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19 Manidoo Envoy Ronin is the invincible samurai of his marvelous stories, the eternal teaser with a vacant smile, a simulated death pose. By his account he has been dead and buried seventeen times in the past decade. Mifune, his nickname at the orphanage, vanished once as a raven in a fever vision, as you know, and his second death was staged, a swimming accident at Oiso Long Beach on Sagami Bay. ‘‘Orphan of Destiny Drowns in the Bay,’’ might have been a headline story, but a week later a teacher found him on the Ginza in Tokyo. Who, at the time, would not run away to the Ginza? Mifune vanished by tricky maneuvers, a strategic death, and an imagic rise in another name and place. This was not an unusual practice because the Japanese do the same thing for economic reasons. The common ruse is known as a ‘‘midnight run,’’ a change of identities arranged by a third party. Thousands of people ‘‘disappear each year,’’ wrote Alex Kerr in Dogs and Demons. ‘‘They discard their homes, change their identities, and move to another city, all to hide from the enforcers of Japan’s consumer loans.’’ Mifune was entranced by scenes of Chushingura, and later Genji Monogatari, at the Kabukiza Theatre in Tokyo. He had a perfect memory of the scenes, and on the way back to the orphanage he described in visual detail the music, costumes, gestures, hairstyles, and cosmetics of the actors. He tormented his teachers by beating the hyoshigi , or clacker sticks, to announce his orphan play. I was stationed there at about the same time, in the late fifties, as a legal investigator for the Army. I might have been at the very same theater with the orphan Mifune. Nightbreaker had been reassigned ten years earlier, but even so we shared many stories and created our perfect memories of Japan. We were both anishinaabe, but from different reservations. I am a member of the Leech Lake Reservation, and he lived to the west, on the White Earth Reservation. The anishinaabe were named the Ojibwe and Chippewa. Nightbreaker was an interpreter for the first year or so of the occupation, and then, because of his experience with investigators 20 at Hiroshima, he was assigned to Camp Desert Rock, a nuclear test site in Nevada. Reason Warehime had similar experiences in Nagasaki and at the Nevada Test Site. He and Nightbreaker participated in atomic test site maneuvers. Reason noticed ‘‘when you get out closer that a lot of the sand had kind of melted into a glaze, like a brown glass. Then we got sunburn, and the guys all started throwing up in the truck going back,’’ he told Carole Gallagher in American Ground Zero. Nightbreaker , Reason, and many other men lost their teeth and hair after the test. ‘‘It started every time you put your comb through your hair, you come out with a big gob of hair,’’ said Reason. ‘‘It would have been three years later when they finally had to pull every tooth in my mouth because they had all turned black and came real loose.’’ The Nevada Test Site was their Rashomon. The Kabukiza Theatre was destroyed at the end of the war and rebuilt in 1951. Faubion Bowers was first moved by the artistic tradition and then obsessed with the eminence of the kabuki actors. The first production he saw was Chushingura at the Kabukiza Theatre a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor. When he returned five years later, and two weeks after the surrender, as an officer and interpreter with the advance forces of the occupation, he had kabuki theater on his mind. The Japanese newspaper reporters and nervous officials were surprised when Bowers asked them about a famous kabuki actor, ‘‘Is Uzaemon still alive?’’ Ichimura Uzaemon XV, ‘‘the leading kabuki actor of his generation , had died of a sudden heart attack’’ three months earlier, wrote Shiro Okamoto in The Man Who Saved Kabuki. Bowers said Uzaemon was his favorite actor, ‘‘the kind of star who could stir people up about anything. He was a legendary kabuki actor.’’ Uzaemon is one of the oldest and most traditional names in the theater. Bowers intervened to protect the kabuki theater from closure by the occupation. Military censors had reduced the great kabuki tradition to a tincture of feudalism, a dangerous art. Bowers, by his advertence, aesthetic enterprise, and compassion saved kabuki. He even brought food to the hungry actors in the...

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