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c h a P t e r t e n The Agony Ends |  The Day Approaches When the Elderly and Women Too Must Offer Themselves —Newspaper headline, 1945 Sure victory is identical with sure death. —Cabinet adviser, 1945 If there are no theaters, we can perform outdoors. —Bunraku performer, 1945 T he wholesale decline of kabuki theater in the first six months of 1945 was inescapably tied to the shuddering collapse of the Japanese Empire. The individual actor was like a drowning sailor caught in the powerful wake of his sinking ship. Fate would determine if he went under or survived. American soldiers and marines were capturing the last islands in Japan’s defense perimeter in preparation for invading Japan itself. The art of kabuki was of small concern to most of the emperor’s subjects at this perilous time, and kabuki mattered not at all to the approaching Americans . In January, critic Fujita Tokutarō wrote of his sense of lassitude after the large theaters closed. He felt no inclination to see plays. Now bombs were falling on Tokyo, and people had no time for plays. Further, he wryly observed, “it seems to me the plays are not good.” He brushed off common criticisms of kabuki—good onnagata are lacking, audiences are inappropriate, truncated scripts (midori) are impossible to understand—and ended with this optimistic forecast: “The great actors Danjūrō IX, Kikugorō V, and Sadanji I died [in 1903–1904], but kabuki did not die. In this same way, kabuki’s traditions are being carried forward without break today as well.”1 We do not know whether Fujita believed this or was simply following the Bureau of Information policy to write bright and cheerful (meirō) articles that would raise morale. Trumpeting irrelevant issues was another way to take citizens’ minds off impending defeat. The final issue of Engekikai, closed by government order The Agony Ends | 297 in February 1945, carried a meaningless article, “Return from a Trip on the Continent.” The important kabuki playwright Hōjō Hideji described his recent goodwill tour of Japan’s mainland colonies on behalf of the Japan Dramatists ’ Association and the Patriotic Society of Writers. He addressed four large conferences: the Greater East Asia Literary Congress in Nanking, the First Decisive Battle Arts and Literature Conference in conjunction with the founding of the Arts and Literature Society of Manchuria, and in Seoul, the Grand Congress of Aroused Theater Artists in celebration of the fifth year of the War of Greater East Asia and the Grand Congress of Outdoor Performing Arts.2 Despite the hoopla and the grand phrases of mutual support in the war, it is hard to believe Hōjō’s presence carried any real significance. In time, kabuki would play a role, some will say a vital role, in preserving Japanese culture, but that would occur only after the slaughter had ended and the war that justified personal sacrifice was no more. The endgame of the military conflict, as well as the endgame of kabuki in 1945, did not go according to Japanese plans. When American marines began their assault on Iwo Jima, the first bit of rock that was part of the Japanese home islands, on February 19, 1945, kabuki in Tokyo shuddered to a halt. No kabuki troupe performed anywhere in the city the following month. And in April no kabuki troupe attempted to perform in Osaka or Kyoto.3 During thirty days of brutal bunkerto -bunker fighting on Iwo Jima, the Japanese garrison of 22,000 resisted nearly to the last man (American losses were 23,000 killed or wounded).4 Every newspaper and magazine in the United States carried the image of six determined marines and sailors raising Old Glory (for the second time) on the top of Mt. Suribachi. As Robert Smith Thompson reminds us, “America, like all Imperial powers dating back to Rome, was ready and willing to trumpet its triumphs to the public.”5 But what was a glorious victory in America could not be called a “defeat” in Japan. The current prime minister, Koiso Kuniaki, presented Japan’s disaster in elegant euphemisms in a March 21 radio address to the nation, “A Path to Solving National Difficulties:” “In the early evening of March 17, every officer and soldier of the imperial garrison on Iwo Jima joined in a final, heroic, ‘allout attack’ (sōkōgeki) to defend this vital link in our homeland defense perimeter . Thereafter, a situation regretfully arose on this same island...

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