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Translator’s Introduction
- University of Hawai'i Press
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vii Translator’s Introduction Not long after World War II ended, the American Occupation, led by Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) Gen. Douglas MacArthur was ready to administer a lethal dose of censorship that would have killed Japan’s great classical theatre, kabuki. The tombstone over its grave might have read, “Here lies kabuki, 1603–1946, able like a willow to adapt to three and a half centuries of native oppression, killed in a year by democracy.” Kabuki is famed for its remarkable diversity of styles, ranging from flamboyant fantasy to roguish realism and from everyday behavior to lyrical dance, with characters inspired by the highest and lowest of Tokugawa (1603–1868) and early Meiji period (1868–1912) individuals, both fictional and real, and with themes reflecting the social, cultural, and political concerns of the premodern feudal era. Kabuki also had a long history of official oppression under both the Tokugawa shogunate and the imperial government that succeeded it. However, it has always managed to survive the efforts to control or even eliminate it and, while rarely overtly critical of the powers-that-be, to express the dreams and aspirations of the citizens who thronged to its playhouses. Although kabuki was never allowed to develop into a true theatre of ideas, evolving instead into a primarily aesthetic genre, ideas cannot be eradicated from the drama; they live on in the theatrical subtext regardless of the playwright’s intentions. From today’s perspective , in fact, even the distance of time does not hide kabuki’s potentially subversive tendencies. It is clear that, for a variety of reasons, one administration after another saw in this people’s theatre the threat it represented to the maintenance of the status quo, which was always the Tokugawa government’s principal objective. Thus, the first three and a half centuries of kabuki’s life were a constant struggle between this art form’s unquenchable desire for expression and the hegemony’s wish for control. Still, despite volumes of laws passed to suppress it, despite being forced to exist without women to play its female characters, despite being forbidden to represent contemporary events or to use the real names of members of the samurai class, despite restrictions on the materials it could viii Translator’s Introduction use for costumes and props, despite arrests of actors for living too well, despite limits placed on the number of theatres that could be licensed, despite the forced transfer of Edo’s three major playhouses to the distant outreaches of the city’s boundaries, despite being forced during wartime to change famous lines to make them sound more patriotic, despite these and other constraints, kabuki endured. But then came the Occupation Army and, in its attempt to democratize Japan, the ironic possibility that what had so long been able to skirt the dangers of native antipathy might, in the space of a few months, either die or be transmuted into a frighteningly pale reflection of what it formerly had been. But circumstances once more favored kabuki’s continuance, a major force behind its survival coming not from within its own domain but from the unlikely source of a member of the conquering army. That source was the late Faubion Bowers, the subject of this book. Although various aspects of the Occupation’s censorship activities have been described in many sourcesmost recently in a chapter of John Dower’s marvelous Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (1999)surprisingly little has appeared in English about its theatre censorship. This book is the first to address the issue at any length. One of the first books to address the subject was Bowers’s own 1952 Japanese Theatre, in which he very briefly discusses the Occupation censorship .1 A fuller, although still brief, treatment was provided by Earle Ernst, the man Bowers replaced as head of theatre censorship for the Occupation . Ernst’s highly regarded book, The Kabuki Theatre, originally published in 1956, discusses the censorship in greater detail than does Bowers’s book.2 Neither man, by the way, mentions his own role as a censor. As The Man Who Saved Kabuki points out, there is still some controversy regarding who, Bowers or Ernst, accomplished more by way of “saving” kabuki. Other discussions appear in a small number of scattered articles and interviews. Although this book’s principal concern is with Faubion Bowers’s achievement in Occupation Japan, it is also about the meaning and impact of...