mentor. They cannot, however, go back to school because students and professors will give them a hard time for being older. They, therefore, must work harder to attract the eye of a mentor. This attitude often leads them to be competitive, and more than once they have tried to make Kirk look bad, although he has already been selected by a mentor‹the actor Ganjiro, one of Japan's national living treasures who is known for his portrayal of Ohatsu in the play Sonezaki Shinju. Others who were originally in the class of ten students dropped out, because they did not like the attitude of the younger students.
In order to attract more students, the Shochiku-za offers the classes for free as part of a two-year program in which the students are taught all traditional aspects of Japanese culture, such as tea ceremony, calligraphy, and music while also being taught stage acting and performance. Kirk applied to the school on the recommendation of his dance instructor while studying abroad. He had originally planned on studying away for an entire year at Tokyo University, but after one semester switched to studying at the Shochiku-za. On an average day from Monday through Friday, Kirk has five classes, each lasting an hour and a half. The first of these is tea ceremony, the next stage fighting, then drama, singing and drama again. The quality of instruction is extremely high, with two of Kirk's instructors being national living treasures. Usually, Kirk leaves his apartment at 9:30am, only to return at 12:30am. On Saturdays he teaches English.
The biggest challenge Kirk faces on his way to becoming a kabuki actor is his accent. Although he speaks the language fluently, he has yet to master the 300-year old language of kabuki dramas. Rather than speak the dialogue, actors learn to sing the dialogue in a somewhat drawn-out, high-pitched, and heavily accented tone. Because the language is outdated and sung in heavily accented voices, audiences usually cannot understand what is being said, which is another contributing factor to kabuki's declining attendance. Although there have been attempts by playwrights, most notably Ennosuke, to convert kabuki plays into modern language, most kabuki plays remain in the traditional kabuki form, and as such they seem outdated to the newer and younger Japanese generations who are used to a fast-paced and action-filled life which they can more easily understand.
Like any other business, the Shochiku-za has had to find ways in which to make money, and this led to the decision to accept Kirk as a student. The theatre has used Kirk in an attempt to appeal to Japan's younger generation and garner more business, because ticket sales have dropped, and attendance is relatively low these days. By showing the Japanese public that an American can succeed in Japan's traditional sphere, Kirk hopes to change how most Japanese youth consider the outside world. In his opinion, the newer Japanese generation is sheltered and unknowledgeable. What they do learn is discerned from the media in TV shows, on pop albums, on billboards and such most of which present primarily European and American images. Approximately 90% of the Japanese population has not left the country, and another 60% may not have left their cities. Kirk wants to show Japanese youth that they too can go out and accomplish something as amazing as what he is doing. First, however, he feels that they must learn their own backgrounds, and learn the traditions behind being culturally Japanese.
Although most of Japan's younger generation have no interest in Japan's more traditional aspects, including kabuki, the newer generation can still identify with the themes presented in most kabuki plays, and Kirk hopes that he can alert them to this fact. Most plays have themes of love, honor, wealth and family, which should not be hard to understand even if one cannot understand the language or the slow-paced actions of the actors. As an example, Kirk talks of a play which his class is learning to perform, and which is the story of a blind man and his devoted wife, who has prayed daily for three years in secret that the gods restore her husband's vision. Her husband accuses her of being unfaithful, but when she tells him the truth that she has left every morning over the past three years to pray for him he feels so ashamed of doubting her that he commits suicide. His wife then kills herself in an act of love. For their faithfulness and love, they are rewarded by the god who restores their lives and also the vision of the blind man. A plot like this is typical of most kabuki plots.
The themes within kabuki plays apply to young viewers but are encased in a form that seems inaccessible and unappealing to the newer modern generation, because not only is the language unintelligible to the undiscerning ear, but the pace of the performance is also unappealing. The younger generation is used to having more information and greater understanding in less time than before. They live in a much more fast-paced world than their predecessors. Rather than pay forty dollars to see a five-hour performance of kabuki, one could use the money to buy popular CDs by artists like Utada Hikaru and Ayumi Hamasaki, or else see the latest American movie flick. There is no inspiration or reason for the younger generation to embrace kabuki.
A recent article in the Japan Times described the dilemma of the Japanese economy and its politics. It stated simply that Japan had not readily embraced globalism and the changes taking place around the world, and that it was lagging behind. It needed to quickly grow accustomed to the fast-paced political and economic game occurring in the world today and make more daring policy changes, or else it would be unable to catch up to the other world powers. Japan's government may not have understood the vast implications of a modernized world, but its youth have come to embrace it. They revel in imports and fashions and ideas from the Western world and beyond. What does not interest them is the traditional, the slow, the uninteresting. They need stimulation and action, foreignness and funkiness. If Kirk can make a difference in the kabuki theatre and revive the tradition that has for centuries remained an integral part of Japanese culture, he can hopefully do it soon. Otherwise it seems unlikely that kabuki will be able to survive in the new age with the success it did in the past. The answer to the debate is clear: traditions must change or be lost in the fast pace of the internet era.
References
Ortolani, Benito. The Japanese Theatre: From Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Brandon, James R, Williams P. Malm & Donald H. Shively. Studies in Kabuki: Its Acting, Music, and Historical Context. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1987.
Ernst, Earle. The Kabuki Theatre. Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1974.
Okamoto, Shiro with translation by Samuel L. Leiter. The Man who Saved Kabuki: Faubion Bowers and Theatre Censorship in Occupied Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001.
Shively, Donald H. Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.
Smith, Robert J. Japanese Society: Tradition, Self, and the Social Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Smith, Robert J. Kurusu: The Price of Progress in a Japanese village 1951-1975. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978.
Brandon, James R., Malm, Williams P. and Shively, Donald H. Studies in Kabuki: Its Acting, Music, and Historical Context.
Brandon, James R. Form in Kabuki Acting.
Tracy
Cheung
Feb. 11, 2002