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Introduction It may not be their, but it is certainly our Japan.1 Q: Can you tell us a little more about what Americans perceive as Japan-ness? A: For instance, it could be things like the stage set is extremely elaborately designed and constructed. Q: Is it a kind of fetishism? A: Well, you could say so.2 Eiko and Koma are quintessentially Japanese, and also longtime New York residents.3 This book is a study of the images and myths that have defined and shaped the reception of Japan-related theater, music, and dance in the United States since the postwar 1950s. In the mid-1980s, at the height of fierce trade tensions between the United States and Japan, Clyde Haberman reported in the New York Times, “Japanese contend that the trouble is not their lingering restrictions so much as American laziness in attempting to penetrate this country’s markets. Learn our language, Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone has said many times. Study our culture. ‘Americans don’t try hard enough’ is a favorite catch phrase.” Haberman contended, “The accusation infuriates many American executives, who feel that they could watch Kabuki plays all day and still get nowhere.”4 The executives’ angry sarcasm was rooted in a paradoxical fact. The American-led Occupation had targeted kabuki—especially its repertory of “feudal” plays such as The Treasury of Loyal Retainers (Kanadehon chūshingura)—as a cultural activity unsuited to a newly democratic Japan. But even before the Occupation ended in 1952, the art form was suddenly being put forward to the cold-war American public as a uniquely authentic example of Japanese culture. The kabuki boosters included a host of American theater professionals and writers—three Pulitzer Prize winners 2 America’s Japan and Japan’s Performing Arts among them—eagerly intent on helping rehabilitate the image of Japan as a friend of the United States in a world where the Soviet Union had now become the foe. The effects linger: although the economic and political climate has greatly changed, kabuki is still a major element in American understanding of Japanese culture. I look at how “Japan” and “Japanese culture” have been discursively constructed, reconstructed, and transformed in response to productions that have taken place in New York, the main entry point and defining cultural nexus in the United States for the global touring market in the performing arts. My research is based on published reviews and related articles—in short, the substantial archival record of public engagement with a broad array of issues related to performance and Japan. The principal source is the New York Times, which has the most comprehensive and influential coverage of theater, music, and dance events that take place in New York—and is the primary voice among mainstream publications in shaping and recording the multi-strand narrative of America’s Japan. Examples also come from the “old-line general-interest print magazines,” which, together with the Times, have a long track record of covering performing arts events on and off Broadway for a national readership. “For decades Time and Newsweek devoted more space to opera and art and theology than to Hollywood or health. You may never have visited New York City, but to be a respectable figure in your town . . . it was helpful to know what operas were playing or what people were reading in Paris”—as well as in New York itself.5 I also include the Village Voice, “New York’s most important alternative newspaper,”6 for its in-depth treatment of the arts “downtown.” My research is additionally based on interviews with artists and arts administrators in the United States and Japan, as well as my own experience attending presentations. The title of my book refers to historian H. D. Harootunian’s frequently cited essay “America’s Japan/Japan’s Japan.” The America’s Japan that Harootunian identified took shape during the Occupation era and continued to be developed by modernization theorists as an “appeal to fixed cultural values—consensuality—uninterrupted continuity, and an endless present derived from an exceptionalist experience.”7 The “America’s Japan” that I analyze in connection with the performing arts is a complex chronicle of cultural mobility and exchange—one that often reduces Japanese culture to a worn-out set of Orientalist stereotypes, but one that also broadly engages in a dynamic, transnational conversation about artistic production and encounter. Through forms such as kabuki, Japan’s culture is repeatedly depicted as a “timeless” one whose...

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