A Beggar's Art: Scripting Modernity in Japanese Drama, 1900-1930

The Skeleton's Dance, by Akita Ujaku

Photo of Akita Ujaku (ca. 1920) courtesy of the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University. 134 THE SKELETONS’ DANCE Akita Ujaku Introduction At the time of the Great Kantō Earthquake, Akita Ujaku was on a lecture tour of his native Tōhoku (northeast) region, meeting fellow Esperantists.1 He returned briefly to his hometown, Kuroishi in Aomori, leaving on September 4 for Tokyo. An army officer’s remark on the train outside Tokyo about the rumor that Koreans had been lighting fires after the earthquake had made the other passengers laugh.Akita recorded in his diary that he was “shocked at the [Japanese] citizens’ thoughtlessness.”2 On September 6 he reached his home in Zōshigaya and was taken the following day by vigilantes to a police station for interrogation; later the same day he was threatened by another thug when he returned home. For the next few days he toured the city, particularly the hardest hit districts in Honjo and Fukagawa on the east of the Sumida River. Learning that the police were cracking down on socialists like himself and his friend, the children’s writer Ogawa Mimei, Ujaku decided it was best to return to Aomori. He left Tokyo on September 16 and before the month was out learned of the murders of Osugi Sakae, Hirasawa Keishichi, and others. “The citizens’ ignorance is truly to be feared,” he wrote in his diary.3 He did not return to Tokyo until late October of that year. After the Quake 135 Ujaku entered the department of English literature at the Tokyo Senmon Gakkō (the precursor to Waseda University) in 1902; by 1904 he had already met his literary idol, Shimazaki Tōson, and published a volume of verse. At school he became acquainted with Shimamura Hōgetsu, one of the most influential critics of the day,and began publishing short stories in Waseda Literature in 1907, and the same year he became secretary for Osanai Kaoru’s Ibsen Society. In 1909 he joined Osanai’s Free Theatre and published his first play. In 1913 he became a director of Hōgetsu’s Art Theatre, leaving that company the following year with actor Sawamura Sōjurō to found another troupe, the Bijutsu Gekijō, which staged his first successful play, Buried Spring (Umoreta haru). He returned to work for the Art Theatre in 1918. Ujaku’s early plays tended to be romantic, lyrical, and idealistic. He revealed a keen sympathy for the underdog and a rising political consciousness as early as 1903, when he heard a speech by the socialist Kōtoku Shūsui. (Shūsui would be executed for treason in 1911 on largely trumped-up charges. The so-called High Treason Incident of 1910 was a foretaste of the murder of Osugi Sakae and other leftists after the earthquake.) In 1921 Ujaku joined the Japan Socialist League and began writing for the preeminent leftist journal of the day, The Sower, publishing the same year another important play, Night at the Frontier (Kokkyō no yoru). In 1927, together with Osanai Kaoru, he was invited to the Soviet Union for tenth-anniversary celebrations of the Russian Revolution.Though his dramatic output fell off by the late 1920s, Ujaku continued his work for the theatre, becoming editor of Teatoro magazine, as well as secretary of the Shinkyō Gekidan, one of the leftist spin-offs from the Tsukiji Little Theatre, in 1934. In 1940, together with several hundred other shingeki artists, he was rounded up and imprisoned; he spent the last years of the war in his native Aomori. Like Ogawa Mimei, he was also a much-loved writer of children’s fiction. After the war, he published an autobiography; his meticulously kept diaries were published posthumously. Ujaku’s diary shows that he was developing ideas for a play about the earthquake as early as November 1923.He had completed the play,as he notes in Esperanto on the published text, on “la 14an de Januaro, 1924.” A number of plays had been inspired by the earthquake, and the March 1924 issue of New Tides in Theatre was in part devoted to a review of these works. Shibata Shōei noted that all these works attempted to portray the event itself, a task beyond the technical resources of the theatre. In the same issue, Ujaku argued that what should have been portrayed was not the event itself but its effect: a beggar...