In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

c h a P t e r e l e v e n War Plays in Kabuki—a Retrospection | August  Loyalty to the emperor is beyond obligation and revenge. —Beyond Obligation and Revenge, kabuki play Friendly comrades . . . together in Manila, Singapore, Malaya, and Burma.—Ten Thousand Cheers for the South Seas, kabuki play Japanese airplanes are dropping bombs on Pearl Harbor! Drop more! More!!—Honolulu City, kabuki play K abuki’s role during Japan’s fifteen-year Sacred War is essentially unknown in the West, and in Japan it is either forgotten or ignored. That era of military horrors is so embarrassing or painful, even after some seventy years, that most Japanese do not wish to confront it. But I believe more important than that, the era contradicts Western illusions of what kabuki was and Japanese desires for what kabuki should be. I have not raised kabuki’s participation in the Manchurian Incident, the China Incident, and the War of Greater East Asia in order to criticize that participation. During the war, kabuki producers and artists followed the broad social trends of the times, and they supported the government’s war aims as did most Japanese citizens. Especially after December 1941, powerful political and social pressure enforced conformity. Kabuki actors were not college educated or politically sophisticated people. They were professional artists focused on developing their careers and perfecting their art. They were “Japanese ,” bound to the only culture and the only land that most of them knew. Further, theater is a group activity, dependent on an elaborate, expensive infrastructure of theater buildings, stage craftsmen, and institutional support. Unlike the poet or painter, who can create alone in a mountain hut if need be, the kabuki playwright or actor must work in collaboration with scores of others. And commercial theater performances had to appeal to the mood of general audiences. War Plays in Kabuki—a Retrospection | 321 I believe that Ōtani Takejirō and Gōda Toku were patriotic citizens who wanted to support their nation in a time of national emergency. Onoe Kikugorō and Nakamura Kichiemon lent their star power to the nation, as did Bob Hope and Betty Grable in America. In both countries, popular actors were called on to promote war bond drives, star in hate-the-enemy plays or films, and offer morale performances for the fighting troops overseas. Theater was an important medium through which the government attempted to control and mold public opinion in support of the war. Donald Keene’s judgment regarding Japanese authors during the war applies equally, I believe, to theater artists: “Perhaps it is too much to ask of anyone that he should openly have resisted, when to resist invited death. . . . The writer, by becoming a public figure, was under pressure to act with the uniformity expected of all Japanese, and forfeited his right to the individual conscience of the artist.”1 I discuss this period because it shows that during the long war years, from 1931 to 1945, the world of kabuki functioned in consonance with contemporary political and social authority. Kabuki was an active player in government movements and campaigns tied to the national war mission. In scores of new plays, kabuki artists played out stories based on the present moment, most particularly the war that impinged on every aspect of Japanese life, and they recast historical events to conform to current imperial ideology. Kabuki producers during the war did what kabuki producers have always done: they enticed audiences into their theaters by offering programs that mixed familiar traditional scenes with one or more new plays about contemporary life. Therefore, a grievous consequence of our forgetting or erasing kabuki’s wartime history is that, as part of this historical absence, we have been unaware that kabuki theater was a living, contemporary performing art as late as 1945. When the war was over and American Occupation officials responsible for theater arrived in Japan, they were told that kabuki plays were wholly “traditional” and carried no “meaning” for modern audiences. Consequently, according to this view, and this was the important point, kabuki drama did not present a threat to the democratic aims of the Occupation. (We have seen that according to one strand of scholarly opinion in Japan, theme or content was unimportant in kabuki drama.)2 One week after Japan’s surrender, Ōtani Takejirō announced that Shōchiku’s basic postwar policy was to perform only traditional kabuki plays.3 Shōchiku denied overnight pickle plays in its campaign to...

Share