Kabuki's Forgotten War, 1931–1945 (review)

One of the most trenchant commentaries on the relationship between kabuki and the social world was given voice in 1830 in the Seji kenmonroku, a caustic treatise on social mores. While it had once been the case that kabuki imitated life, the anonymous author wrote, "the theater of the present does not imitate the world; rather, it is theater itself that is the base and the world that imitates the theater."¹ To a modern viewer of kabuki from the late twentieth or early twenty-first century, it is often difficult to see how this "classical" form of theater once played an important role in social life, shaping taste, generating desire, broadly influencing how people perceived and lived in the world beyond the stage. But as James R. Brandon argues in his new book on Kabuki's Forgotten War, as late as a century after the Seji kenmonroku was written—and in the midst of war no less—kabuki continued to function as it had in the final decades of the bakufu, not merely reflecting but actually creating and shaping social experience, providing a grid through which the world was understood. Not only was "kabuki theater … a living, contemporary performing art as late as 1945" (p. 321) but, Brandon argues, "during the war, and especially in its early years, kabuki was partner with the government in molding Japanese support for the war. Kabuki did not have to change to do this: its nature was suited to the task" (p. 354).

"Classic kabuki," Brandon writes, would come later, in the wake of defeat and under the American occupation. Kabuki's image in the second half of the twentieth century was—and continues to be—the expression of a particular kind of "forgetting" or "erasing" through which kabuki's very contemporary nature during the first half of the twentieth century would be essentially written out of history. This forgetting has taken many forms and has operated at many levels. At the level of the individual, Brandon quotes the actor Ichikawa Ennosuke II—"The five years of the Pacific War was a dark period, a time of suffering for performers" (p. 313)—and comments: "Like most others, Ennosuke did not see himself as a participant in the war. Forgotten were his morale performances in Manchuria, flying to China to gather authentic war material, and the many heroic soldier roles he enacted in war plays" (p. 313).

Ennosuke's own "forgetting" of his wartime roles (in both senses of that word) is emblematic but is only a particular example of how kabuki's wartime history has been written (or not written) in the half century following the war, the product of what Brandon describes as a mix of "Western illusions of what kabuki was and of Japanese desires for what kabuki should be" (p. 320). For several generations of postwar historians of kabuki—in both Japan and abroad—the wartime history of the genre has been largely ignored and Brandon frames his own study as "an attempt to remember some of the more important aspects of kabuki's forgotten war from 1931 to 1945" (p. xi).

At one level—and this is particularly true of the introduction and the book's final chapter on the fate of kabuki after the war—Kabuki's Forgotten War is very much about questions of forgetting and remembering, about the nature of historical memory, and how forgetting and remembering have shaped the historiography of kabuki following what Brandon describes as its "fossilization" (p. ix) during the occupation. The body of Brandon's book, which follows the arc of the war, is shaped by this governing theme of forgetting and remembering, and reads much as if it were a willful act of remembering, an attempt to restore a somehow forgotten or repressed—though barely submerged—memory. Kabuki's Forgotten War weaves together a rich social history of the theater with sharp analyses of the plays, their staging, and their reception...