The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado (review)

Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera The Mikado, or The Town of Titipu premiered at the Savoy Theatre in London on 14 March 1885 and has since become one of the most revived and adapted shows in modern history. From professional productions to amateur performances, the opera about a fictional Japanese town continues to attract audiences and devoted fans. The longevity of its popularity and influence prompts Josephine Lee to ask in her book: "What about The Mikado allows the opera to maintain such popularity?" (xi). Since its first production, critics have debated whether the opera is about England or Japan, and how much of it is about cultural authenticity or theatrical imagination. As a scholar of Asian American drama, Lee approaches the question from the perspective of critical race studies, situating race as the central category by which to examine how the opera's production history reflects evolving representations of Japan. The book's eight chapters cover "over a century of Mikado productions, tracing through them both the changing and often conflicting racial dynamics in England and America and the ways that racial representations persist and mutate over time" (xii).

The book is organized into three parts. The first, "1885," includes three chapters that situate the London debut of The Mikado within the broader context of Victorian japonaiserie, or "Japan craze" in art, fashion, decor, crafts, songs, and gestures. Lee argues that the opera is a prime example of "commodity racism," a concept that describes the process of using consumed objects (such as fans and swords) to promote understandings of racial difference in the absence of real human relations. The first chapter explains the meaning of the book's title by emphasizing the unabashed invention of an exotic land occupied by white actors playing "queer and quaint" characters in yellowface makeup. The "racial transformation" in the opera, according to Lee, is not an "informed imitation," but rather a "pure invention" that lacks any sense of seriousness or responsibility (xvi). Chapters 2 and 3 develop this line of argument and investigate the racial tensions between actual and performed Japanese identities, with examples from the Japanese Native Village that opened near London several months before the opera's debut and Mike Leigh's 1999 film Topsy-Turvy, which represents the opera against the backstory of its creation.

The second part, "1938-39," features two chapters on the influence of the opera on African American musical theatre. By using a triangulated, rather than binary, formulation of racial relations, Lee examines the paradoxical ways that the opera allowed African American performers to advance in American theatre, while perpetuating the minstrel tradition. Lee argues that with productions like Swing Mikado (1938-39) and Hot Mikado (1939), African American performers used fictional Japanese characters to demonstrate their talents and create a "multiracial paradise" with "liberated rhythms" (xix). At the same time, Lee points out, these popular productions resulted in an onstage layering of blackface and yellowface performances that perpetuated racial stereotypes, both unquestioned and exotic. These chapters caution against a celebratory narrative of 1930s African American theatre. From Lee's perspective, swinging Mikados were less a "reinvention" than a continuation of commodity racism in which "what is Japanese is simply a style, an invention, an act without consequence" (120). While Lee acknowledges the significance of the opera in making African American performance visible and profitable, her analysis of its history in the context of japonaiserie challenges progressive narratives of American theatre history and presents new possibilities for a comparative critique.

Lee's strengths as a scholar of race studies and Asian American studies are best demonstrated in the last part of the book. Titled "Contemporary Mikados," part 3 includes three chapters that consider the ongoing fascination with the opera both in Europe and elsewhere, including Japan. Chapter 7 in particular gets to the core dilemma of the book: How should the opera be received and evaluated in the cultural climate of political correctness and racial sensitivity in...