Kabuki's Forgotten War: 1931-1945

Notes

n o t e s Abbreviations JT Japan Times (1956 to present). See also JTA, JTM, and NT JTA Japan Times & Advertiser (1940–1942) JTM Japan Times & Mail (1918–1940) KHH Nagayama Takeomi, ed., Kabuki-za hyakunen shi, honbun hen, 1 (One-hundred-year history of the Kabuki-za, main volume, 1) KHS Nagayama Takeomi, ed., Kabuki-za hyakunen shi, shiryō hen (One-hundred-year history of the Kabuki-za, resource volume) KKNK Kokuritsu Gekijō Kindai Nenpyō Hensanshitsu, ed.. Kindai kabuki nenpyō, Kyōto hen (Chronology of modern kabuki, Kyoto series) KKNO Kokuritsu Gekijō Kindai Nenpyō Hensanshitsu, ed.. Kindai kabuki nenpyō, Ōsaka hen (Chronology of modern kabuki, Osaka series) NGESS Ōzasa Yoshio, Nihon gendai engeki shi: Shōwa senchū hen (History of modern Japanese theater: Shōwa war years), vols. 1, 2, and 3 NT Nippon Times (1943–1956) SH Tanaka Jun’ichirō, Shōchiku hachijūnen shi (Shōchiku: An eightyyear history) SHES Nagayama Takeomi, ed., Shōchiku hyakunen shi, engeki shiryō (One-hundred-year history of Shōchiku, theater sources) SHH Nagayama Takeomi, ed., Shōchiku hyakunen shi, hon shi (One-hundredyear history of Shōchiku, main history) SS Tanaka Jun’ichirō, ed., Shochiku shichijūnen shi (Seventy-year history of Shōchiku) Chapter 1: Prelude to War 1. The Japanese army manual exhorted soldiers to “dash forward,” maishin, to overwhelm the enemy on both attack and defense. Maishin was a basic military doctrine that led to the many hopeless suicide, or “banzai,” charges made by outnumbered Japanese soldiers in the Pacific fighting. Brian Daizen Victoria notes that French military doctrine stressing “morale, esprit de corps, and aggressive combat” was influential in early Meiji Japan, and therefore the spirit of fanatical attack in bushidō, seen in the twentieth century, was an “imposition of indigenous [Japanese] content upon a Western model” (Zen at War, 243). During the Fifteen-Year War, the phrase came to be applied to aggressive or fearless action of almost any kind. 358 | Notes to Pages 4–12 2. Plays about current events are also called kiwamono, “seasonal goods.” I prefer the more pungent term ichiyazuke here. 3. Za can mean a theater building, as in Minami-za (South Theater), or a theater troupe such as Kokoro-za (Heart Troupe). Another common term for a theater building is gekijō, “drama place,” as in Teikoku Gekijō (Imperial Theater). 4. The epithet “Tiger of Malaya” is usually applied to General Yamashita Tomoyuki, commander of the Japanese forces that captured Singapore in February 1942. 5. KKNK, 10: 683. Reported in detail in the Bangkok Times, April 7, 1942. 6. Miyake Shūtarō, Engeki gojūnen shi, 384–386. 7. Donald Calman explores nativist theories of Japanese racial and religious superiority that justified Japan’s economic and military aggression into Asia (Nature and Origins, 53–70). 8. Among many scores of books in English that examine Japan’s wartime goals and actions, I have drawn especially on those by Bix, Calman, Coox, Craig, Hayashi, Ienaga, Irie, Iritani, Yomiuri Shinbun War Responsibility Reexamination Committee , and Young (see Sources). 9. Imaya Kyūhei, “Nisshin sensō geki no omoide,” 73. 10. KKNO, 3: 68–74. The war fever skipped kabuki in Kyoto. Fifteen China war plays were staged in that city between mid-August and late December 1894, none by kabuki troupes (KKNK, 3: 48–70). 11. Imaya, “Nisshin sensō geki,” 72–74; KHH, 85–86; KHS, 27–28. 12. “Engeki shashin,” 15. 13. Kawatake Shigetoshi, Nihon engeki zenshi, 856. 14. Ibid., 856–857, as translated by Donald Keene in his excellent overview of literature and drama during the Sino-Japanese War (Landscapes and Portraits, 259–299). 15. Atsumi Seitarō lists fifty-nine new kabuki plays staged in just four years, 1934–1937 (“Daigo shinsaku geki nenpyō,” 31–35). Kawatake was well acquainted with these new kabuki plays staged one after the other, but he seems to have preferred the old repertory of traditional plays. We can best view his dismissal of new plays as part of his long-standing campaign to “classicize” kabuki (see Chapter 12). 16. Kawatake aligns himself with those traditionalists who argue that ichiyazuke about mid-twentieth-century events cannot be “kabuki” but rather are “modern drama.” See, for example, Kiga Kimiko’s “Gendai geki to kabuki geki to,” where modern drama (gendai geki) and kabuki drama (kabuki geki) are described as mutually exclusive play types (23). I do not find this distinction persuasive. Historically, “kabuki ” has encompassed both traditional and contemporary plays. 17. The production was hugely successful: the...