Showdown at Culture Gap: Images of the West in the Plays of Shuji Terayama

Showdown at Culture Gap: Images of the West ill the Plays of Shuji Terayama CAROL FISHER SORGENFREI Although the popular press recently announced the "discovery" of hallbei (Japanese anti-American sentiment) and kenbei, its more virulent, gut-level version, such attitudes are far from new.' Japanese intellectuals and artists have suffered from an intensely paradoxical ambivalence toward "the Other" for at least 1500 years, ever since initial contact with China forced Japan to confront conflicting attitudes of cultural superiority and cultural indebtedness. It can be argued that Japanese intellectual history is a pendulum swinging wildly between the extremes of national self-aggrandizement and feelings of inferiority. Scholars such as Jun Eto have identified this crisis of identity as "a vehement longing for something indispensable, that has been somehow absent, but which must be restored at any cost. . .. Sometimes [Japanese writers] have believed·that it might be found outside Japan, perhaps in Western ideas, and sometimes they have considered that this 'something' might be found within their own country - perhaps in the past. But, as e~ch writer has failed to find it anywhere, he has felt that he would rather be the thirst incarnate; he has even willingly gone so far as to sacrifice his only means of self-identification - namely, artistic accomplishment - for the sake of a more direct expression of this longing.", The playwright Tsuneari Fukuda insisted that the dilemma results from the wholesale importation of alien ideas and forms without regard for the originaJ cultural context. Prior to the seventeenth century, foreign concepts came primarily from Mainland Asia. After the Meiji Restoration (1868), European importations and hollow imitations dominated. Following World War II, the source shifted to America. Adoration of the conqueror in the immediate post-war era became so extreme that a kabuki aficionado is reported to have praised his favorite actor by caJling out, "You're MacArthur!" In the persuasive and passionate rhetoric of Orientalism, it may be argued that Japan, like post-colonial Europe, has developed "a style of thought based Modern Drama, 35 (1992) II7 JI8 CAROL FISHER SORGENFREI upon an ontological and epistemological distinction" between the Self and the Other. It has created a "corporate institution for dealing with the [Other1dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it."3 Combine such a "corporate institution" established to support hegemonic superiority over a weakened or inferior Other, with a subtle suspicion of one's own cultural inadequacy in relation to the past greatness of the Other, and you have a recipe for powerful emotional conflicts. When the Other ceases to behave as the Orientalizing or Occidentalizing culture has authorized (whether the stereotype is exotic Asia, dynamic America, Woman-as-Madonna-or-Whore, or Rousseau-esque pygmies dancing in the African jungle), a sense of betrayal ensues. Hatred and contempt are the emotional responses. Look for a moment at Japan's immense cultural debt to China, and at Japan's treatment of China during the wars of the last hundred years. Now look at Japan's adoring adaptations of Euro-American culture during those same hundred years, at its current economic superiority, and at its concomitant contempt for what it perceives to be a civilization in decli~e. Japan feels it has surpassed its teachers, who are now viewed as doddering, senile giants to be disdained or pitied. Passionate anti-Americanism and the search for cultural identity have been major themes in Japanese avant-garde or "underground" theater since its emergence in the early 1960s.' Often cloaked in complex metaphors and outrageously theatrical staging, these works reject accepted Japanese values while advocating the destruction of American cultural hegemony. Working against both an Orientalist view of a quaint, refined Japan and against Japanese self-hatred, and suspicions of cultural inferiority, the works of the avantgarde present disturbing, multi-layered, and radical images of the underbelly of the national consciousness. Performers and theorists of the dance form Butoh, which is closely allied to avant-garde theater, have termed their own work "the dark dance of the soul." Such a sobriquet is apt for the dramatic works of Shuji Terayama, one of the leaders...