Kabuki's Forgotten War: 1931-1945

Introduction

i n t roduc t ion I did not plan to write this book. It forced its presence on me while I was doing research on the censorship that kabuki endured during the American Occupation that followed Japan’s defeat in World War II. As I read descriptions of kabuki that were written in the immediate postwar years, I was struck by the insistence of both Japanese and American writers that the kabuki plays being submitted to American Occupation censors between 1945 and 1949 were wholly classical works, having no connection to Japanese society of the mid1940s . And yet as everyone knows, throughout the history of kabuki, actors in every generation acted in new plays. Indeed premieres constituted the lifeblood of kabuki from Okuni’s first performances in the early 1600s through the Tokugawa period (1603–1868). In January 2000, Samuel L. Leiter and I were in Tokyo selecting play scripts to be translated in the four-volume series Kabuki Plays On Stage. Our central theme was that every generation of kabuki artists created new plays that reflected contemporary life in Japan. I was faced with a nagging question: if the plays performed by kabuki actors were wholly traditional in September 1945 when the occupation of Japan began, when had the fossilization of the kabuki repertory occurred? When had playwrights ceased to write contemporary plays for kabuki theaters, and when did kabuki actors stop performing them? I was shamefaced. I didn’t know. Nearly fifty years ago, Professor Kawatake Shigetoshi suggested in his magisterial Complete History of Japanese Theater (Nihon engeki zenshi, 1959) that new plays stopped being performed in kabuki theaters after 1894–1895 (see Chapter 1). What then of the half century between 1895 and 1945, and especially the fifteen years 1931–1945? I had encountered almost nothing about wartime kabuki in my readings up until this time. I thought that a direct way to confirm the “classic” nature of kabuki drama in the decades preceding 1945 would be to scan the standard chronological listings of kabuki productions published by the Shōchiku Theatrical Corporation (Nagayama Takeomi, ed., Kabuki-za hyakunen shi and Shōchiku hyakunen shi) and the National Theater of Japan (Kokuritsu Gekijō Kindai Nenpyō Hensanshitsu , ed., Kindai kabuki nenpyō, see Sources). To my amazement I found scores of plays whose titles indicated contemporary subject matter: Riding the Famous Hot-Air Balloon (1891), Festival of the Founding of the Manchurian Na- x | Introduction tion (1932), and Ten Thousand Cheers for the South Seas (1944), among many others. When I focused on the period of Japan’s “Fifteen-Year War” (1931– 1945), title after title indicated a war play set in the present time: Three Heroic Human Bombs (1932), Secret Agent of a Nation at War (1938), Tank Commander Nishizumi (1940), Submarine No. 6 (1941), and Pearl Harbor (1942), to name a few titles of plays staged at kabuki theaters. In time, sources yielded some 160 kabuki plays about the war with China, and later America and Britain, or that used historical subject matter to comment on the current war. This book is the result of eight years of research that followed on my simple question: when did current subject matter leave the kabuki stage? And the completely unexpected answer that emerged was: not until the war was over. In the following chapters, I quote extensively from Japanese sources of the time —books, newspaper stories, magazine articles, war reports, speeches, performance reviews, play scripts, and diaries—to convey the way Japanese perceived kabuki during the war’s cataclysmic course (rather than in later, perhaps rosytinged , memory). We see that the institution of kabuki actively participated in Japan’s wartime adventures between 1931 and 1945. Indeed, kabuki war plays were the subject of illustrated postcards printed, sold, and mailed everywhere in Japan during the war years (for example, Figs. 11.5–11.8). I devote considerable space to setting the actions of kabuki managers, playwrights, producers, and actors within the broad parabola of political and military events during the war: kabuki’s star rose with the expansion of the new Japanese Empire into China and the Pacific (1931–1942), and kabuki was nearly destroyed when Japan’s empire was bloodily dismembered in the final war years (1943–1945). The records show that contemporary events were dramatized on the kabuki stage until early 1945. The kabuki repertory became “classic” only after the war was lost and partly in response to the arrival of the American occupiers (and Occupation theater...