Kabuki's Forgotten War: 1931-1945

481 Pages·2008·2.25 MB·English

by  James R. Brandon

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kabuki’s forgotten war
Where Else on Earth Will You Find Its Equal?
The Essence of the Japanese Soul!
Three Heroic Human Bombs
in Three Scenes
A Special Rush Production!
Featuring Ichimura Uzaemon and Onoe Kikugoro¯
With Passionate Performances by the Entire Company!
Opens March 6
at the
Kabuki-za
(Kabuki-za program insert, March 1932, author’s collection)
KabuKi’s
Forgotten
war 1931–1945
James R. Brandon
University of Hawai‘i Press | Honolulu
© 2009 University of Hawai‘i Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
14 13 12 11 10 09 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brandon, James R.
Kabuki’s forgotten war : 1931–1945 / by James R. Brandon.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8248-3200-1 (hard cover : alk. paper)
1. Kabuki — History — 20th century. 2. War and
theater — Japan — History — 20th century. 3. World
War, 1939–1945 — Theater and the war. I. Title.
Pn2924.5.k3b65 2008
792.0952'09043 — dc22 2008028328
Publication of this book has been assisted with grants from
The Center for Japanese Studies, University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa
and
The School of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa
University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free
paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and
durability of the Council on Library Resources.
Designed by April Leidig-Higgins
Printed by Edwards Brothers, Inc.
contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
Part 1 Kabuki’s Foreign Adventure: 1931–1939
One Prelude to War 3
Two Kabuki and the Manchurian and Shanghai Incidents:
1931–1934 37
Three Kabuki and the Marco Polo Bridge Incident: 1937–1938 68
Four The Darkening Storm: 1939 94
Part 2 Fruits of Victory: 1940–1942
Five Kabuki and 2,600 Years of Imperial Rule: 1940 113
Six Confrontation with America and Britain: 1941 156
Seven Japan and Kabuki at the Zenith: 1942 188
Part 3 Defeat and Survival: 1943–1945
Eight Kabuki and Japan’s “Decisive Battle”: 1943 235
Nine Kabuki Is a Luxury: 1944 262
Ten The Agony Ends: 1945 296
Eleven War Plays in Kabuki — a Retrospection: August 1945 320
Part 4 Kabuki Outlasts the Occupation: 1945–1947
Twelve Inventing Classic Kabuki: 1945–1947 345
vi | Contents
Notes 357
Sources 417
Index of Play Titles in English and Japanese 439
Index of Kabuki Actors’ Names in the Text 449
Index 453
acknowledgments
Some material in this book was first presented in colloquia at the Department
of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University; the Depart-
ment of Performance Studies, Brown University; the International Sympo-
sium: Nō Theater Transversal, Trier University; the Paul I. and Hisako Tera-
saki Center for Japanese Studies, UCLA; the Japan Studies Forum, University
of Hawai‘i at Mānoa; and the Conference on East West Theater Revisited,
Pomona College (later published in conference proceedings). Some material
in the final chapter appeared in different form in the Asian Theatre Journal
(Spring 2006).
For permission to reproduce many photographs I am especially indebted
to Okunishi Michiko and Okunishi Makoto, the Shōchiku Ōtani Library, the
Tsubouchi Memorial Theater Museum of Waseda University, the Engekikai
Publishing Company, the General Douglas MacArthur Foundation, Olga Tet-
kowski and the Barr Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts Design
and Culture, the Sumida Ward Local Culture Archives, the Mainichi shinbun,
and their staffs. Staff members of the University of Hawai‘i Hamilton Library,
the Waseda University Theater Museum Library, the Harvard-Yenching In-
stitute Library, the National Archives in Suitland, Maryland, and the Hoover
Institution, Stanford University, kindly and efficiently helped search out war-
time documents. In Tokyo, Professors Sakaba Junko and Mariko Boyd, and Itoh
Kazue provided valuable research assistance. Satō Tatsuichirō, Narita Akemi,
Tanaka Yoku, and Judy Van Zile generously shared their collections of pho-
tographs and recordings and Janine Beichman her knowledge of modern nō.
Okunishi Michiko sent me useful information on Kansai performances. Samuel
L. Leiter and Sakaba Junko kindly read drafts and offered thoughtful sugges-
tions and corrections. Friends and colleagues, Elizabeth Wichmann-Walczak,
Fan Xing, Kim Yung-hee, and Daniel Kane gave expert advice on Chinese and
Korean transcriptions. My thanks also go to Karen Zwicker, Fan Xing, and
Kurt Wurmli for bringing order to scattered files and to Will Fleming for work-
ing computer magic on the Notes and Sources. I thank University of Hawai‘i
Press senior editor Patricia Crosby for her warm friendship and good advice
viii | Acknowledgments
over many years, and I thank Susan Stone, Cheri Dunn, and Jo Ann Teno-
rio for sharing their detailed editorial expertise. All errors, of course, are my
responsibility.
And most important, I am deeply grateful to my wife Reiko for her patience,
for helping with difficult translations, and for encouraging me every day to
complete this manuscript.
introduction
I did not plan to write this book. It forced its presence on me while I was doing
research on the censorship that kabuki endured during the American Occu-
pation that followed Japan’s defeat in World War II. As I read descriptions
of kabuki that were written in the immediate postwar years, I was struck by
the insistence of both Japanese and American writers that the kabuki plays
being submitted to American Occupation censors between 1945 and 1949 were
wholly classical works, having no connection to Japanese society of the mid-
1940s. And yet as everyone knows, throughout the history of kabuki, actors
in every generation acted in new plays. Indeed premieres constituted the life-
blood of kabuki from Okuni’s first performances in the early 1600s through the
Tokugawa period (1603–1868). In January 2000, Samuel L. Leiter and I were in
Tokyo selecting play scripts to be translated in the four-volume series Kabuki
Plays On Stage. Our central theme was that every generation of kabuki artists
created new plays that reflected contemporary life in Japan.
I was faced with a nagging question: if the plays performed by kabuki ac-
tors were wholly traditional in September 1945 when the occupation of Japan
began, when had the fossilization of the kabuki repertory occurred? When had
playwrights ceased to write contemporary plays for kabuki theaters, and when
did kabuki actors stop performing them? I was shamefaced. I didn’t know.
Nearly fifty years ago, Professor Kawatake Shigetoshi suggested in his magiste-
rial Complete History of Japanese Theater (Nihon engeki zenshi, 1959) that new
plays stopped being performed in kabuki theaters after 1894–1895 (see Chapter
1). What then of the half century between 1895 and 1945, and especially the fif-
teen years 1931–1945? I had encountered almost nothing about wartime kabuki
in my readings up until this time.
I thought that a direct way to confirm the “classic” nature of kabuki drama
in the decades preceding 1945 would be to scan the standard chronological list-
ings of kabuki productions published by the Shōchiku Theatrical Corporation
(Nagayama Takeomi, ed., Kabuki-za hyakunen shi and Shōchiku hyakunen shi)
and the National Theater of Japan (Kokuritsu Gekijō Kindai Nenpyō Hensan-
shitsu, ed., Kindai kabuki nenpyō, see Sources). To my amazement I found
scores of plays whose titles indicated contemporary subject matter: Riding the
Famous Hot-Air Balloon (1891), Festival of the Founding of the Manchurian Na-