Kabuki Woogie began in 2011 as a way to record a research trip to Japan I took on a Mellon Fellowship a year earlier. My day-to day-experiences on that trip, including videos and photos, are archived at the beginning of the blog. Over the past few years, Kabuki Woogie provided regular entries on the history of the first Kabuki-za, Japan’s leading kabuki playhouse, founded in 1889, and still on the same site after four additional incarnations. The series, which offered 24 chapters, ended recently with a chapter on 1911, when the theatre underwent significant renovation, ending its first incarnation.
Readers may also skim the blog for reproductions of the covers of Engekikai, kabuki's monthly magazine of record, which I began posting in November 2018.
The following is a paper I gave this past November at a conference held at Tel Aviv University. The conference was called Creation, Preservation, and Transformation of Theatre Traditions: East and West. My paper is based on a much longer chapter of the same name in my 2014 book Kabuki at the Crossroads: Years of Crisis, 1952-1965. Citations, omitted from the paper, can be found there.
Yakusha or Haiyū?: Kabuki Actors at the Crossroads
Samuel L. Leiter
The years 1952 to 1965 were among
the most crucial in the modern history of Japan’s kabuki theatre. 1952 is the
year the American Occupation, which began in late 1945, ended. During those
seven years, postwar Japan greatly intensified the mission of Westernization it
had been on since opening its doors in the mid-19th century.
Among the many stresses felt during the Occupation was the
fear that, in the rush to westernize, or, rather, to Americanize, many of
Japan’s cultural achievements would either disappear or be seriously weakened
in competition with shiny new ones imported from abroad. Among the threatened
standard bearers was kabuki, which the Occupation authorities originally
subjected to censorship, objecting to its feudalistic values.
The details of how kabuki survived have been told in various
books and articles over the past decade, but the story didn’t end there. From
1952-1965, many new stresses affected kabuki’s health, most of them chronicled
in my 2013 book Kabuki at the Crossroads:
Years of Crisis, 1952-1965. Today, I’d like to talk about several of the
issues concerning kabuki actors and how they responded to these threats.
In 1954, a new theatre devoted to shingeki, or Western-influenced drama, opened in Tokyo. It was
called the Haiyū-za. Haiyū means actor so the name could easily be
translated as Actors’ Theatre. But no one would expect that the actors working
here were from kabuki, since kabuki actors were traditionally known as
yakusha.
Simply said, since the Meiji period, which ended in 1912, there
has been a tendency for even kabuki
actors to use the word haiyū, as if yakusha somehow smelled of a
dishonorable past. Haiyū sounded more
modern and respectable. Between 1952 and 1965, this trend intensified, and the
principal kabuki institutions used
the word haiyū in their names. Today,
the words are often interchangeable.
The dilemma embodied in this seemingly minor disagreement
over terminology is symbolic of a greater question: what was the future for kabuki actors in a westernized Japan,
and how could they secure their niche within the world of postwar entertainment?
Were they useless dinosaurs, or were they major artists seeking to advance a
great traditional theatre and make it responsive to the needs of a recovering
nation seeking self-respect and the world’s regard?
Kabuki actors were
prominent cultural figures and were involved in numerous controversies, rivalries,
experiments, and developments. It was a time when actors seeking career
alternatives or supplements to kabuki’s
perceived instability found them by acting in movies, television, and radio, as well as other
forms of theatre.
This was part of a general movement toward
self-determination among kabuki
actors, who frequently found ways to declare their independence of kabuki’s feudalistic practices, doing
the unthinkable of putting themselves before their group. Kabuki actors accepted the challenge of acting outside kabuki, including in Western classics,
and in companies mingling men and women. The idea that actresses could hold their own in the traditionally
all-male kabuki world was explored,
with kabuki stars commonly acting
with real women, not female impersonators or onnagata. Such mixed-genre productions put a spotlight on the future
of the onnagata.
Kabuki has found
various ways to make the past ever present. However, at a time when kabuki’s future was being debated
because of economic problems and competition from other forms of entertainment,
concerns were raised about proper training for the next generation as well as
about ways in which to discover actors not born into the kabuki world.
The matter of proper training became even more urgent when
the classical Chinese theatre form jingju toured Japan in 1956, led by female-role
specialist Mei Lan-fang. Viewers were fascinated by
the physical discipline of the remarkably well-trained Chinese actors.
Interest in Chinese theatre was renewed in the 1950s even
before Mei’s visit because of two developments, 1) the forced exile there of a kabuki actor whose communist
affiliations had forced him to flee Japan, and 2) a tour to China in 1955, kabuki’s first foreign visit since 1928. The musical and sketch-like dramatic elements
of jingju were considered more like nō and kyōgen, but many thought its female impersonators, dramatic poses,
painted faces, and acrobatic combats were reminiscent of kabuki. Yet closer comparison revealed strong differences.
The remarkable skills of the Chinese resulted from awesome
dedication. When contrasted with the unified effect of Chinese acting, kabuki seemed filled with gaps. Not a
crack in the facade was visible. This was attributed to the state support then
received by jingju, with training units located
throughout the country. Despite kabuki’s
desire to provide the same level of training there would be no formal program
until the National Theatre, opened in 1966, began one in
1970. Even then the actors involved were almost all bound for supporting roles.
A kabuki actor’s
training was based on master-disciple relationships, with different masters for
specialized arts, like music, dance, and chanting, and not part of a formalized
system. Much of an actor’s education took place indirectly, by watching his
elders and being on stage from childhood on.
The current stars were too overworked to worry about
anything else than their next month’s roles, much less training their
successors. The issue was among the many obstacles restricting kabuki’s healthy progress. Another was
the movies.
The cinema was yet another threat to stability and health.
Movies offered fame and riches to promising talents, robbing the theatre of its
future pillars. A genre like kabuki can’t
afford to see its best and brightest leaving for the movies. A sizable number
of actors decided to venture into films, although some returned to
the stage. Regardless, their departure revealed the problems of being a kabuki actor at a time when economic and
artistic challenges were assailing the art form.
Japan’s film industry was experiencing its golden age,
largely because of an explosion of great directors. The demand for actors capable
of acting in period roles was strong, and few could do them as well as those
with kabuki backgrounds.
Prewar kabuki actors
who switched to movies were mainly those with unsteady stage careers, since kabuki is largely a domain where stars
are born into or adopted by the families of other stars. It’s easy to see why lesser
names might have chosen film careers.
Despite the occasional loss of promising prewar actors, it
was nothing like what happened afterward, when budding stage stars, even those
from major families, found film careers too seductive to ignore. The best example
was Ōtani Tomoemon (later Nakamura Jakuemon IV, 1920-2012), who had a five-year movie
star career, from 1950-1955. Tomoemon, originally a leading man,
had become a respected onnagata before returning to male parts on screen. He
had great talent but he had started late and, seeing limited opportunities, was
persuaded to go into films. The difference between him and those who followed
is that he never quit kabuki. Films were
merely a way to boost his visibility.
He did a small number of kabuki
performances during his film years, but when he returned to the stage for good,
Shōchiku, kabuki’s producing company, exiled him to Osaka,
where he remained, with brief exceptions, throughout the last half of the 1950s.
Tomoemon later said he didn’t consider his film work
valuable to his stage acting: “There are some whose experiences acting in
movies make them
better kabuki actors, but for me, my
heart wasn’t really in it and I usually did my job while longing to return to kabuki, so it had no use to me as an
actor.”
 |
| Ōtani Tomoemon (later Nakamura Jakuemon IV) |
Adapting to films wasn’t easy. He tried to do exactly what the
director told him. If the director said “sleep,” he slept, if he said “walk,”
he walked. But the director might say, “You’re walking funny. Don’t walk the
way you do on stage, just walk as you do usually.” Then he would try to walk in
a normal way but it would seem odd to the director. He might have to repeat
this twenty times before the director was satisfied.
Tomoemon found that his heart was in kabuki and his body in movies, but he was trapped by his
contract. There was only a verbal contract with Shōchiku, but in movies contracts were
necessary. And taxes were so heavy that he kept feeling compelled to make
another film to pay them off. He was in a vicious cycle; when he finally
returned to kabuki, his long absence
made it hard for him to catch up.
Those who tried to work in both films and kabuki
were sometimes criticized for the damage that movie acting brought to their art.
Critic Tobe Ginsaku suggested in 1955 that kabuki actors should be banned from
films because they had begun to bring an overly internalized approach to their
work on stage. As an example, he stated that while kabuki dances traditionally end with the performers facing the
audience directly, he had noticed a recent tendency for them to face each other
instead. Similar stories could be told about kabuki actors and their activity on TV, which was introduced to
Japan in 1953.
The restlessness among kabuki
actors was also expressed in a rash of highly publicized productions of Western
plays that began in 1960. Between that year and 1965
three of the leading kabuki actors
starred in five major productions of Western drama, a field normally occupied by
modern theatre or shingeki actors. In
fact, the supporting casts in four out the five were dominated by shingeki players; the same four
productions were staged outside a standard kabuki
theatre.
The involvement of kabuki
stars in these ventures didn’t mean that they were contemplating leaving
for other genres. The trend was a reflection of the widening scope of
possibilities becoming available as the greater social and artistic freedom
provided by postwar conditions made it easier to attempt challenging
experiments. Of the five plays produced during the 1960-1965 period, the best
example was Cyrano de
Bergerac, the sole example produced at the main kabuki theatre, the Kabuki-za.
 |
| Onoe Shōroku II as Cyrano, Yamada Isuzu as Roxanne, in Cyrano de Bergerac. |
Onoe Shōroku’s Cyrano was supported by a large company of top
kabuki actors, with actresses in the female roles. Shōroku, who was worried about
slipping attendance at the Kabuki-za, saw kabuki settling into a stream of creative inertia. He came to
believe that there should be thoroughly rehearsed presentations of different
kinds of plays.
This production had far more rehearsal time than ever given
to kabuki, which gets only several
days between one month’s program and the next. Every night after their evening
programs. Cyrano’s actors rehearsed,
often till dawn. If a foreign play could benefit so much from such
conscientious rehearsal, why couldn’t the same be true for kabuki itself?
Nevertheless, critics began to question what value these
productions had for the stars, outside of relieving them of the tedium of
playing in only traditional plays with actors of similar backgrounds. One
critic felt kabuki actors would have
been better off concentrating their experimental interests in the staging of
modern kabuki plays. Shōroku insisted
that he gained much from acting in Western classics, first, because he was able
to satisfy his ambition, and second, because it allowed him to view kabuki with fresh eyes, especially after
having the ability to rehearse for a full month instead of a few days.
The opposite phenomenon occurred in 1964 when a shingeki company tackled a kabuki play, Yotsuya Kaidan (The
Ghost Story of Yotsuya), in a carefully rehearsed, four-and-a-half
hour production. It had a realistic style
that kept certain conventions while adopting various modern innovations. This
production began a process of serious re-examination of classic scripts, which
could only have been a benefit to kabuki’s
progress. Seeing a kabuki play
through the eyes of non-kabuki actors
was a valuable inspiration for those willing to accept it.
In the time remaining, I’d like to touch on the ongoing
dilemma of the presence of male actors playing female roles in modern kabuki.
 |
| Kyō Machiko |
Kyō Machiko, the star of Kurosawa’s classic film Rashomon, was one of a relatively small group of
actresses that began costarring with kabuki actors in various forms of the
1950s. Most of these actresses costarred at least twice with kabuki actors, some even more, both at
mainstream venues like the Kabuki-za and at theatres that specialized in other
genres.
Prewar examples existed but it wasn’t until the postwar
period, with the “intermingling” of actors from different genres, that
actresses and kabuki actors began to
regularly share the same stage. Nevertheless, the closest such productions came
to being what could be defined as authentic kabuki
was in the realm of dance, and even that was rare. While it became fairly
common to see the name of a famous actress on a kabuki program, their plays were almost always either new ones
written for kabuki and dealing with
historical events or from some other genre, usually shinpa.
And the actresses themselves were not artistically
homogeneous, some having extensive training in kabuki-style dance, others having been trained as singer-actresses
in the all-female Takarazuka Revue, others having worked mainly in films, and others specializing in modern
drama.
Most had some training in traditional dance, invaluable in providing the
bearing for acting in period plays. Some, like Yaeko Mizutani, could hold their own against
major kabuki dancers and would probably
have been able to play certain classical roles if given the chance.
 |
| Yaeko Mizutani |
A reminder of the potential ability of actresses to play kabuki was the unusual circumstance in 1961
when Yamada Isuzu was scheduled to appear at the Kabuki-za in
four roles in two new plays but had to cancel because of illness. Filling in
for her was not another actress, but three top onnagata.
This demonstrated how easily the gender barrier could be crossed without doing
serious damage, at least in modern kabuki
drama.
 |
| Yamamoto Fujiko |
The introduction of actresses
could create problems, as one case in
particular illustrates. Yamamoto
Fujiko, chosen in 1950 as the first Miss
Japan,
was a successful film actress who had had
appeared in a succession of movies, her range constantly expanding. But in 1963
her movie career came to a screeching halt when she demanded changes in her
contract with Daiei. Daiei was so furious it blackballed her from ever appearing
in a Daiei film and convinced the five top movie companies, parties to the Five
Company Agreement
(Gosha Kyōtei), not to hire her either. Many
viewed the incident as an abuse of Yamamoto’s human rights, and it was even
debated in the Diet, but she never made another movie. Announcing that she was
“free,” she shifted her sights to the stage and television, and she signed with Shōchiku
to costar in July 1963 with the recently named
Danjūrō XI
at the Kabuki-za. But Shōchiku acquired her
commitment before asking Danjūrō for his; this was a mistake.
 |
| Ichikawa Danjūrō XI. |
Danjūrō
was disturbed that he had not been consulted and decided not to appear. Soon, a
newspaper reported that Danjūrō canceled because he wanted July to rest before
preparing for the upcoming ceremonial performances honoring Nagoya’s rebuilt kabuki theatre. Shōchiku wanted the production done in July to boost a slow
summertime box office but Danjūrō refused to listen to Shōchiku’s pleas. He was
also receiving floods of letters opposed to his costarring with a movie actress
now that he had ascended from Ebizō to Danjūrō, kabuki’s highest name.
Meanwhile, Yamamoto insisted that she’d agreed only after pressure
from Shōchiku. She declared that her good
intentions were being met by Danjūrō’s reluctance, which her patrons and
friends considered an embarrassment that Shōchiku could not explain away. As a
compromise, Shōchiku proposed moving the program up a month to June
but no one in the already planned June production was willing to move aside.
Yamamoto explained to a press conference that both she
and Danjūrō were victims and that the proposed pairing of the great kabuki actor and popular film actress
would not take place. Which it did not. However, in 1964, a persistent producer
managed to arrange for Yamamoto to costar with Matsumoto Kōshirō, and even to
reach the venerated Kabuki-za’s stage in 1965, costarring there with Nakamura
Kanzaburō XVII, one of her roles having first been created by the great onnagata Nakamura Utaemon VI.
Disappointingly, a critic wrote: “Yamamoto Fujiko failed in delivering her onnagata-style dialogue.” And while the
mixing of actresses with onnagata in shinpa plays, where both were employed,
was accepted, when such admired non-shinpa
actresses appeared with onnagata the
imbalance they created raised critical eyebrows.
The sudden increase in actresses appearing in newly written kabuki plays brought the subject of kabuki’s esteemed onnagata tradition into the spotlight. Female roles in these plays
seemed better suited for real women than onnagata,
and certain onnagata were even
accused of offering a kind of “actress-like” performance. Critic Watanabe
Tamotsu, for example, points to a 1958 performance by Ōtani Tomoemon when Tomoemon looked remarkably like an actual woman, a
situation that eliminated the artistic effect of external femininity being undergirded
by the power of an onnagata’s underlying
masculinity. Thus, claims Watanabe, he resembled an actress when he should have
been transcending the image of a woman and creating a phantasm of femininity,
not actuality.
Watanabe describes another performance, two years later, in 1960, when this tendency peaked.
Acting as a Chinese woman, Tomoemon really seemed to be female. Such acting,
Watanabe notes, reflects a tendency to make the onnagata so real he becomes a mere substitute for an actress, which
defeats the whole purpose of his existence by taking reality to an unnecessary
level. He believes Tomoemon did it for three specific reasons, one of
which he claims is Tomoemon’s having been influenced by acting with actresses in movies. The technical requirements
of movies forced the actresses to be as close to real women as possible. So
Tomoemon sought to bring a dose of reality in female
behavior to kabuki, where naturalness
is denied.
Epitomizing concerns for the future of the onnagata was a newspaper debate published in January
and February 1956 between the respected kabuki
scholar and critic Tobe Ginsaku and the controversial
director-producer-critic Takechi Tetsuji. Called the “Onnagata Debate” (Onnagata Ronsō), it began in a column when Takechi questioned whether the onnagata was still necessary, to which Tobe responded that it was. Each contributed two
essays. Takechi’s true motive may have been
to argue about the decrease in the acting power of contemporary onnagata rather than to demand their
elimination.
It’s
impossible to sum up all the issues raised briefly, so
I’ll touch on only a few. A full account is in Kabuki at the Crossroads. Takechi doesn’t specifically say that the onnagata is unnecessary. He seems more interested in raising
questions than making definite recommendations. He writes about a play called Higashi wa Higashi (East
is East) he directed in kyōgen
style in 1954 , starring Takarazuka-trained actress Yorozuyo
Mineko, whose resonant voice suggested
that women could rival men’s vocal powers when playing onnagata roles.
 |
| Yorozuyo Mineko. |
He offers an historical overview of actresses in kabuki and other genres and insists that
no proof exists to demonstrate their inferiority to men, blaming women’s
disappearance from the stage on their declining status on the feudal government,
whose oppression of the people turned kabuki
into a decadent art. Then, by the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, onnagata acting had become too firmly embedded to be dislodged. Despite the
failure of early 20th-century attempts to return women to kabuki, he believed that actresses like Yorozuyo proved the
viability of the idea, especially when modern lighting made the male features
of the actors so much more uncomfortably apparent than did candlelight.
Tobe argues that Yorozuyo’s performance in an
experimental modern play had nothing to do with kabuki and that Takechi’s using her as an example because of her
strong voice makes no sense. He says the bright lighting is simply part of
accepting the experience of a man playing a woman and insists that the question
of women replacing onnagata is minor.
Kabuki is what it is because of its
300-year evolution, and the onnagata is
more essential to its existence than anything else.
Tobe declares that to deny the art of onnagata acting means the complete
denial of present-day kabuki and what
makes it special.
Among other things, Tobe disputes the adequacy of Takechi’s
understanding of early kabuki history,
when the mere existence of singing and dancing female performers was no proof
of their artistic achievement, as opposed to later, when the conditions that
forced kabuki to rely on men playing
women demanded higher standards.
In the subsequent essays, the debate wanders, even
introducing Takechi’s Marxist-based belief that
the monopolistic profit motives behind kabuki
production are responsible for the decline he sees in onnagata acting. Takechi denies being anti-onnagata, noting that he merely intended to point out how much of a
woman’s natural expressiveness is lost when female parts are played by men. Yet
his next thought is how, when watching the late onnagata Onoe Baikō VI and Nakamura Jakuemon III, he was able to appreciate
their acting, even if it was a distortion of actual femininity, because of the
quality of their artistry. Tobe notices this contradiction and throws it in
Takechi’s face.
Ultimately, Takechi, regardless of his
eye-catching title about whether the onnagata
is necessary, was not insisting that onnagata be replaced by actresses but that, because historical conditions had
weakened kabuki, actresses should be
sought as one more possibility. In
fact, as they spar, neither Takechi nor Tobe ever provides a carefully reasoned rationale
for the onnagata’s survival.
Nine years later, Tobe wrote an article summarizing major
developments over the past fifteen years, among them the issue of whether
actresses should replace onnagata.
During that period, of course, there had been numerous instances of leading
actresses intermingling with kabuki actors,
but by 1965, Tobe noted, not one such actress had appeared in a
true kabuki play in a role normally
taken by an onnagata. There were no kabuki actors bold enough to break with
precedent and challenge the convention. Nor, to my knowledge, has there been
since.
This isn’t to deny the occasional experiments outside of
mainstream kabuki in which all-women
companies have presented kabuki
plays. The Ichikawa Girls’ Kabuki, active in the fifties and sixties, was the
most interesting example, but Takarazuka also offered limited productions by
its kabuki study group, which was
mentored by famous actors. The period even saw actresses from the then popular
form called onna kengeki, or women’s
sword-fighting drama, do a kabuki classic,
but there was no critical coverage of these exercises, making it impossible to
evaluate their effectiveness. Such presentations continued sporadically over
the years, but always in the guise of showcases not meant for general public
consumption.
As this paper has noted, during the period of 1952-1965 kabuki actors, worried not only about
their own futures but that of kabuki itself
found various ways to cope. They turned their attention to acting in other
media, to the idea of emulating Chinese training standards, to crossing over
into other theatrical genres, and to allowing actresses into their
male-dominated precincts. Kabuki has
never rested on its laurels. Time and again it comes to a crossroads and time
and again whatever road it chooses infuses it with new life.
