YAKUSHA OR HAIYŪ: KABUKI ACTORS AT THE CROSSROADS, 1952-1965

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.