Theatre Yearbook 2018
Theatre in Japan
Published in March, 2018
Japanese Centre of International Theatre Institute (ITI/UNESCO)
c/o Kokuritsu Nohgakudo (The National Noh Theatre)
4-18-1 Sendagaya, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 151-0051, JAPAN
Tel: +81-(0)3-3478-2189 / Fax: +81-(0)3-3478-7218
mail@iti-j.org / http://iti-japan.or.jp© Japanese Centre of International Theatre Institute 2018
All rights reserved. Requests for permission to reproduce material
from this work should be sent to the Japanese Centre of International Theatre Institute.

Commissioned by the Agency for Cultural Affairs,
Government of Japan in the fiscal 2017
under the Human Resources Development Programme
for the Next Generation of Cultural Creators.
Editor-in-chief Tanokura Minoru
Director in charge Yoshiiwa Masaharu, Sota Shuji
Editor Nakajima Kana
Editorial Staff Iki Terumi, Goto Ayako,
Sakurai Yumiko, Hayashi Hideki,
Hishinuma Yoshiaki, Monden Miwa
Translation William Andrews, Sumida Michiyo,Mark Oshima, James Ferner, Sato Michiyo
Proofreading Mark Oshima, Tove Bjoerk, Rosalind Fielding
DTP Staff Nakamura Tomoko
Art Direction and Design Kubo Saori
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Printed in Japan

Foreword
The Japanese Centre of International Theatre Institute has become a public interest incorporated foundation and is a member of an international network comprised of National Centres and professional organizations in approximately ninety countries and regions constituting
the International Theatre Institute (ITI), which is a non-governmental organization under theumbrella of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
The preamble of the UNESCO Constitution begins with the famous phrase “since wars begin
in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed”.
In Article 3 of the standing rules of the Japanese Centre of International Theatre Institute, it
is stipulated that the purpose of the Centre is “to contribute to the development of culture andrealization of peace in Japan by deepening mutual understanding and facilitating the creations
and exchanges of theatre and dance based upon the purpose of the UNESCO Constitution”.
Theatre and dance are excellent media that enable us to take interest in one another andthink about man and society by sharing time and space together. Even in today’s society, where
the means of communication have developed and the volume and speed of distributing information have increased dramatically, the role of theatre and dance that help us gain multifaceted
and deep insights will not diminish.
The Japanese Centre has continued to publish the Theatre Yearbook since 1972. Startingfrom 1997, it has been published in two parts, namely ‘Theatre in Japan’ (English version) for
readers outside Japan and ‘Theatre Abroad’ (Japanese version) for domestic readers. From
2011, the Centre has been commissioned by the Agency for Cultural Affairs to carry out the
publication project under the ‘Program for Nurturing Upcoming Artists Leading the Next
Generation’.
Furthermore, reading performances have been presented every year since 2009 to introduce
remarkable plays from around the world as part of the research and study activity to promoteinternational theatrical exchange. In 2017, the ‘Theatre Born in Conflict Zones’ series was
carried out for the ninth consecutive year and two new plays from Syria and Jordan/Parestine
were translated and introduced to Japan for the first time.
Thus the publication of the ‘Theatre Yearbook’ has laid a firm foundation for actual activities to gain knowledge on the relationship between Japan and the world, to deepen mutual
understanding by positioning Japan within the global network, and to realize cultural development and peace.
We look forward to your continued support and cooperation to the activities of the Japanese Centre of ITI in the years to come.
March 27, 2018
In commemoration of the World Theatre Day

Nagai Taeko
President
Japanese Centre of International Theatre InstituteCONTENTS
005 Shots from the Performing Arts in Japan in 2017

The Japanese Performing Arts in Japan in 2017037 Noh and Kyōgen Nishi Tetsuo
045 Kabuki and Bunraku Mizuochi Kiyoshi
056 Musicals Hagio Hitomi
064 Contemporary Theatre Yamaguchi Hiroko
073 Children’s and Youth Theatre and Puppet Theatre Yokomizo Yukiko
082 Japanese Classical Dance Hirano Hidetoshi
094 Ballet Urawa Makoto
102 Contemporary Dance and Butoh Tsutsumi Hiroshi
113 Television Dramas Kotaki Tetsuya, Nakamachi Ayako

Developments in Japan and Overseas
129 The Birth of Shingeki / Ozasa Yoshio
141 Creating the New Kabuki The Wars of Mahabahrata / Aoki Go
148 Thirty Years On, Remembering Ninagawa and Macbeth / Rosalind Fielding
155 Talk Event “Theater Reviews and Theatrical Journalism”
Theatrical Criticism as an Instrument to Raise Theater to the Level of Culture / Uchida Yoichi

Special Feature
161 A Report on ‘Theatre Born in Conflict Zones 9’
Two Arab Playwrights Cutting Through the Darkness of Night / Goto Ayako
176 Companion Volume ‘Theatre Abroad 2018’ in Japanese
178 ITI Centres

Names are presented in the style of the person’s country of origin.
For Japanese names, the order is family name followed by given name.

日本の
舞台芸術
を見る

Shots from the Per forming Ar ts in Japan
in 2017

Noh and Kyōgen

Atelier Kashu celebration program for
Master Performer Nomura Shirō certified as Living National Treasures
Sansuijin Muchū Suigin (The Revelries of Three Drunken Poets)© Suzuki Kaoru

Umewaka Manzaburō
Tomonaga (The Tragedy of Minamoto no Tomonaga)
Umewaka Ken Noh Kai Kikkō Kai© Maejima Yoshihiro

Kanze Noh Theatre grand opening felicitous program Okina Kanze kiyokazu (centre) Kanze Noh Theatre
Photo provided by Kanze Sōke © Maejima Yoshihiro

Association for Japanese Noh Plays Tsuchigumo (The Monstrous Ground Spider)
Kongō Hisanori (left), Kanze Kiyokazu (right) © Maejima Yoshihiro

Noh and Kyōgen

Awaya Yoshio Obasute (The Old Woman Abandoned in the Mountains) Awaya Noh no Kai © Maejima Yoshihiro

Observing the 500th year since the passing away of Kanze Kojirō Nobumitsu Hoshi (The Stars)
Ōtsuki Bunzō (left) Ōtsuki Noh Theatre © Moriguchi Mitsuru

Myōga Zarae (Horikawa River Cleaning) the Nagoya Castle ‘Yume Tsukuri’ Kyogen Kai © Imai Keisuke

Ayu (The Sweetfish) Nomura Mansai (centre) © National Noh TheatreKabuki

Yoshitsune Senbonzakura – Tokaiya and Daimotsu no Ura (Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees– Tokaiya and Daimotsu no Ura) Kataoka Nizaemon © Shochiku

Name-succession program Kotobuki Soga no Taimen (The Felicitous Soga Encounter)
Bandō Hikosaburō 9th (fourth from the left) © Shochiku

Igagoe Dōchū Sugoroku – Numazu (Vendetta at Iga Pass – Numazu) Nakamura Kichiemon (centre),
Nakamura Jakuemon (front), Nakamura Karoku (back) © Shochiku

Yuki no Yūbe Iriya no Azemichi – Naozamurai (Narrow Paths on a Snowy Night in Iriya – Naojiro the Samurai)
Onoe Kikugorō (left), Nakamura Tokizō (right) © Shochiku

KabukiNoda Ban Sakura no Mori no Mankai no Shita(Noda Edition : Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees)
Nakamura Kankurō (front), Nakamura Shichinosuke (back)© Shochiku

Kiwame-tsuki Indo-den Mahābārata Senki(The Ultimate Indian Epic: The Wars of Mahabharata)
Onoe Kikunosuke © Shochiku

Suda no Haru Geisha Katagi – Yanagisima Hashimoto Zashiki (Ume Yoshibei and the Stolen Poem Card
– A parlor in the Hashimoto restaurant in Yanagishima) Nakamura Kichiemon (centre) © National Theatre

Chō Kabuki Kuruwa Kotoba Awasekagami (Words and Mirrors Come Together in the Pleasure Quarters) Nakamura Shidō
Photo provided by Niconico Chokaigi 2017

Bunraku

Honchō Nijū Shikō – Jushukō no dan (Twenty-Four Filial Pieties – The Ten Types of Incense section)© National Bunraku Theatre cooperated with Ningyō jōruri Bunraku-za

Sugawara Denju Tenarai Kagami – Terakoya no dan (Sugawara’s Secrets of Calligraphy - The Temple School section)© National Bunraku Theatre cooperated with Ningyō jōruri Bunraku-za

Sonezaki Shinjū – Temmaya no dan (The Love Suicides at Sonezaki – The Temma House section)© National Theatre cooperated with Ningyō jōruri Bunraku-za

Shō-Utsushi Asagao Banashi – Ōi Gawa no dan (Story of the Morning Glory – The Crossing at the Ōi River section)© National Theatre cooperated with Ningyō jōruri Bunraku-za

Bunraku

Tamamo no Mae Asahi no Tamoto – Kewai Sesshōseki no dan (Tamamo the Nine-Tailed Fox – The Spirit of the Fox
Becomes the Killing Stone section) © National Theatre cooperated with Ningyō jōruri Bunraku-za

Hiragana Seisuiki – Matsuemon Uchi no dan (The Battles of Genji and Heike – The Matsuemon’s House section)© National Theatre cooperated with Ningyō jōruri Bunraku-za

Musicals

Billy Elliot Tokyo Broadcasting System Television, Inc.／HoriPro Inc.／Umeda Arts Theater／WOWOW Inc.／
Mainichi Broadcasting System, Inc. (Osaka) photo provided by HoriPro Inc. © Abe Takayuki

Parade HoriPro Inc. © Miyagawa MaikoMusicals

My Name is Shingo (Watashi wa SHINGO)
HoriPro Inc. © Watanabe Takahiro

Ikebukuro West Gate Park Song & Dance
Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre / HoriPro Inc.
© Watanabe Takahiro

The Land of the Gods – The Twilight of the Romanovs (Kamigami no tochi – Romanofutachi no Tasogare)
Takarazuka Revue Company (Cosmos Troupe) © Takarazuka Revue

All for One – D’Artagnan and the Sun King (All for One – Darutanian to Taiyōou)
Takarazuka Revue Company (Moon Troupe) © Takarazuka Revue

Contemporary Theatre

The Air (Za kūki) Nitosha Theatre Company © Honma NobuhikoLife is Precious (Nuchi du takara) Bunka-za © Sakamoto Masafumi

Cloud 9 Mochiron © Hikichi Nobuhiko

The Diary of a Good Girl (Anne no hi) Fukinkobo © Yokota Atsushi

Contemporary Theatre

The Mass of Pale Pink (Usui momoiro no katamari) Saitama Gold Theater © Miyagawa Maiko

Risk-Takers (Okashita mono) Bungakuza © Miyagawa MaikoSetagaya Public Theatre 20th Anniversary Production Requiem on the Great Meridian (Shigosen no matsuri)
Setagaya Public Theatre © Hosono ShinjiⓒNODA・MAP
Footprint Princess (Ashiatohime – Toki ayamatte fuyu no yūrei) NODA MAP © Shinoyama Kishin

Contemporary Theatre

Neighbors (Fushin – Kanojo ga uso wo tsuku riyū) Parco Co., Ltd. © Abe Akihito

Enemy of Heaven (Ten no teki) Ikiume © Tanaka Aki

Children’s and Youth Theatre and Puppet Theatre

Arabian Nights – The Magic Lamp and the Light of Tomorrow(Arabian Naito — Mahō no Rampu to Asu no Hikari)
Puppet Theater Musubi-Za © Shimizu Jirō

With Two Wings (Futatsu no Tsubasa)
company ma © Ota Hiroki

Children’s and Youth Theatre and Puppet Theatre

Shinyuri Theater Musical Cat Runs (Neko Hashiru) Kawasaki Art Center © Sekiguchi Junkichi

Higashiyama Asakura Narratives – The Section of Jinbei’s Ferry (Higashiyama Asakura Sōshi – Jjinbei Watashiba no Dan)
Kawano Kuruma Ningyō Preservation Society © Iida Puppet Theatre Festa Executive Committee

The Boy Who Was Always Late (Itsumo Chikoku no Otokonoko) Puppet Theatre Puk © Puppet Theatre Puk

Chua Chui Dong Lai – As the Sparrows Wended in a Windless Winter (Chua Chui Dong Lai – Suzume Sarite Fuyu Kitaru)
Public-interest incorporated foundation Edo Marionette Theatre YOUKIZA © Miyazaki MitsuakiJapanese Classical Dance

Yoshimura Chihiro Recital ‘Mai no Kai’ Nonomiya Yoshimura Chihiro © Video Photo Saito

Kanawa Inoue Koman © National TheatreNihon Buyō Mirai-za Nyonin Sumida : Tayutō (Women and the Sumida River : Gently Flowing) Onoe Yukari, Hanayagi Kiyohito,
Fujikage Shizue, Fujima Etsuko, Mizuki Yuka The Japanese Classical Dance Association Inc. © Video Photo Saito

Goyōkai performance in New Delhi, India Ramayana The Japan Foundation / Nihon Buyō Foundation © One Frame Story

BalletⓒNew National Theatre, Tokyo
The Nutcracker and the Mouse King The National Ballet of Japan © Shikama Takashi

Cleopatra Tetsuya Kumakawa K-Ballet Company © Gombi Ayumu

The White-Haired Girl (Hakumōjo) Matsuyama Ballet Company © Hirai Shinnosuke (A•I Co.,Ltd.)

Triple Bill: Pas de Quatre Shakujii Ballet Academy © Seto Hidemi

BalletDie Toteninsel Sadamatsu-Hamada Ballet © Kanehara Yumi

La Traviata Sasaki Michiko Ballet Company © Furuichi Eiji

Contemporary Dance and Butoh

Festival / Tokyo 2017 Toky Toki Saru Conceived and directed by Pichet Klunchun © Siriwan Pakmei

KAAT Kids Program 2017 Alice's Adventure in Wonderland Kanagawa Arts Theatre © Miyagawa Maiko

Contemporary Dance and Butoh

17’s Map CONDORS Photo provided by Sainokuni Saitama Arts Theater © HARU

Howling at the moon (Tsuki ni hoeru) Saburo Teshigawara / KARAS © Maezawa HidetoWoman is a Journey (Onna wa, tabi de aru) Mademoiselle Cinema © Yamanoue Masanobu

SAYUSA (Left-Right-Left) Co-produced by Yokohama Noh Theater and Japan Society © Tsukada YoichiContemporary Dance and Butoh

Dairakudakan Temptenshiki Anniversary 45th Super-human (Chōjin), Pseudo-human (Gijin) Dairakudakan© Kawashima Hiroyuki

missing link Iwabuchi Teita © GO (go-photograph.com)

日本の
舞台芸術
を知る
Th e J a p a n e s e Pe r fo r m i n g A r t s
i n 2017

ˉ GENNOH and KYO

Noh and Kyōgen

An Abundance of
Spirited Nohgaku Programs
Nishi Tetsuo
Award Winners
Certification as a ‘Preserver of Important Intangible Cultural Property’Ōkura Genjirō was certified as a ‘Preserver of Important Intangible
Cultural Property’ – Individual Certification (National Living Treasure). He is a performer on the kotsuzumi (hand-held shoulder drum)
and also the Grand Master of the Ōkura Kotsuzumi School. Born in
038

1957, he is the second son of (the late) Ōkura Chōjūrō 15th. This recognition makes him the eleventh living individual in the field of Noh
who has been given this honor.
In addition, 45 individuals received certification as ‘Preservers ofImportant Intangible Cultural Properties’ (Collective Certification).
With this new group, the total comes to 527 persons living who havereceived the recognition.
Japan Art Academy Prize

The Japan Art Academy Prize was awarded to Ōtsuki Bunzō. A
shite (main role) performer of the Kanze School, he is the eldest son ofŌtsuki Hideo and he studied with his grandfather, Ōtsuki Jūzō, andhis father, as well as Kanze Hisao and Kanze Tetsunojō 8th.
Grand Prize at the Arts Festival of the Agency for Cultural Affairs

The Grand Prize at the Arts Festival of the Agency for Cultural

Affairs in the Theatre division was awarded to Umewaka Manzaburō
for his performance of Tomonaga (the Tragedy of Minamoto no Tomonaga) at the Kikkō Kai. A shite performer of the Kanze School, he is
the eldest son of Umewaka Manzaburō 2nd. Born in 1941, he wasinstructed by his father.
Award for the Encouragement of the Arts

The Award for the Encouragement of the Arts of the Minister of
Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology was presented toKongō Hisanori. A shite performer of the Kongō School, he is presently the school’s 26th Sōke (Grand Master). The eldest son of KongōIwao, he received instruction from his father. He has also been therecipient of the Kyoto Prefecture Award for Cultural Achievement aswell as the Award for Distinguished Service and others.
039
The Kanze Hisao Memorial Hosei University Noh Theatre Award

Okamoto Akira received the Kanze Hisao Memorial Hosei University Noh Theatre Award for directing the production, Ren’niku
Kōbō. He was born in 1949, and is currently associate professor at
Meiji University Graduate School.
Matsuda Hiroyuki also received the award. A nohkan (flute) performer of the Morita School, studied with the late Tanaka Ichiji andMorita Mitsuharu. He is a graduate of the Kunitachi College of Musicand is a Lecturer at the National Noh Theatre Training Course.

Successions of the Heads of Schools and otherSuccessions of the Heads of Schools

In the shite Komparu School, Komparu Yasuaki took the name
Komparu Norikazu, becoming the 81st Grand Master of the School.

Theatre in Japan

Theatre Yearbook 2018ˉ GENNOH and KYO

He was born in 1982, the eldest son of Komparu Yasuaki.
The waki (supporting role) performer of the Hōshō School,
Hōshō Kinya has become the 13th Head of the School. He was bornin 1967.
Name Successions

In the Kyōgen Izumi School, Nomura Toranosuke, the eldest sonof Nomura Ryōsuke (Manzō), who, himself, is the second son of
Nomura Man, took the name Mannojō 6th.
In the Kyogen Okura School, Shigeyama Yoshinobu took thename Shigeyama Chūzaburō 5th. Born in 1982, he is the eldest son of
Shigeyama Chūzaburō 4th.
Relocation of the Kanze Noh Theatre040

The new Kanze Noh Theatre – Memorial to Kanze Sakon the
25th Grand Master of the School – opened with a number of special
commemorative programs. The new theatre is in the 3rd basement
floor of GINZA SIX, located in Metropolitan Tokyo, Chuo ward,
district 6.
The programs that accompanied this grand opening included‘Shukuga Noh’ (Felicitous Program of Noh) that offered a performance of Okina by Kanze Kiyokazu (Grand Master of the Kanze
School) and others (April 20, 21, 22 and 23rd), as well as, ‘Hikazu Noh’
(Program Celebrating Longevity, April 25, 27, 28. 29 and 30th and May1st), and a ‘Special Program for Young Performers’ (April 24th).
Program of the Tokyo branch of the Association for Japanese Noh PlaysOn September 19th, the Association for Japanese Noh Plays,
whose members are among the professional performers who have

been recognized by the nation as being those with the highest skills,
held its Tokyo Program at the new Kanze Noh Theatre. The Noh
Play Tsuchigumo (The Monstrous Ground Spider) was performed withthe shite of part one played by Kongō Hisanori and the shite of parttwo played by Komparu Yasuaki. The role of the warrior Raikō was
performed by Kanze Kiyokazu and Kochō by Hōshō Kazufusa withmembers of the Kanze and Kita Schools assisting.

Performances of ‘Old Woman Plays’
Next, I will give a listing of performances of ‘Old Woman Plays’
which have a special place among the greatest works of Nohgaku:
Umewaka Genshō Sotoba Komachi(The Legend of Ono no
Komachi at the Stupa)

January 17th ‘Shikō noHana’ Special Program.

Awaya Yoshio

Obasute(The Old Woman
March 5th at the Awaya
Abandoned in the Mountains) Noh no Kai.

Ōtsubo Kimio

Ōmu Komachi(The Legend of Ono no
Komachi’s ‘Parrot’ reply)

May 3rd at the Ōtsubo
Kimio no Kai.

Hirota Yukitoshi

Sotoba Komachi

May 14th at theHirota Yukitoshi NohAppreciation Program.

Kakutō Yukuo

Higaki(The Cypress Fence)

October 14th at the Ranno Kai.

Tōyama Takamichi Ōmu Komachi

041

October 22nd at the
Hōshō Special Autumn
Program.

Takeda Yukifusa

Sekidera Komachi(Ono no
November 4th at the Kaei
Komachi at Sekidera Temple) Kai.

Honda Mitsuhiro

Higaki

December 10th at the
Komparu ‘En-Ma-I Kai’.

Uzawa Hisa

Higaki

December 24th at the
Uzawa Hisa no Kai.

Theatre in Japan

Theatre Yearbook 2018ˉ GENNOH and KYO

Reconstructed Plays and Newly Created Works for Noh
Reconstructed plays
Asami Masakuni

Aya no Tsuzumi(The Damask Drum)* This work is performed as a regularpart of the reparatory of the Kita,
Kongō and Hōshō Schools only.

Umewaka Genshō

Ikenie (The Pool Sacrifice) February 4th at Noh GobanŌtsuki Bunzō

Hoshi (The Stars)

Shiotsu Akio andŌtsuki Bunzō

Shikimi Tengu (Goblins February 11th at the Shiotsu
among the Flowers)
Noh Program.

Yamashina Yaemon Takayasu (Takayasu –Narihira’s Lover)

042

January 29th at the National
Noh Theatre Special Program.

February 4th at the Program
observing the 500th year since
the passing away of Kanze Kojirō
Nobumitsu.

February 25th at the Takayasu
Noh.

Hayashi Sōichirō

Kibitsu no Miya
(Kibitsu Shrine)

Umewaka Genshō

Natori no Rōjo (The
July 28th, at the National Noh
Aged Woman of Natori) Theatre Planned Program.

Ōtsuki Bunzō

Unoha(Cormorant Feathers)

May 13th, at the ‘Program
Commemorating theReconstruction of the Play
Kibitsu no Miya’.

July 30th at the National Noh
Theatre’s Special Programme of
Noh Performance.

Newly Created Works for Noh
Rikyu–Enoura(The Tragic Death of
Rikyu)(February 12th at MOA Museum of Art Noh
Theatre): Asami Masakuni and Kanze Tetsunojōwith Sugimoto Hiroshi in charge of planning andproduction. The play, written by Baba Akiko wascomposed and directed by Asami Masakuni.
Sanada Yukimura(March 16th, Yamamoto Noh Theatre): Yamamoto
Akihiro (Kamigata Dentogeinō DE Rekijuku).
Shiki(May 10th, Matsuyama Castle Ninomaru Garden):(The Poet Masaoka Shiki) Udaka Michishige, Ninomaru Takigi Noh.
Newly Created Dance(September 1st, National Noh Theatre): Nomura
Sansuijin Muchū Suigin Shirō (Li Po), Sakurama Kinki (Tu Fu), Yamamoto(The Revelries of Three
Tōjirō (Bai Ju Yi), Matsuda Hiroyuki (Noh Flute),
Drunken Poets)
Kasai Kenichi director and scriptwriter.
Contemporary Noh,
(December 12th, National Noh Theatre): Umewaka
Marie Antoinette
Genshō. Written and directed by Ueda Shinji.

New Works for Kyogen
Wadachi, (The Wheel Furrows) with Sato (February 2nd, Nagoya Noh
Tomohiko,
Theatre) in the Nagoya Castle
Yume Tsukuri with Inoue Matsujirō and ‘Yume Tsukuri’ Kyogen Kai.
Myōga Zarae with Kashima Toshihiro(All written by Yamakawa Satomi).
Ayu (The Sweetfish)(December 22nd, National Noh
Theatre) Nomura Mansai. Written
by Ikezawa Natsuki and Directedby Nomura Mansai.

Noh performers and Individuals Related to Nohgaku who
passed away last year
Tokue Gensei (2016 November 30th) Professor Emeritus at
Kokugakuin University and a Medieval Performing Arts Scholar.
He was 85.
Takahashi Hiroshi (2017 February 2nd) shite performer of the043

Kanze School. He was 70.
Sekine Shōsetsu (Shōroku) (February 22nd) a shite performer ofthe Kanze School. A member of the Japan Arts Academy andrecipient of The Japan Art Academy Prize and the Award for
Excellence at the Arts Festival among others. He was 86.
Kaburagi Mineo (June 27th) a waki performer of the Shimogakari Hōshō School. He was 86.
Yasufuku Tatsuo (July 17th) an ōtsuzumi (hand-held hip drum)
performer of the Takayasu School also acting Grand Master ofthe school. A recipient of the designation ‘Preserver of Important Intangible Cultural Properties’ – Individual Certification(National Living Treasure). He was 78.
Hayashi Kiemon (August 15th) a shite performer of the Kanze
School. He was 76.
Yoshii Junichi (September 1st) a shite performer of the Kanze

Theatre in Japan

Theatre Yearbook 2018ˉ GENNOH and KYO

School. He was 85.
Umeda Kunihisa (October 5th) a shite performer of the Kanze
School. He was 86.
Nishi, Tetsuo
Nohgaku Scholar, born in 1937. Graduated from Saitama University. He has
worked for Tokyo-dō Shuppan Publishing House, as well as part-time instructor
at Musashino University and Bunka Gakuin University. He has been chief juror
for the Agency for Cultural Affairs’ Arts Festival – both Nohgaku and Theatre
departments, on the Selection Committee for Arts Encouragement – classicalarts and theatre departments, and on the committee of experts for the Japan
Performing Arts Foundation (National Noh Theatre). He is a co-author of theNohgaku Daijiten (Encyclopedia of Nohgaku, Chikuma Shobō).
(Translation: James Ferner)

044

Kabuki and Bunraku

Kabuki – noteworthy in its promotionof young stars;
Bunraku – increasing its audiencebase year by year
Mizuochi Kiyoshi
KabukiThe ‘Daikanbu’ or the ‘top executive class’, as the actors in their 70s
and up who represent the Kabuki scene are generally referred to, are
all in good health and have been respectively putting their matured045

and polished artistry on display, not only in performing the works
that they are famous for but also in taking on new first time challenges. In recent years however, due to limitations of age, the middleaged class of actors in their 40s and 50s have been leading the charge
in an increasing number of programs and in 2017, the younger actors
in their 20s and 30s were also being appointed to take on some of thebigger roles in an increasing number of programs. In addition, those‘top executives’ have been sharing the stage more and more with theyounger stars thereby creating more opportunities for the directtransmission of the art. In Kabuki, there are ceremonies called‘Shūmei’ (name-succession) in which an actor receives the name of his
father or teacher; in January, there was one for Ichikawa Udanji 3rd,and in May, Bando Hikosaburō 9th held a name-succession programthat involved his entire house.
The Kabuki-za Theatre, the home base of Kabuki, held monthly

Theatre in Japan

Theatre Yearbook 2018

KABUKI and BUNRAKU

programs throughout the year. There were quite a few speciallytitled programs: in January, the opening New Year’s program, in February Edo-Kabuki (its 390th year), in May the Dangiku-sa (a joint
program by the Danjūrō and Kikugorō acting houses), in September, Shū zan-sai (program commemorating Nakamura Kichiemon
I - stage name: Shūzan), in October, the Geijutsu-sai (Arts Festival),in November, the ‘Kaomise’ (All-Star Program). Most of these programs were in two parts (those in August and December were inthree) with lineups of multiple works that did justice to the program
titles. Among the especially fine programs that were presented
throughout the year were: Nakamura Kichiemon, Nakamura Karoku
and Nakamura Jakuemon performing the Numazu sections of Igagoe
Dōchū Sugoroku (the Vendetta at Iga) in January; Kataoka Nizaemon
performing Yoshitsune Senbonzakura (Yoshitsune and the Thousand
046

Cherry Trees) – the Tokaiya and Daimotsu no Ura sections in March;
Kichiemon and Onoe Kikunosuke performing Keisei Hangonko(the Stuttering Painter) in April; Onoe Kikugorō and Nakamura
Tokizō performing, Sakana-ya Sōgorō (Sōgorō, the Fish Monger) in
May; Kichiemon, Karoku and others performing the Sakaro sectionof Hirakana Seisuiki (Record of the Battles of the Genji and Heike)in September; and in November, Kikugorō and Tokizō performing
the Naozamurai (Naojiro the Samurai) section of Yuki no Yū be
Iriya no Azemichi (Narrow Paths on a Snowy Night in Iriya) as wellas Nizaemon performing the fifth and sixth sections of Kanadehon
Chūshingura (Treasury of Loyal Retainers) and Matsumoto Koshiro,
Ichikawa Somegorō and Nakamura Kotarō performing in Ōishi Saigo
no Ichinichi (Ōishi’s Last Day).
Among the ‘Shinsaku’ (newly created works) there was an adaptation of a play, by Noda Hideki for Kabuki entitled, Noda Ban Sakura

no Mori no Mankai no Shita (Noda Edition: Under the Blossoming
Cherry Trees) in August, which featured, Nakamura Kankur ō,Nakamura Shichinosuke and Somegorō. Also, in October, there wasa work based on the Classical Indian Epic Poem entitled: Mahābārata
Senki (The Wars of Mahabharata) (written by Aoki Gō and directed by
Miyagi Satoshi) and performed by Kikunosuke. In addition, there
were a number of programs in which children of 4 and 5 years oldfrom the major houses of Kabuki made their debuts, and thesereceived big coverage in the media as well as large audience turnout.
The National Theatre held a program commemorating its 50th
anniversary which lasted until March. In January, an ensemble with
Kikugorō at its head performed for the first time in forty years, theplay, Shiranui Monogatari (The Tale of Shiranui), a work by Kawatake
Mokuami with Kikugorō directing and providing a new script. Hisson, Onoe Kikunosuke played the leading role of Princess Wakaba

047

and skillfully maneuvered between multiple male and female roles(four in all), executing quick costume changes and even flyingthrough-the air effects. In March, the work Igagoe Dōchū Sugoroku(The Vendetta at Iga), which had a triumphant tour in 2014 when it
was awarded the Yomiuri Theatre Grand Prize, was performed with
Kichiemon topping the bill in the role of Masaemon and delivering aspectacular performance. In June and July, there was a special
program aimed at novice spectators entitled, ‘Discover Kabuki’. In
October, the work Reigen Kameyama Hoko (Blood Revenge at
Kameyama) by Tsuruya Nanboku was performed by Nizaemon, whotook on two separate evil roles: one performed in historical jidai
mono style, one in domestic sewa mono style, along with Jakuemon,
Nakamura Matasaburō, Nakamura Kinnosuke and Kataoka Takatarōand others. In November there was a performance of a Kabuki play

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written in the 20th century by Yamamoto Yūzō entitled, Sakazaki
Dewa no Kami (Sakazaki, Lord of Dewa Castle), performed by Onoe
Shōroku, as well as a performance of Kutsukake Tokijirō (The Lonely
Yakuza) written by Hasegawa Shin and featuring Nakamura
Baigyoku, Nakamura Kaishun and others. In December Kichiemon
gave his first performance of a work made famous by his adopted
father Kichiemon 1st, Suda no Haru Geisha Katagi (Ume Yoshibei and
the Stolen Poem Card), written by Namiki Gohei.
At the Shinbashi Enbujō in January, a name-succession ceremony
for Ichikawa Udanji 3rd was held with performances by Ichikawa
Ebizō and others. In October and November, there was a repeat performance of the adaptation of the popular Manga, One Piece for‘Super Kabuki’. In January at the Asakusa Kabuki, Onoe Matsuya
took the stage leading a troupe of young actors in their 20s. In May,048

at the Meija-za, there was also a performance given by a troupe ofyounger actors in their 20s led by Kataoka Ainosuke. In June, theTheatre Cocoon held a program featuring Ebizō. In April, at the
Akasaka ACT Theatre, Kankurō, Shichinosuke, and others gave a
performance of a new work for Kabuki written and directed by Hōrai
Ryūta entitled, Yume Maboroshi ka Koi Zōshi (Reincarnation of the
Red Eye). Also in April at Makuhari Messe, Nakamura Shidō, continuing the tradition from last year, shared the stage with the popular
Vocaloid, Hatsune Miku in a ‘Chō Kabuki (Ultra Kabuki)’ performance of Kuruwa Kotoba Awasekagami (Words and Mirrors Come
Together in the Pleasure Quarters). In July at the Yoyogi National
Gymnasium, Somegorō together with Arakawa Shizuka from theworld of figure skating, joined efforts in a collaboration program
called, ‘HYŌEN 2017 Basara’. This series of new projects may beseen as experiments for the upcoming Olympics/Paralympics in 2020,

where the essence of Kabuki will be shown to foreigners.
In Osaka, at the Shōchiku-za, there was a name-succession ceremony for Nakamura Shikan 8th. In February and in May, there wasa program of ‘Hanagata’ Kabuki (featuring the younger actors), in
July, Nizaemon, and Somegorō also performed. In Nagoya, in July,
Kankurō and Shichinosuke performed in the Heisei Nakamura-za
Program, in November, a ‘Kaomise’ (all-star) program was held at the
Civic Centre (Shimin Kaikan). As Kyoto’s Minami-za is being renovated, the December program was held at the Rome Theatre and it wasalso a ‘Kaomise’ (all-star) program. From the summer to the autumn,
there were also the customary three troupes touring all of the publichalls giving performances, and they also performed quite a few showsin the smaller performance rooms that still remain in every region of
the country.
049

In this manner, Kabuki has seen a yearly increase in the numberof programs given as well as an increase in younger audience
members. At the same time, there have been more programs featuring the younger actors, who are themselves, from the same generation
as the young audience goers, and are now being appointed to take on
the larger roles. On the whole, the past year was one in which eachgeneration of actors, from the ‘top executives’ to the young stars were
all actively engaged in performing.
Especially active were the middle-aged generation with
Somegorō, Ainosuke, and Ennosuke, the generation in their 30s andbelow that, the younger generation with Onoe Matsuya, Nakamura
Baishi, Nakamura Kazutarō, Nakamura Kotarō and Onoe Ukon.
In March, as part the 45th anniversary of the restoration of diplomatic ties between Japan and China, , there was a program of Kabuki
held in Beijing with Nakamura Ganjirō, Shikan, Kazutarō and others
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KABUKI and BUNRAKU

in performances of Torii Mae (In Front of the Fushimi Inari Shrine),
Fūin Kiri (Breaking the Seals) and Fuji Musume (The Wisteria Maiden).

BunrakuIn Bunraku there was a program entitled ‘Program Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Opening of the National Theatre’
which went on until March. At the National Bunraku Theatre in
Osaka, there were five programs held in the course of the year. Part
one of the January program, consisted of the famous works: Kotobuki
Shiki Sanbasō (The Dance of Sanbasō), Ōshū Adachigahara (Adachi
Plain in Ōshū) and Honchō Nijū Shikō (Twenty-Four Filial Pieties). In
April there was a name-succession ceremony in which Toyotake
Hanabusadayū took the name Toyotake Rodayū 6th. The first part of050

the program consisted of Kotobuki Shiki Sanbasō, and the third andfourth sections of Sugawara Denju Tenarai Kagami (Sugawara’s Secretsof Calligraphy) in which, Roday ū chanted the fourth section –Terakoya (The Temple School). The second part consisted of Kusunoki
Mukashi-banashi (The Old Tale of Kusunoki) and Sonezaki Shinjū (The
Love Suicides at Sonezaki). In the ‘Discover Bunraku’ Workshop in
June, there was a performance of Ninin Kamuro (Two Apprentice
Geisha) followed by a lecture entitled ‘Bunraku for Beginners withyounger performers explaining and demonstrating the three elementsof Bunraku and their techniques: the Tay ū (narrative chanting),
Shamisen (a three-stringed musical instrument played with a plectrum) and the Ningyōtsukai (Puppeteering) and then going on to
perform the third and fourth sections of Kanadehon Chūshingura(Treasury of Loyal Retainers). In July, there was the three-part,‘Bunraku Special Performance’: the first part being called, ‘Family
Summer Holiday Show’, with performances of works that even

children could enjoy, such as Kintarō no Ōgumo Taiji (Subjugation of
the Ground Spider), which is based on the famous Japanese Fairy Tale
and Akai Jinbaori (The Scarlet Cloak) based on a Folk Tale and written
by Kinoshita Junji. The second part called, ‘Masterpiece Theatre’ wasa performance of Genpei Nunobiki no Taki, (Minamoto and TairaClans at Nunobiki Falls), and the third part, called ‘Summer LateShow’ was a performance of Natsumatsuri Naniwa Kagami(Summer Festival: a Mirror of Osaka). In the November program,part one was Hachijin Shugo no Honjō (Masakiyo’s Loyalty) andYarino Gonza Kasane Katabira (Gonza the Lancer), while part two
had Shinjū Yoigōshin (The Love Suicides of Hanbei and Ochiyo) andMomijigari (Maple Viewing Party). In addition there were two performances of ‘su-jōruri’, in which, chanting without puppets waspresented as well as a program called ’Demae Koen’ (Bunraku on
Demand) which could be held at schools or outside events. Audi-

051

ence numbers have been on the increase year after year, and in thepast year, not only the special name-succession events, but every
program outdid those of the previous year in attracting spectators.
The ‘Discover Bunraku’ program drew a particularly large crowd at
94.7% of the theatre’s capacity.
In Tokyo, there were four programs given at the National Small
Theatre. The special program in February was in three parts andentitled, ‘Chikamatsu’s Masterpiece Collection’ with performancesof three works of Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who flourished at the
beginning of the 18th century. The first part featured the period piece(historical play), Heike Nyogo ga Shima (Shunkan on Devil Island);part two featured a ‘sewamono’ (contemporary-setting play aboutcommon people) Sonezaki Shinjū (The Love Suicides at Sonezaki) andpart three also featured the ‘sewamono’, Meido no Hikyaku (Courier

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KABUKI and BUNRAKU

for Hell). In May, the program featured the name-succession ceremony of Rodayū, which was the same one that had been held at the
Osaka Bunraku Theatre. Part one had the same lineup of works; parttwo was a performance of Kagamiyama Kokyō no Nishikie (Picturesof our Home at Kagamiyama) in its entirety. In September, the firstpart was a complete performance of, Shō Utsushi Asagaobanashi (Taleof the Morning Glory); the second part was Tamamo no Mae Asahino Tamoto (Tamamo the Nine-Tailed Fox), also a complete performance. In December, there was a matinee for high school students
entitled, ‘Bunraku Performance for Beginners’ with Hidakagawa(Cherry Trees along the Hidaka River) followed by a lecture andthen, Ninokuchimura (Ninokuchi Village). In the same program in
the evening there were two workshops called, ‘Bunraku for Working
People’, also in August, there was a workshop for foreigners called,052‘The Charm of Bunraku’ with a lecture in English and a performanceof Ninokuchi Village. Each of these programs had significant audience
turnout. Programs for foreigners were also held in Kabuki and Nohlast year and from now, there will be more of this type of activity inanticipation of the 2020 Olympics/Paralympics, to prepare for theopportunity in a timely fashion.
Tokyo, including its surrounding areas, with its large population
generally enjoys packed houses for every program. This year was no
exception with every program playing to full capacity. In particular,
there was an increase in the number of elderly males attending theperformances. In October, the customary tour of the provinces was
carried out as always with performances of Katsuragawa Renri no
Shigarami (The Love Suicides of Ohan and Chōemon) and Sonezaki
Shinjū (The Love Suicides at Sonezaki).
The ‘Tayū’ (performer of the narrative chant), Toyotake Sakitayū,

in conjunction with Shamisen performer, Tsuruzawa Enza demonstrated some superb chanting in his performances of the Temma
House section of Sonezaki Shinjū as well as in the Shimada Yadowarai
section of Shō -Utsushi Asagao Banashi (Story of the Morning Glory).
Among the following generation, Takemoto Chitosedayū showed off
his skills in the Fūin Kiri (Breaking the Seal) section of Meido no
Hikyaku (Courier for Hell), as well as the Michiharu Yakata section of
Tamamo no Mae Asahi no Tamoto (Tamamo the Nine-Tailed Fox). On
the other hand, the middle-aged class, which includes Rodayū andTakemoto Mojihisadayū seemed to be in somewhat of a slump. The
generation below that one, including Toyotake Rosetay ū and Toyotake Sakihoday ū has been taking on more important chanting
opportunities drawing on their strong resonant voices. Among theyounger chanters, Toyotake Yoshihodayū and Toyotake Yasutayū are053

both gaining strength. Toyotake Matsukadayū retired in March.
The elder statesman of the Shamisen camp, Tsuruzawa Kanji, in
excellent health, played with a tone that was voluptuous in hue.
The ‘top star’ in essence, Tsuruzawa Seiji, had more opportunities to team up with chanter Rosetayū; and with Rosetayū’s chanting
taking the lead, some wonderful performances were created. Tsuruzawa Seisuke, Toyozawa Tomisuke and Nozawa Kinshi all haveacquired the skills to deal with whatever part they are playing, andhave displayed a diversity of technique. Among the younger performers, Takezawa Sōsuke, Tsuruzawa Tōzō and others have becomemuch more solid performers, and appear to have made their way up
to a new level
Among the puppeteers, the senior performer, 83 year old Yoshida
Minosuke is in good health but he has limited his stage appearances
to onnagata (female) roles where he displays an original beauty all

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KABUKI and BUNRAKU

his own. In the following generation, Yoshida Kazuo was chosen
the next National Living Treasure after Minosuke. The main
roles of each program were being assigned to Yoshida Tamao andKiritake Kanjūrō, with Tamao showing his skills in such roles as,
Tokubei from Sonezaki Shinjū, Chūbei from Meido no Hikyaku andMatsuomaru from Terakoya – a tachiyaku (male role) and Kanjūro
showing his worth in such roles as, Chiyo from Terakoya, onnagata(female) roles such as Ohatsu in Sonezaki Shinjū and even comic roles
such as Yūsen, the doctor, in Shō-Utsushi Asagao (Story of the Morning
Glory). In addition, he demonstrated a broad diversity of puppeteering
style in executing the quick changes required in his renditions of theseven characters that the Yōko (fox spirit) transforms into in Tamamo,
the Nine-Tailed Fox, differentiating clearly between them. Amongthe following, generation: Yoshida Tamaya gave a demonstration of054

his skills as Gonshirō from Hiragana Seisuiki (the Battles of Genjiand Heike), Usugumo no Ōji from Tamamo, the Nine-Tailed Fox, andothers making the leap to the taking on of larger supporting roles.
Toyomatsu Seijūrō gave us some neat playing in his performances ofthe onnagata roles of Asagao from Story of the Morning Glory andUmegawa from The Courier for Hell. Among the younger performers,
Yoshida Kōsuke, Yoshida Minojirō, Yoshida Ichisuke and Yoshida
Tamaka are all gaining strength and we can look forward to theirfurther development in the future.

Mizuochi, Kiyoshi
Born in 1936 in Osaka. Graduated from Waseda University Faculty of Literature,
specializing in Theatre. From 1970 he was in charge of the Theatre section for
the Arts and Cultural News department of the Mainichi Shimbun and served as
vice-chairman for that newspaper as well as having been a member of the
Editorial board and also a special committee member before his retirement.
Currently he is Affiliate Member of the Editorial Board. From the year 2000, he
was a professor at J. F. Oberlin University, retiring in 2007 as Professor Emeritus.
His writings include: Kamigata Kabuki (Kyoto-Osaka Style Kabuki), Bunraku, Heisei
Kabuki Haiyu-ron (Essays on Kabuki Actors Today) and others.
(Translation: James Ferner)

055

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MUSICALSMusicals

Outstanding Japanese Version ofBilly Elliot
Original Musicals Made With Hard Work
Hagio Hitomi

In 2017 many musicals were presented, and the Japanese musical scene
was full of variety. Nevertheless, aside from a few productions suchas Billy Elliot, not many of them were very striking. Musicals translated into Japanese were largely quite successful both in terms of artistic value and commercial results, but some of the adapted musicals
056

were disappointing. There were also a number of co-productions withforeign creative staff, which may have contributed to the recent development of original Japanese musicals.

Two Challenging Musical Productions
The most noteworthy musical in 2017 was no doubt Billy Elliot,
which received rave reviews when it premiered in London in 2005. It
opened on Broadway in the following year, and has been long-awaitedhere in Japan as well. However, because of licensing problems andabove all the difficulty of the casting, at one point, it seemed as
though it would never be presented in Japan. For one thing, there was
the hurdle of finding boys for the title role with unbroken voices, who
could not only sing and act, but could also dance at a high-level.
Nevertheless, the project was finally realised at long last.
It took careful preparation and time to present the Japaneseversion of Billy Elliot. Schedule-wise, auditions for child actors started
in November 2015, then the children took lessons, before it finally
opened in July 2017. It would never have been possible without theresilience of the production-side, as well as their love and commitment for the piece. As it is probably unlikely to recoup the costs, it
must indeed have been a big challenge.
The story is about a boy named Billy Elliot, who lives in an
English coal-mining town and aspires to become a ballet dancer, and
it is set during the Thatcher era. It is based on Stephen Daldry’s filmof the same title (the Japanese title is Little Dancer). For the musicaladaptation, the script and lyrics were written by Lee Hall, the music
was composed by Elton John, and Daldry himself directed it. The
Japanese version followed the original direction and choreography (byPeter Darling).
The Japanese company followed the original staging very well057

and gave a human touch to the characters. Above all, the five boys
who played the part of Billy (Kato Kōsei, Kimura Sakuya, Maeda
Haruto, Mirai Kazuki and Yamashiro Riki) were wonderful. Also,
the boys who played Billy’s friend Michael and the girls who played
the ballet girls sang, danced and acted with ease. I felt sure that thefoundation of the Japanese musical world had expanded.
While the original film focused on Billy growing up, more depth
was added to the drama in the musical version. Through the clear-cut
portrayal of the adults around Billy and the difficulty of the times, astark contrast was drawn between Billy’s steps towards the future,
driven by his will and the love of his family, and those who were left
behind by the economic changes.
Staging methods that are only possible in musicals were
extremely appealing. For instance, there was a scene in which theTheatre in Japan

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MUSICALS

increasing tension in the coal-mining town that was heading toward along strike was depicted alongside children taking a ballet lesson.
They were taking place at the same time in the same town. Moreover,there was a beautiful dreamlike scene, in which Billy, who is aspiring
to become a ballet dancer, danced a fantastical duet with Billy fromthe future. The most spectacular scene was the ‘Angry Dance’, inwhich Billy’s anger at not being able to attend a Royal Ballet audition
was overlapped with a clash between demonstrators and the police. It
was a powerful scene with a cross-over between Billy’s tap dance andthe collision between the police and demonstrators.
Another musical that seemed to be taking on a difficult challenge
was Parade. Premiered on Broadway in 1998, the story is about a realcase of false accusation which occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century in the American south (book by Alfred Uhry, music and058

lyrics by Jason Robert Brown). It seems to have taken a long time tobe presented in Japan due to essential elements of the drama which
are hard for the Japanese to understand, such as the complicated racial
segregation and the cultural and economic confrontation between thenorth and the south.
The falsely-accused Frank Leo, the central character (played by
Ishimaru Kanji), is a Jewish man born in the north, who has been sent
to the south, where the agricultural economy is declining. He is aso-to-speak ‘puppet’ for the industrial economy of the north. He was
the perfect human sacrifice. The prosecutor (played by Ishikawa
Zen), who used people’s frustration over racial discrimination andeconomic disparity to lay a false charge against Frank, was a symbolof populism. There were other characters such as the governor(played by Okamoto Kenichi), who wanted to hold on to his politicalcareer, a reporter (played by Takeda Shinji), who embodiedsensationalism, and a social activist (played by Niiro Shinya), whotook advantage of people’s anxieties. It was a gritty drama that also
reflected the dangerous world that we live in today.
It opened with a vivid scene with colourful confetti falling
almost excessively. The drama evolved smoothly through well-paced
staging (by Mori Shintaro) using a revolving stage, but it seemed tobe lacking something. Nevertheless, on the whole, the musical was
not bad and the fact that this controversial musical was presented inJapan was gratifying.

The Contrasting Results of Translation and Adaptation
Other translated Broadway musicals that premiered in 2017
included Big Fish, Legally Blonde, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love andMurder, Beautiful: The Carol King Musical, Young Frankenstein and
059

The Pajama Game.
Big Fish (book by John August, music and lyrics by Andrew
Lippa) is a musical adaptation of the Tim Burton film based on thenovel of the same title. It is an out-of-the-world fantasy celebrating
life, evolving around the bond between a big-mouthed father (playedby Kabira Jay) and his son (Urai Kenji). The cast were well suited forthe parts and the direction (by Shirai Akira) was steady, so it becamea warm musical.
Legally Blonde is also a musical adaptation based on a successful
movie. The cute charm of Kanda Sayaka in the lead role was appealing. A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder is based on a novel that
was also turned into a film which won a Tony Award. It was fun towatch the comical performance of Ichimura Masachika, who playedeight different characters including men and woman of all ages.
Beautiful is Carol King’s critical biography pieced together with

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MUSICALS

her songs. It is one of the so-called catalogue musicals that haverecently become popular, but it did not have any significant hook andthe script was quite flat. However, Mizuki Nana and Hirahara Ayaka(double cast) playing the leading character sang well and made thenumbers appealing, and also added different colours to the characterwith their individual qualities, creating an entertaining musical.
The Pajama Game premiered on Broadway in 1954 (revived in2006) and is known as the first musical Bob Fossey choreographed.
This was its Japanese premiere. The classic love comedy set against
the backdrop of a wage increase dispute at a pajama factory was
directed by Tom Sutherland, who revealed new dimensions when hedirected Grand Hotel and Titanic. Unfortunately, he did not take avivid approach in this musical.
Young Frankenstein is based on Mel Brooks’ film with the same
060

title (1974) which Brooks himself adapted into a musical (2007). The
Japanese version was directed and written by Fukuda Yū ichi, a
popular director known for successfully writing the script for anddirecting the Japanese version of Monty Python’s Spamalot. It was apity that they were apparently trying to get laughs from the audience,
especially because Oguri Shun, playing the leading character, put on a
sharp performance.
There were also some successful foreign musicals that werealtered and adapted. Amongst them was an adaptation of hit Korean
musical Frankenstein (written and directed by Wang Yong Beom,music by Lee Sung Joon) that was premiered in Japan (embellishedand directed by Itagaki Kyōichi). Stories conveyed through powerfulsong numbers is the trend and appeal of Korean musicals. On theother hand, logical consistency tends to be neglected, which is why
Japanese audiences may not be completely satisfied. If that is the case,

I think this musical should have filled these gaps more daringly.
Though I am aware that the original creator’s intentions cannot beeasily changed, the inconsistent parts could have been fixed and depictions that were too extravagant for the Japanese audience (as somescenes felt like that to me) could have been cut. With just a few
changes, it could have turned into a much more appealing musical.
The cast had many good singers such as Nakagawa Akira and
Hamada Megumi.
A very disappointing adaptation of a musical was Comedy
Tonight! A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (Edo
Version) (directed and script adaptation by Amon Miyamoto). It was
based on the wonderful premise of transferring the setting of Stephen
Sondheim’s great musical full of famous numbers to the Edo period
in Japan. But as it turned out, for some reason, it was without atmosphere. It was all the more a pity because as the lead Kataoka Ainosuke

061

sang and danced well.

Original Musicals Made with Hard WorkIt seems that original musicals are becoming richer every year.
Among them, My Name is Shingo (Watashi wa Shingo) was a freshmusical. It was based on Umezu Kazuo’s comic from the 1980s andwas directed and choreographed by Philippe Decouflé. A boy and agirl in elementary school decide to get married and from that moment
they have a reckless adventure, with an industrial robot they havebeen playing with developing a consciousness and thinking it is theirchild. The long and complicated original work starts from there, but
the storyline of the musical was trimmed to a simple drama about
love, and the script (Tani Kenichi) was well written. Dance, acrobatics, projection, scenic art and music were integrated, creating a

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MUSICALS

magical production. The cast consisting of Takahata Mitsuki,
Kadowaki Mugi and Songha were also appealing.
After a series of workshops, Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre put on
Ikebukuro West Gate Park Song & Dance (directed and designed by
Sugihara Kunio), which was a stylish production leaving room forrefinement. Shiba Yukio wrote the script based on the original novel
by Ishida Ira, which has also been adapted into a hit TV drama series.
It is a universal ensemble play about the young members of a street
gang portrayed through the eyes of a man who used to be its leader,looking back on the gang wars twenty years later. The powerful
dance numbers (choreographed by Kitao Wataru) worked well withthe piece.
The Great Gatsby is a musical adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
novel which has been made into a movie several times. The hit
062musical was originally made for the Takarazuka Revue was reworked
to star Inoue Yoshio, and was directed and written by Koike
Shūichiro as with the Takarazuka version. The music was written by
the up-and-coming composer Richard Oberacker, who made his
Broadway debut in 2017. It was a pity that the melodies were beautiful but not very catchy.
Speaking of original Japanese musicals, one has to mention
Takarazuka. After all, the company produces new musicals almost
every month. Young creators, who developed their skills at Takazuka,
are emerging. Takarazuka Revue thrived commercially in 2017 andproduced a number of good productions. Hana Gumi (Flower
Troupe)’s Golden Desert (Konjiki no Sabaku) and Sora Gumi (Cosmos
Troupe)’s The Land of the Gods – The Twilight of the Romanovs(Kamigami no tochi – Romanofutachi no Tasogare) (both written anddirected by Ueda Kumiko) were spectacular dramas dealing with

novel subject matters. Tsuki Gumi (Moon Troupe)’s All for One –d’Artagnan and the Sun King (All for One – Darutanian to Taiyōou)(written and directed by Koike Shūichiro) was a typical Takarazuka
love comedy. Hoshi Gumi (Star Troupe)’s Berlin, My Love (Berlin,
Waga Ai) (written and directed by Harada Ryō) was a love story
closely based on theory.
Shiki Theater Company, which plays a central role in theJapanese musical scene, did not premiere any new musicals in 2017.
The number of Shiki’s productions in Tokyo decreased because its
permanent theatres, namely Haru (Spring) Theatre and Aki (Autumn)
Theater, closed down for redevelopment. However, the company isstill energetically putting on long-running shows elsewhere andtouring all over Japan as ever. Lion King transferred from Haru
Theater to Natsu (Summer) Theater and entered its twentieth year in
063

Japan at the end of 2017.
As described above, the world of musicals in Japan thrived in2017 both in terms of the number and variety of productions.
Hagio, Hitomi
Film and theatre critic. Hagio started her career as a newspaper journalist andwrites reviews for Tokyo Shimbun as well as a column series and articles formusical magazines. She has written books such as Musical ni Tsurete itte (literal
title: ‘Take me to the musicals’), Les Misérable no Hyakunin (literal title: ‘A Hundred
People of Les Misérable’) and others. She has also edited and written Broadway
Musical, Tony shō no Subete (literal title: ‘All about Broadway Musicals and the Tony
Awards’), Hajimete no Musical Eiga: Hagio Hitomi no Besto Selekushon 50 (literal
title: ‘Your First Musical Film: Top 50 Selected by Hagio Hitomi’) and others.
(Translation: Sumida Michiyo)

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Contemporary Theatre

Theatre that Scrutinizes
Where We Are Today
Yamaguchi Hiroko
In 2017, the Abe Shinzō government forcibly passed the Conspiracy
Law, in spite of strong opposition that protested its erosion of
freedom of speech. The prime minister and his wife, Akie, also cameunder suspicion over whether or not they had used their influence toacquire favours for others through “conjecture” (sontaku), but straightanswers were not forthcoming. On the other hand, the private actionsof the former public servant, whose testimony added much to those064

suspicions, was splashed across the newspapers like a scandal. Against
a backdrop of the prime minister pushing ahead with his pledge tochange the Constitution, how did theatre respond to these times?

Strong Urge of Artists to Reflect Social Changes
Nervous about news shows, the Abe government revealed an
extraordinary attitude when it requested that television broadcasters
provide “fair coverage.” How should TV channels, which are dependent on the government for their broadcasting licenses, respond?
One play based on this was The Air (Za kūki), written and directed by Nagai Ai, and set at a TV channel. Sensing the mood of thegovernment, the top ranks of the channel disapprove of a news special
set to go out that night about the crisis of freedom of speech. Should
they reject the interference, or should they compromise? As the time
for broadcast draws near, the staff behind the programme are caught

in a state of uncertainty. And what exerts power here is not the
instructions that accompany responsibilities or overt pressure, but the“air” (kūki, meaning the climate or unspoken mood) within the
broadcaster and society at large. Nagai portrayed the people entangled
by this “air” acerbically and humorously. That sharp look was directed at both the writer and the audience. And it asked a question: Whatkind of society lies ahead after “reading the air” and imposing
self-censorship on itself? The play was performed between January
and March. Just a few months later, the suspicions over the prime
minister and his wife came to light. At the end of the year, sontaku
was chosen as one of the buzzwords of the year.
A similar awareness of this issue also appeared in the work ofyounger theatre artists. Ishihara Nen wrote Hiding the White Flower(Shiroi hana o kakusu), directed by Ogasawara Kyō and dealing withthe changes the public broadcaster NHK made to a TV show about065

the comfort women. Narahara Taku wrote and directed the comedy
It’s a Conspiracy! (Kyōbō desu yo!), in which a cooking club finds itself
suddenly mistaken for a terrorist group. These plays shared a stance
whereby they thought about the themes as personal problems fromthe starting point of individual lifestyle, rather than placing the artist
on a pedestal and making grand statements to the audience.
Marking 75 years since it was first established, Bunka-za
premiered Life is Precious (Nuchi du takara). Written by Sugiura
Hisayuki and directed by Uyama Hitoshi, the play depicted thesteadfast nonviolent resistance of people in postwar Okinawa, when
their farmland was taken from them and their lives threatened while
the United States military controlled the prefecture. As we stand 45
years after the restoration of Okinawan sovereignty to mainland
Japan, which the characters in the play yearn so strongly for, US

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military bases remain concentrated in Okinawa, leading to continual
accidents and crimes. This pain is rooted in the relationship between
the United States and Japan. The compelling play powerfully zoomed
in on the pride and faith of the Okinawans, taking aim at mainland
Japan in 2017.
In the wake of various high-profile accusations of sexual harassment in Hollywood, the prominent #MeToo movement encouraged
women to break the silence over their treatment by men. “Feminism”
was selected by an American dictionary as the word of the year for2017. In the midst of this tide attempting to fight back against subjugation, the year witnessed a coincidentally yet perfectly timed revival of
Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9, directed by Kino Hana. First staged in the
UK in 1978 and some 30 years since Kino first directed it, the feminist
play still felt astonishingly fresh. Though a technically adroit play
066

that mixes up chronology and the genders of the performers and characters, it also powerfully affected the viewer with its portrayal of the
difficulties of obtaining a satisfactory way of living and position
within society, or finding the love and sexuality that is true to oneself,
as well as its depiction of the poignancy of the desire to overcome
conventions.
Written and directed by Shimori Roba, The Diary of a Good Girl
(Anne no hi) livelily portrayed the struggles of women striving todevelop sanitary products that are good for both the body and nature. It
was a touching play that discussed mind and body, society, corporations, and the dignity of the individual from a thoroughly female pointof view, including those whose physical and mental genders differed.

Six Years on from the Great East Japan Earthquake
It is now six years since the Great East Japan Earthquake. It issaid that reconstruction has progressed in the areas hardest hit by thedisaster, but many people are still unable to return to their previous
lives. In particular, the nuclear power plant accident made the area
uninhabitable for the local people. Though the evacuation order has
been lifted for some places, people are torn over whether or not toreturn to their hometowns. We watched this current reality ofFukushima in two new plays written and directed by Iwamatsu Ryō.
Staged with young actors, The Young Girl Miu (Shōjo miu) focusedon the eponymous Miu, who is the daughter of an employee who
causes a nuclear accident, intersecting a mysterious family tragedy
with a TV show about her. The other play was The Mass of Pale Pink
(Usui momoiro no katamari) for Saitama Gold Theater and Saitama
Next Theatre. Complexly interweaving several stories, including
those of people involved with reconstructing a railroad line in orderto help evacuees return home, of lovers separated by the disaster, and067

of newly blossomed romance, it conjured up a mystical world throughwhich powerfully flowed the life force of mankind and nature.
Written and directed by Okada Toshiki, Time’s Journey Througha Room (Heya ni nagareru jikan no tabi) was staged in Tokyo after
already premiering in Kyoto in 2016 and touring to 16 cities worldwide. It layered the temporalities of three people (a young wife whodied soon after the disaster while hoping a new world would come,her husband who survived, and his new lover), quietly examining how
far we have been separated since that fateful day in 2011.
The theatre department of Futaba Future School, which was
opened in Fukushima Prefecture as a symbol of reconstruction,
staged the play Number Line (Sūchokusen) in Tokyo, portraying andperformed by students who had directly experienced the earthquake
and nuclear disaster. The time spent by the students, who were still in

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elementary school when the disaster took place, made us think ofthese six years with a greater gravity and acuteness than what adults
had felt.
Kawamura Takeshi wrote and directed Ephemeral Elements(Efemeraru erementsu), in which a robot with advanced artificial
intelligence works to decommission a nuclear reactor. Seemingly
developed from his android-themed 1983 play Japan Wars (Nipponuōzu), what was originally science fiction now seems strangely real.
The questions it asks about what makes someone human have taken
on an even greater urgency.

Handing Over the Generational Baton and Renewing
The theatre company Bungakuza commemorated 80 years since
it was established and the energetic activities of veterans stood out
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through such plays as the premiere Hooray for Gluttons! Masaoka
Shiki’s Youthful Rhapsody (Kuishinbō banzai! Masaoka shiki seishunkyōshikyoku), written by Setoguchi Kaoru and directed by Nishikawa
Nobuhiro, and the first revival in 23 years of Nose (Hana), written by
Betsuyaku Minoru and directed by Uyama Hitoshi. On the other
hand, the company’s Atelier no Kai studio saw the debut of two
young directors, Tokoro Kanade and Ikuta Miyuki. With his productions of Nakahashi House (Nakahashi kōkan) by Mafune Yutaka andRisk-Takers (Okashita mono) by Miyoshi Jūrō, the up-and-coming director Kamiura Satoshi carefully rediscovered plays that examined theJapanese immediately after the war and used them to raise issues
about contemporary society. It was a commemorative year thatshowed the overall strength and vigour of the company.
Gekidan Mingei’s production of “Work Club” Actresses (“Shigoto
kurabu” no joyūtachi), directed by Tanno Ikumi, used a script by theyoung playwright Osada Ikue (adapting the novel by Aoki Shoko) andstarred everyone from the company’s director Naraoka Tomoko to its
younger performers. Here was another production that brought
different generations together.
Marking 20 years since it opened, Setagaya Public Theatre’s
artistic director Nomura Mansai announced that he would direct andstar in an “upgrade” of a masterpiece by Kinoshita Junji, Requiem on
the Great Meridian (Shigosen no matsuri). Featuring a cast of actors
from such differing backgrounds as Noh, Kabuki, and Shingeki, eachbringing their own qualities, its harmonious, polyphonic structure
inherited from the past while employing clever conceits that visually
showed the Genpei War (1180—1185) and the impermanence of ourworld, resulting in a highly accomplished performance. Setagaya
Public Theatre also staged other ambitious productions, such as
069

Tschick, directed by Oyama Yū na and adapted from a German
children’s story, and a South Korean and Japanese co-production of
Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, directed by Yang Jung-ung.
The New National Theatre, Tokyo marked its 20th year with aseries of plays by Mishima Yukio, Abe Kōbō, and Tanaka Chikao
directed by young up-and-coming directors—Tani Kenichi, Kamimura
Satoshi, and Ogawa Eriko—and a staging of a new translation by
Mizutani Hachiya of a foreign masterpiece, John Osborne’s Look
Back in Anger, directed by Chiba Tetsuya.
Having lost in Ninagawa Yukio such a central figure in its activities, the Saitama Arts Theater started the process of handing things
over to the next generation, including the aforementioned IwamatsuRyō production with Saitama Gold Theater. Yoshida Kōtarō, inwhom Ninagawa placed much trust, took over as artistic director of
the theatre’s project to stage all of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, and directed

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and starred in his contribution to the series, Timon of Athens.
At Kanagawa Arts Theatre, artistic director Shirai Akira’s work
began in earnest. With the productions that he directed himself ofFrank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening and Orlando, based on the
Virginia Woolf novel, as well as Nagatsuka Keishi’s staging of Six
Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello, the programming aspired toward new possibilities for a theatre and really started
to build momentum.
The artistic director of Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, Noda
Hideki, wrote and directed Princess Footprint: Time Mistaken WinterGhost (Ashiatohime — Toki ayamatte fuyu no yūrei), which was a
tribute to the late Nakamura Kanzaburō XVIII and also examined
the origins of Kabuki. It paid homage to an actor whose ideas connected the past and the future, his spirit and craft housed in a body that070

is fated one day to disappear. Step Outside! (Omote ni deroi!), which
Noda originally performed with Nakamura Kanzaburō, now transformed into the English-language One Green Bottle, written and directed by Noda from an English adaptation by Will Sharpe. It eerily
showed how intolerance within a family spreads.
Neighbors (Fushin — Kanojo ga uso o tsuku riyu), written anddirected by Mitani Kōki, seemed to inherit something from the workof Betsuyaku Minoru. The two married couples in the play are notgiven names, adding to the inscrutable human enigmas that unfold inthis story composed in the mystery tale style that is Mitani’s forte. It
both showed the influence on the next generation of the Theatre of
the Absurd that Betsuyaku established in Japan as well as formed akind of successor to it. While there was a cynical or even cold feel tothis play, Mitani also wrote and directed Children’s Affairs (Kodomono jijō), which was set in an elementary school fourth-grade classroomand in which the joys and sorrows of the world of children were performed by adult actors, resulting in moments of touching comedy
and poignancy.
Keralino Sandorovich similarly paid homage to Betsuyaku with
Please Wait A Moment (Chotto, matte kudasai), which he wrote anddirected. It was a comedy depicting the strange intermingling of two
families, but the clearly Betsuyaku-esque quality of the play meantthat the humour and social criticism felt stronger than in Keralino
Sandorovich’s other work.
The company Komatsu-za, which stages the plays of Inoue
Hisashi, particularly shined with Kuriyama Tamiya’s productions of
Who Am I? (Watashi wa dare deshō) and Glittering Constellation(Kirameku seiza).
071

Portraying the Diversity of the World
Shizuoka Performing Arts Center general artistic director
Miyagi Satoshi’s staging of the Greek tragedy Antigone was invited toopen the Festival d’Avignon in France. In these times today, whenpartitioning the world simplistically into either friend or foe is dominating the discourse, Miyagi’s approach of mourning the dead as
Buddha showed us a way to heal our divisions.
The much-discussed director Mori Shintarō achieved successes
with Ghost Story: The Peony Lantern (Kaidan: Botan dōrō), from ascript by Fujino Satsuko, and Enigma Variations by Éric-EmmanuelSchmitt, while Ogawa Eriko demonstrated her abilities with her production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh.
The revivals of Enemy of Heaven (Ten no teki) and Before We
Vanish (Sanpo suru shinryakusha), in which Maekawa Tomohiro
returned to earlier plays he had written and directed, were highly

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acclaimed. Akihori Masaaki revealed a cross section of contemporary
Japan in World (Sekai), which he wrote and directed, reflecting thedepressing everyday lives of sullen men.
The popular company Gekidan Shinkansen enjoyed a long runof over a year, changing casts every few months, with one of its major
plays, Seven Souls in the Skull Castle (Dokurojō no shichinin), written
by Nakashima Kazuki and directed by Inoue Hidenori, and staged at
IHI Stage Around Tokyo, a new theatre in Toyosu featuring approximately 1,300 seats on a circular platform that can rotate 360 degrees.
Enhanced by its ample use of video, the fast-paced action and largescale entertainment spectacle unfolded on a stage that completely surrounded the audience seating in a doughnut shape.
Yamaguchi, Hiroko
072

Reporter for the Asahi Shimbun. Born in 1960, she graduated from the
Department of Science at Ochanomizu University. In 1983, she joined the Asahi
Shimbun newspaper, working at its Tokyo and west Japan (Fukuoka) branches,and Osaka head office. She worked mainly as a reviewer and reporter on culturalnews, in particular for theatre. She has served on the paper’s editorial board andas an editorialist. She co-wrote Ninagawa Yukio’s Work (Shinchōsha).
(Translation: William Andrews)

Children’s and Youth Theatre and Puppet Theatre

Working Together to Prepare for
the Tokyo Olympics
Yokomizo Yukiko
Bullying and violence at schools and child suicide are occurring on adaily basis. Lack of ease in society at large is depriving children of
dreams and time to play. It is therefore necessary to have anotherlook at why theatre education should be prioritized over moral education. Theatre education consists of two pillars, namely ‘expression’and ‘appreciation’. Theatre games, in particular, stimulates children’s
imaginations and helps to develop their expressiveness. To watch073

high-quality stage art gives children emotional richness as it provides
opportunities to expand images with no end.

Moving Forward Through the Basic Act for Culture and the Arts
There are an increasing number of schools that are trying toenhance the scholastic standards of children for the sake of achievement tests, and therefore time allocated to appreciate theatre throughclasses and events tends to be reduced. Under such a situation, there
was a ground-breaking incident which became a ‘tail wind’ for theworld of theatre for children and the youth, which was the revision of
the Basic Act for Culture and the Arts for the first time in sixteen
years that took place in June. The word ‘promotion’ has been taken
away from the name of the Basic Act for Culture and the Arts and in
the second paragraph of Article 8 of its guiding principle, it is stipulated as follows: ‘Measures must be taken to enable mutual

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cooperation among schools, organizations engaged in cultural andartistic activities, families and regional communities to support theimportance of cultural and artistic education for infants, pupils andstudents.’ As a result, the Agency for Cultural Affairs is planning toincrease the frequency of art appreciation, which used to be twice, tothree times during the years of compulsory education. As infants
have been added to the clause, if the coverage of financial aid isexpanded to ‘baby drama’ (the name given to performing arts for
infants, which is also called ‘baby theatre’), it will help to invigorate
theatre for children and young people.
At the ninetieth world conference of ASSITEJ (International
Association of Theatre for Children and Young People), it was decided
that the 20th world conference of ASSITEJ will be held in Japan in
2020. It was the most remarkable accomplishment in the history of074

theatre for children and young people in Japan. The Asia TYA
Festival in Japan will be held in February 2018 at the National Olympics Memorial Youth Centre as its pre-event.
The ‘Regional Tour of Theatre for Children and Youth (Jidō
Seishōnen Engeki Chihō Junkai Kōen)’ that is subsidized by the Japan
Arts Council marked its fifty-eighth year. It is based on steady efforts
and activities made by the Japan Association of Theatre for Children
and Young People (Nihon Jidō Seishōnen Engeki Kyōkai) that provides
opportunities to children living in underpopulated areas to watch live
performances. During the first school term, eight troupes performed
throughout Japan plays for children and puppet plays, which included
Gekidan Geiyū-za’s Ikkyū-san and Puppet Theatre Puk’s Tiny Pink
Dragon (Pinku no Doragon); during the second school term, twelve
troupes performed nationwide, presenting plays such as Theatre
Company Poplar’s Wizard of Oz (Ozu no Mahōtsukai) and Operetta

Theatre Tomoshibi’s The Grateful Tiger (Tora no Ongaeshi). As forthe project called ‘Touring to Regional Areas, Remote Islands andSecluded Areas’ commissioned by the Agency for Cultural Affairs,
thirteen troupes toured around Japan, such as Puppet Theatre
Company Hitomi-za’s Beauty and the Beast (Bijo to Yajū), andGekidan Urinko Theatre Company’s The Dawning of Rakugo (Yoake
no Rakugo).
Under Shiki Theatre Company’s project ‘Theatre of the Heart(Kokoro no gekijō)’ sponsored by private corporations, four familymusicals, namely The Prince and the Pauper (Ōji to Kojiki), Elcos’s
Prayer (Elcos no Inori), Gamba’s Great Adventure (Gamba no Daibōken),Children of the Storm (Arashi no Naka no Kodomotachi) toured around
Japan from the northernmost Hokkaido to the southernmost
Okinawa, visiting 171 cities around Japan, performing 438 times and
075

560,000 children seeing the shows. The company also held lessons
called ‘How to Speak Beautiful Japanese (Utsukushī Nihongo no
Hanashikata Kyōshitsu)’ at 715 schools.

Increasing Number of Festivals During the Summer Holidays
During the summer holidays, festivals are held in various parts ofJapan. Ricca Ricca *Festa International Theatre Festival OKINAWA
for Young Audiences is a large-scale event and in 2017 it was held from
July 24-30 (at Gino-za in Naha) with the participation of twenty-fivetroupes from nine countries.
Baby theatre, which is plays for infants, drew particular attention.
Dansema Dance Theatre from Lithuania presented Colourful Puzzle,
and actors inside tube and square-shaped objects created various
shapes, such as carrots, tomatoes and mushrooms, which stirred andexpanded children’s imaginations. Finland’s Baby Sauna (Loiske

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Ensemble) used sounds of steam, crackling fire and other sounds as an
attempt to attract children to the world of rhythm and colours. Afterwatching AGAIN by the Danish company called Aaben Dans, a lectureon ‘Baby Theatres of the World’ was held. Baby theatre is drawing
more attention in Japan as well.
‘Forum for Children to Encounter Stage Arts (Kodomo to Butai
Geijutsu Deai no Fō ramu)’ (July 28 − August 2 at the National
Olympics Memorial Youth Centre) marked its seventeenth year.
Thirty-eight productions were presented, which included Tokyo
Engeki Ensemble’s A Pirate that Disappeared (Kieta Kaizoku),
Hipopotaamu’s The Hedgehog and Snow Flower (Harinezumi to yuki
no hana), drawing a total audience of six thousand. Besides workshops on kyōgen, playing with shadows and hip hop, there was alecture on baby theatre under the title ‘Until Now, Now and From076

Now On (Koremade, Ima, Korekara)’.
Twenty groups took part in the forty-fifth ‘The Summer Vacation
Children and Youth Theatre Festival’ (July 22-30 at Space Zero, Puk
Puppet Theatre). Both puppet theatre companies and modern drama
troupes are making efforts to deliver good productions such as
Gekidan Nakama that presented The Day All the Little Letter ‘Tsu’s
Disappeared (Chīsai ‘Tsu’ ga Kieta Hi) and Puppet Theatre Poporo that
presented Rudolf and Ippai Attena (Rudorufu to Ippaiattena).
At the eighteenth ‘21st Century Theatre from Kitakata’ (heldAugust 4 - 7 at Kitakata Plaza and other venues), seventy-six troupes
took part and presented eighty-seven productions.
‘Nissay Theatre Family Festival’ was held during the weekendsof July and August, aimed to show first-rate art although the admission fees were expensive. The classic concert Alice’s Music Journeywith Beethoven (Beethoven to Iku Arisu no ongaku Ryokō) was a bold

attempt to tell music history through a play with music with a fullorchestra playing Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. Puppet theatre
Hitomi-za’s Summer Festival at Moomin Valley (Mūmin-dani no
Natsumatsuri), Comic Chat for Parents and Children at Nissay (Nissay
Oyako Yose) by Yanagiya Karoku and others and Tokyo City Ballet’s
Coppélia were presented as well.
Three productions were presented at ‘TACT/FESTIVAL (International Theatre Festival for Young People)’ (May 4-7 at Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre). Moon and Sun – Eclipse was a shadow play andmasked dance from Bali. Japanese actors joined Canadian theatre
troupe Corpus’s A Bigger Flock of Sheep (Les Moutons), which has
already been invited many times, and this year the number of sheep
increased. Cicro Aero, a Finnish circus company that visited Japanfor the first time, presented The Pianist and got lots of laughs. A
pianist dressed in a tuxedo performed acrobatic stunts such as rolling077

on the floor in front of a piano and jumping on to a chandelier. There
were other summer festivals held by public theatres such as Setagaya
Public Theatre and Za-Kōenji Public Theatre based on unique ideas.
I will name 2017’s top three productions for children and theyouth.
Company ma presented With Two Wings (Futatsu no Tsubasa)(written by Anne Negri, directed, translated and designed by Ōtani
Kenjirō). It was about how physically-challenged parents faced theirhealthy children. The theme has not been dealt with in the world of
juvenile theatre and it was depicted as a story about a family of birds.
It was written by an emerging playwright, who teaches theatre at a
public elementary school in the U.S.
Kawasaki Art Centre planned and produced Cat Runs (NekoHashiru) (written by Kudō Naoko, script written and directed by
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Fujita Asaya, music by Nishimura Katsuyuki, choreographed by
Sakai Mayako). It was made into an excellent musical production
with a cast comprised of actors and opera singers who graduated fromShowa University of Music.
Puppet Theatre Musubi-za presented Arabian Nights – The Magic
Lamp and the Light of Tomorrow (Arabian Naito – Mahō no Rampu to
Asu no Hikari) (script by Yoshida Atsushi, directed by Ōno Masao).
Three people manipulated the puppets by incorporating traditional
bunraku-style puppetry to express the delicate movements of thepuppets and the actors used colourful cloths and large flags in their performance. The meaning of true happiness was asked through the play.

Creative Ideas of Puppet Theatre Companies
Puppet theatre companies from all around Japan gathered at ‘Iida
078

Puppet Theatre Festa (Iida Ningyōgeki Festa)’ (August 1 - 6). The
lineup ranged from a traditional puppet company called Edo
Marionette Yūkiza to contemporary puppet theatre troupes, with 268
companies presenting 489 performances. Kawano Kuruma Ningyō
Preservation Society (Kawano Kuruma Ningyō Hozonkai), succeeding‘Kuruma Ningyō’ style of puppetry passed down in Tokyo’s Okutama
region, presented Higashiyama Asakura Narratives – The Section ofJinbei’s Ferry (Higashiyama Asakura Sōshi – Jjinbei Watashiba no Dan)
with unique puppetry using a three-wheeled box car called ‘Rokuro
Guruma’. This year, Shōnanza from Hiratsuka City in Kanagawa
Prefecture took part for the first time. The company, which succeeds
the ‘Otome Bunraku’ puppeteering technique of one puppeteer
manipulating the puppets that has been handed down from the
Taishō Era, presented Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees –Scene of the Journey of Shizuka Gozen (Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura

– Michiyuki Hatsune no Tabi). It was also unusual that thirteen companies representing the three major puppet festivals held in Kanagawa Prefecture (Kanagawa Puppet Theatre Festival, Märchen Puppet Festival
and Kawasakai Puppet Theatre Festival) performed one after another.
Eight foreign companies took part in the festival. Sawa
Noriyuki, who is a puppet artist based in the Czech Republic, completed his giant puppet show Salamander (Sanshō-uo) with the citizensof Iida-Shimoina area (presented at the Auditorium of Iida Cultural
Centre), which took him two years. The aim of the project was tocreate an international show originating from Iida City. Seven companies took part in My First Puppet Show (Hajimete Deau Ningyōgeki)
for zero-year to two-year old infants. Each company came up withcreative ideas.
Puppet Theatre Puk, which marked its 88th anniversary, presented thirteen plays at its home theatre Puk Puppet Theatre and079

toured seven shows. Tales of Peony Lantern (Kaidan Botan Dōrō) for
adults was revived at Kinokuniya Hall in Tokyo. Moreover, it premiered Where’s the Fish? (Kingyo ga Nigeta) (originally written by
Gomi Taro, dramatized by Shibasaki Yoshihiko and directed by
Hayakawa Yuriko) catered to zero-year to two-year old infants. It was
visually easy to understand, with goldfish moving around the stage andplaying hide-and-seek, and it was expressed through onomatopoeia andpantomime. The Boy Who Was Always Late (Itsumo Chikoku no
Otokonoko) (originally written by John Burningham, adapted by Ikuta
Mariko and directed by Nishimoto Katsuyoshi) stirred the imagination by making a manhole cover turn into an alligator and grass look
like lions, and it also had a unique rhythm. One may also say that it
was a piece that indicated the future direction for puppet theatre
Puppet Theatre Puk invited Stuffed Puppet Theatre from Holland

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to present Mathilde, which made a deep impression. It is a tragicomedy
about the 102-year old Mathilde who lives in a nursing home. The
technique of Neville Tranter manipulating life-sized puppets was fascinating and we could relate to the poignant satire. The three best productions that Puppet Theatre Puk worked on were Mathilde, Tales ofPeony Lantern and The Boy Who Was Always Late.
Puppet Theatre Hitomi-za took on the challenge of mounting
Inoue Hisashi’s play, namely Dog’s Revenge (Inu no Adauchi) (March
23 – 26 at Haiyūza Theatre). It was the first time in many years for
Hitomi-za to put on one of Inoue’s plays. In the past, the company haspresented two of his plays, which were The Floating Gourd Island(Hyokkori Hyōtanjima) (premiered in 1967) and The Life of Don
Matsugorō (Don Matsugorō) (premiered in 1977). When the forty-seven080

rōnin (Akō Rōshi) attacks, Kira Kōzukenosuke escapes from his bed
and hides himself in a coal hut with a white dog that he has been given
in trust from the Shogun general. It is an epic puppet drama depicting
Treasury of Loyal Retainers (Chūshingura) from Kōzukenosuke’s pointof view.
Edo Marionette Theatre Yūkiza revived Dollstown written anddirected by Chon Uishin for the first time in ten years (January 15 - 55
at The Suzunari). Marionettes played people living in a town during
the wartime, and the people remembering the days of the war in the
postwar period were performed by actors, creating a double structure.
Chua Chui Dong Lai — As the Sparrows Wended in a Windless Winter(Chua Chui Dong Lai— Suzume Sarite Fuyu Kitaru) (script by Zhao
Binghao, composition and direction by Wang Chong, puppets designed
by Kushida Kazuyoshi) is set in a nursing home in a certain town in
Asia and the sadness of the elderly people, who were lonely and scaredof death, were portrayed through close-up images of marionettes

(November 30 - December 3 at Za-Kōenji Public Theatre 2).
Taira Jō, who is a puppet show actor with a unique performancestyle combining monodrama and puppeteering, presented a trilogy
about ‘women’ (The Story of Medea (Ōjo Media no Monogatari), The
Ballad of Orin (Hanare Goze Orin) and La Marie-Vision (Kegawa no
Marie)), alternating the programme every day (September 30 – October
2 at The Pit, New National Theatre Tokyo).
The World of Kawamoto Kihachiro—Puppet Theatre, Noh, Puppet
Animation (December 16 , Yokohama Nōgakudo) was held as part of
The Year of Czech Culture in Japan. Czech’s Alfa Theatre troupe
manipulated puppets made by Jiří Trnka, under whom Kawamotostudied, and presented the world premiere of Trnka’s Circus (Torunka
no Sakasu). House of Flame (Kataku), which is Kawamoto’s puppet animation based on the Noh play Seeker’s Mound (Motomezuka), was081

screened as well.
The O Fujin Prize for Children and Youth Theatre was established for women who have contributed to the world of theatre forchildren and the youth. The 27th prize was given to Yoshida Akiko,
the longtime producer of Puppet Theatre Musubi-za, for producing
Pinocchio and Arabian Night, which were both highly acclaimed.
Yokomizo, Yukiko
Yokomizo Yukiko is a theatre critic, executive director of the Japan Theatre
Association, a councilor for Tomin Gekijō and a member of Kabuki Circle’splanning committee. After working as an editorial staff of the cultural sectionof Jiji Press Ltd., she held posts in the screening committee of the Arts Festival
sponsored by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, the Japan Arts Council’s TheatreCommittee and has given lectures at Nihon University College of Art. She isalso a member of Dance Critics Association, Saitama Prefecture’s Writers’
Association and the International Theatre Institute. She has translated Practical
Stage Makeup (joint translation) and written Actors Talk About Their Dreams(Yume Kataru Yakusha-tachi), etc.
(Translation : Sumida Michiyo)
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JAPANESE CLASSICAL DANCEJapanese Classical Dance

It Is Time When We Must Find
the Exact Border Between“Hare (Non-Daily)” and “Ke (Daily)”in Nihon Buyō (Japanese Classical Dance)
Hirano Hidetoshi
What is the Position of “Kabuki Odori” Within Nihon Buyō ?
In designating Intangible Cultural Treasures (popularly known as“Living National Treasures”) for the genre of nihon buyō, the Japanese
082

Cultural Agency officially uses the term “kabuki buyō,” emphasizing
the important place in the repertory of nihon buyō of dances originally performed as part of productions of kabuki theater and theimportance of preserving this tradition from the Edo period (1603 –1868). These dances were performed by kabuki actors (all men, evenfor female roles) in the hare (which means “formal” or at least,“removed from ordinary daily life”) context of a kabuki performancewith the kabuki actors in make-up and stage costumes. In fact, it issaid that the first time Japanese classical dancers (“odori shishō,”meaning “dance teachers”) were able to wear the same stage costumes
as kabuki actors was with the performances of the Hanayagi Buyō
Kenkyūkai founded in 1924 by Hanayagi Jusuke II (1893 – 1970), thesecond head of the Hanayagi school of dance and one of the pivotal
artists who brought the dance traditions of the Edo period into themodern world in the form of “nihon buyō.”In 1924, it was epoch-making when Japanese classical dancers

wore the same costumes as kabuki actors; today, it is considered to bequite normal. This is just one aspect of the question of what nihonbuyō is: what kind of spaces is it performed in and what kind of performers, from what kind of background, in what kind of situation are
performing it. This is what Hanayagi Juraku II (1918 – 2007) one of
the most prominent dancers and choreographers in the Hanayagi
school and the nephew of Hanayagi Jusuke II had to say about performances on stage of nihon buyō:
I am often asked exactly what “nihon buyō” is and that is a very goodquestion, because, in fact, the definition is not clear at all. By thebroadest definition, all kinds of things can fall into the category of“nihon buyō.” Folk dances can be included, Awa odori can be included
and – this is an extreme case – I understand that there are even “nihonbuyō Shows” as part of strip-tease performances, so I guess that might
be included as well. (Laughs.)
But if I were to speak as one of the directors of the Japanese ClassicalDance Association (Nihon Buyō Kyōkai), first, I would like to point out
that unlike other forms of traditional performing arts, like kabuki,
Bunraku, noh and most recently, the kumi odori of Okinawa, nihonbuyō is a genre without a nationally supported theater building
specifically dedicated to this art form.

083

When I go to the government offices to see if it is possible to get atheater for nihon buyō, they ask me, “What is nihon buyō ?” And this iswhere the problem comes. I have been designated a “Living National
Treasure,” but it is in the field of “kabuki buyō.” Now I work to teach andchoreograph kabuki dances and so I am very much working in the fieldof “kabuki buyō” and have received some degree of recognition for that,but ultimately, the performers of “kabuki buyō” are kabuki actors.
As Japanese Classical dancers, of course, we perform the same dances,often in costume and make-up. But it is very hard for a JapaneseClassical dancer to give a performance of a dance from the kabuki
repertory that might be considered superior to what a kabuki actor
might do. We might be able to compete with short dances like Tomo
Yakkō (The Samurai Footman) or Echigo Jishi (The Echigo Lion Dancer)
in a program of, say, two contrasting dances, which don’t have much

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of a story and we can excel with formal perfection. But when it comesto large-scale dance plays like Seki no To (The Snowbound Barrier) or
Masakado, with extended sections of dance, but also with complex
stories and sections of dialogue, there is no chance that we JapaneseClassical dancers can compete with kabuki actors. There is somethingthat a kabuki actor can express on stage because day in and dayout, throughout the year, they are performing kabuki and this issomething that we cannot possibly hope to imitate. That is what real“kabuki buyō” is and you have to understand that fact to understandnihon buyō.
(“Nihon Buyō Nyūmon” 2001, published by the Engeki Shuppansha)

In 2017, the National Theatre sponsored two performances ofnihon buyō, the “Meisaku Kabuki Buyō (Masterpieces of Kabuki
Dance, May 27, Large Hall) and “Hanagata Meisaku Buyō Kanshōkai(Masterpieces of Japanese Classical Dance by Young Dancers, August
26, Small Hall). All of the pieces presented were dances originally084

from kabuki with Japanese Classical dancers performing the dances
in make-up and costumes. The piece that received the most attention was the performance of the Tokiwazu piece Tsumoru Koi Yukino Seki no To (The Snowbound Barrier) with Hanayagi Motoi as thebarrier guard Sekibei, actually court noble Ōtomo no Kuronushi,
Fujima Etsuko as Princess Komachi, Mizuki Yū ka as the courtesan Sumizome, actually the spirit of the Komachi cherry tree andHanayagi Juraku III as Shōshō Munesada. This was probably the best
possible cast with Japanese Classical dancers, but what they produced
was very distant from a performance of this dance by kabuki actors.
This is not the level of performance that lives up to the designationof an art form as an “Intangible Cultural Treasure.” Seeing this performance I very sharply felt the difference between what JapaneseClassical dancers and kabuki actors can do. In a performance like
this, Japanese Classical dancers wear the same costumes and make-up

as kabuki actors, but in their daily life, they are dance teachers andthe essence of their existence comes through in their performance.
A kabuki actor spends his daily life in costume and make-up andexpressing themselves through these techniques of staging and movement. Even with the same dance play, the difference type of performance is very evident.

The Current State of the Schools of“Mai” and “Odori” in Nihon BuyōThe word “buyō” was created in the Meiji period by combining
the Chinese characters for the two major varieties of dance, “mai” and“odori” to describe all kinds of dance that were then known by avariety of names. “Odori” is represented by dances from kabuki
mostly originating in Edo (the old name for Tokyo). “Mai” is represented by several schools of dance in Kamigata (the old name for the area085

around Kyoto and Osaka) and includes kyōmai and jiuta mai. Whilealso being related to kabuki, these schools of mai are also strongly
influenced by gidayū , the narrative music of the Bunraku puppet
theater and the classical noh and kyōgen theaters. These schools of
mai are also closely with the geisha districts of Kyoto and Osaka andthese dances are usually performed in banquet chambers by maiko
and geiko dressed in formal kimono with hair dressed in traditionalhairstyles and often with white face make-up.
“Mai” has also been designated an Intangible Cultural Treasure”
and kyōmai (*1) and jiuta mai are represented by such schools as Inoue,
Yamamura, Yoshimura and Umemoto. The National Theatre ofJapan in Tokyo first produced a recital of mai called “Mai no Kai” in1967 (supervised by Numa Sōu) with a rich variety of artists. The performers from the Inoue school were the Gion geisha Komame andTheatre in Japan

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Yasue. The Yoshimura school was represented by the head of theschool, Yoshimura Yūki (*2), the Yamamura school was represented bydance teacher, Yamamura Taka, the Kanzaki school was represented
by the head of the school, Kanzaki Hide and the Umemoto school
was represented by the head of the school, Umemoto Rikuhei. The
performance also featured Takehara Han, a prominent jiuta mai
dancer who was not associated with a particular school of dance.
From 1971, the name of the recital was changed to “Mai no Kai:
Keihan no Zashiki Mai (Mai of the Dances for Banquet Chambers of
the Geisha Districts of Kyoto and Osaka),” adding the words “zashiki
mai” and under this name it has continued until today.
In this year’s recital (November 23, 2017, small hall of the
National Theatre, Tokyo), Living National Treasure for kyōmai andhead of the Inoue school, Inoue Yachiyo, displayed the poise and086

power of the artistry of a dance teacher with the jiuta piece, Yomogiu
and in the sensuous performance of the jiuta piece Kanawa, the Gion
geisha Inoue Koman filled the stage which evoked the intimate atmosphere of a banquet chamber. In both of these performances, there wasa strong feeling of the desire of personal expression, which had a very
special feeling. However, as a whole it was worrisome that with thechange in generations differences in artistic levels were very noticeable.
Gondō Yōichi explained the way of thinking in kamigata mai inthe following way:
Among the performers in the “Mai no Kai” in 1969 commemorating
the third anniversary of the opening of the National Theatre, the nameof the dancer Nishikawa Koyuki appears. Nishikawa school dance is
not ordinarily considered to be “kamigata mai.” But in the old days in
Kamigata, there was not a very strong feeling of restricting dancers
only to the schools of which they were members, so it was notparticularly unusual to go learn from a teacher in a separate school orgenre of dance. Nishikawa Koyuki was a student of Nishikawa Koi anda member of the Nishikawa school but at the same time she learned
Yamamura school kamigata mai. Kamigata mai dancers like TakeharaHan, Kanzaki En and Kawaguchi Hideko (*3) all got their first training
in dance in the Yoshimura school of kamigata mai, then learned
from dance schools in Tokyo, synthesized these experiences insidethemselves and then blended all their distinctive characteristics tocreate their own personal styles of “kamigata mai.”
But in recent years, the trend has been reversed. There are many
dancers in established schools of odori who take advantage of thewide range of distinctive techniques in kamigata mai that they do
not have in their own schools to create their own new works. Thisis especially true for new pieces and revivals of su-odori (dancing informal kimono without stage costume). This shows the extent towhich kamigata mai has an attraction and characteristics not found in
Edo styles of buyō.
(from the program for the “Mai no Kai: Keihan no Zashiki Mai” in 2006
commemorating the 40th anniversary of the opening of the National
Theatre, published by the National Theatre)087

As he says it is necessary to recognize the breadth of techniquecontained in kamigata mai. But also, in view of the fact that the
National Theatre of Japan commemorated its 50th anniversary in
2017, it is vitally important to return to the roots of the “Mai no Kai”
and re-evaluate questions like the meaning of the fact that the term
“zashiki mai” is originally a term from the classical noh theater andthe meaning of the difference between the hare or formal extra-daily
performances of geisha in white make-up and the ke or daily performances of dance teachers without white make-up.
In the world of buyō in Tokyo there is a similar problematic to
the kamigata mai situation in the relationship of geisha performing ina hare extra-daily situation with white face make-up and dance teachers without white make-up in the genre of su-odori. This is a genrethat became established in the Taisho period (1912 – 1926) where a

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dancer would perform in formal kimono without stage costume orstage make-up. Like kamigata mai this overlapped with the world ofgeisha doing dances in banquet rooms, but for teachers of buyō thatwere neither kabuki actors nor geisha, the genre of su-odori provided a
special realm in which they could excel. Su-odori is not recognized as
an independent genre by the Japanese Cultural Agency as a Living
National Treasure and moreover, the 2016 “Su-Odori no Kai” at the
National Theatre at the beginning of the year commemorating the50th anniversary of the opening of the National Theatre was the last.
Nevertheless, this is a genre in which teachers of buyō can assert theirunique artistic excellence.
As Gondō explained, kamigata mai has a rich variety of resources
for su-odori and the new piece Nonomiya in the recital of Yoshimura
Chihiro at Kioi Hall on November 5 (lyrics, Tsuki Morimitsu, com088

position, Tsukahara Katsunori, koto and kokyū composition and performance, Takahashi Suishū) was a good example of this. The lyrics,
composition and mai melded together perfectly and created a piece inthe atmosphere of a banquet chamber with a powerful emotional
impact. As an example of su-odori as a place to display the artistry of abuyō teacher in formal kimono without white make-up, there was theperformance of the Tōmei piece Kono Kimi at the “Onoe no Kai(September 1, large hall of the National Theatre)” danced by Onoe
Bokusetsu and Onoe Kikune that was a performance that used theperformers’ technique polished by years of experience to create an
appealing piece full of their individual emotions. This raises hopes forthe future of the buyō of dance teachers whose artistry has been supported by fifty years of effort by the National Theatre.

Probing the Future of Nihon BuyōIn recent years, the term “Galapagos phenomenon” has beenused a lot. The Galapagos islands are 900 kilometers off the coast of
Ecuador in South America and with minimal interaction with theoutside world, this group of islands has developed its own, uniqueecology. This term is used to describe the fact that in a variety offields from data communications, automobiles to the music industry,in Japan product development and industrial organization has undergone its own unique development so that even if there is great development, it is only in reference to conditions inside Japan without any
relationship to the outside world. For example, Japan is one of the
few countries where fold-out cell phones are still common and they
are called “gara-kei (Galapagos style).” In other words, development
and prosperity within Japan also means a decline in the ability to
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compete internationally.
In the history of Japanese culture, there have been several times
where there have been policies restricting interaction with theoutside world, for example ending the cultural missions to Tang
China in 894 and the seclusion policies and banning of Christianity
in the Edo period. But the result is that Japan has been able topursue its own cultural development resulting in art and performing
arts like noh, Bunraku puppet theater, kabuki, traditional music anddance for the zashiki banquet chambers and even folk music anddance. Many of these cultural forms have achieved glory by being
designated World Cultural Heritages by UNESCO. But this culture
rare in the world can also be described as a “Galapagos phenomenon.” In other words, the kabuki buyō and dances for the zashiki
banquet chambers recognized as Intangible National Treasures are akind of Galapagos phenomen.

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There have been efforts to create new forms of stage dance inJapan or “shin buyō” ever since the publication of “Shin Gakugeki
Ron (New Stage Arts)” by Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859 – 1935). From 1984
to 2015, the Nihon Buyō Kyōkai sponsored the “Sōsaku Buyō Gekijō(Creative New Buyō Theater)” which made many new works. This iswhat Hanayagi Juraku II, who was instrumental in beginning andleading the project, had to say:090

Until the beginning of the Shin Buyō Undō (New Buyō Movement),
in buyō, the only time you would have many dancers moving at
once would be in brief sections of sō-odori (everyone dance) withsimple, unified choreography. There was no gunbu (massed dance) inwhich dancers were choreographed in massed groups. Many of mypredecessors made attempts to create gunbu; some were successful
and others ended with just a trial and error effort. This is a task that
we have continued and I think that we have been successful in raising
the level of technique in gunbu in buyō. But one thing that makes
gunbu difficult in nihon buyō is that it seems that kimonos are notvery suited to gunbu.
Naked bodies are what is most suited to gunbu, but they have to begood looking bodies. I saw Maurice Béjart’s Bolero when it came to
Japan, and in it, as the solo dancer Jorge Donn goes through a seriesof movements on a round platform, there is an ensemble performing
a gunbu surrounding the platform below. I remember that when
I saw it the first time, the gunbu was performed by Japanese andunfortunately I thought they were terrible and had no idea what
they were doing there. But the next time I saw it, the gunbu was
performed by an ensemble from abroad and for the first time, I wasconvinced. With enormous power, the gunbu concentrated attention
on Jorge Donn in the center. This is a power that you cannot havewith scrawny Japanese bodies.
First of all, these dancers from abroad have bodies that are a pictureeven if they are just lying down and not doing anything. Just the
naked body is a picture, is a sculpture. So conversely, we have tocreate a kind of gunbu suited to the Japanese body, one that you can
only do with Japanese bodies. It’s OK to do it in kimono, but we haveto make a gunbu suited to Japanese bodies wearing kimono.

(“Nihon Buyō Kanshō Nyūmon [Introduction to the Appreciation of
Nihon Buyō]” 2001, published by the Engeki Shuppansha)

In 2017, the Nihon Buyō Kyōkai got a new start with the first
performance of the Nihon Buyō Mirai-za (Nihon Buyō Future
Theater), “Sai (Throwing the Dice)” (June 16 – 18, small hall of the
National Theatre). Three of the four pieces had the problems identified by Juraku. The fourth was the Risōgaku piece Nyonin Sumida:
Tayutō (Women and the Sumida River: Gently Flowing) (staging: Orita
Kōji, composition: Honjō Hidetarō, choreography: Tachibana Yoshie,dancers: Onoe Yukari, Hanayagi Kiyohito, Fujikage Shizue, Fujima
Etsuko and Mizuki Yuka). The music was a lyrical picture of theSumida river, “Tayutō,” that was originally composed in 2010 byHonjō Hidetarō as a concert piece. The dance was staged by taking

091

characters from shinpa and kabuki to display the beauty of people inkimono. The dance showed the very high technical level of the top
female buyō dancers and recalled the achievements of the Shin Buyō
Movement in the early part of the 20th century. But although thetheme of the production was “the future of nihon buyō,” it did notadvance beyond the previous achievements of shin buyō.
The crisis regarding the future of nihon buyō is probably because
for too many years a preoccupation with the extra-daily space of stage
performances has meant that there has not been sufficient attention toother fundamental problems. This includes attention to the witty aesthetics of the music and lyrics of the pieces of nihon buyō and focusing attention on the development of individual physical technique andcreative ability, something which has long been stifled.

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TopicsIn recent years, there have been many performances of nihonbuyō on noh stages. It is not clear what a theater devoted to nihonbuyō might look like, but I think that something resembling the stage
and seating of a traditional zashiki might be desirable. Probably noh
stages are attractive to nihon buyō dancers because there are similarities to zashiki and they have their own charm as a traditional Japanesestage space.
On April 20, 2017, the Kanze Sakon XXV Memorial Kanze Noh
Theater opened in Tokyo’s Ginza. With the aim of bringing the traditional performing arts closer to the Japanese people, there is a new
production group named Ginza Hana Kagami centered on producing
a variety of performances using the stage of the Kanze noh theater.
092

On July 11, they sponsored a performance titled, “Nippon no Buyō.”
It will be interesting to see how this project develops. It is an age inwhich Western dancers can wear tabi and dance. It is necessary tothink very carefully about the meaning of using a noh stage for traditional Japanese music and dance.
There were many collaborations with other genres. One unusual
performance was a collaboration between nihon buyō and flamenco.
Flamenco dancer Kagita Mayumi and Fujima Kiyotsugu presented
Futari Shizuka (December 24, small hall of the National Theatre,
Seikei Kai) was an impressive effort that showed how Western andJapanese styles can be combined.
There has also been an increase in international exchanges. In
2017, the nihon buyō group Gei Maru-za performed in New York
(February 22) and following on the 2016 performance, the Goyōkai
again performed in New Delhi (December 4 – 11).
These two groups are also very active within Japan as well. Thereare many workshops for children sponsored by the Japanese Cultural
Agency and local governments, but these workshops don’t seem toconnect at all with the creation of professional nihon buyō artists. In
2017, there were no recipients of the Cultural Agency’s Special Prizeand the only award was Nishikawa Mitsu’s performance which participated in the Kansai division of the Arts Festival.
*1

Although there are several schools of jiuta mai in Kyoto, the only schoolof kyōmai is the Inoue school, which is closely related to the Gion geisha
district.

*2

Yoshimura Yūki (1923 – 1998) was one of the few male dances in the worldof jiuta mai and is also known as the father of actor and stage personality
Ikehata Shinnosuke (“Peter”).

*3

Takehara Han (1903 – 1998), Kanzaki En (1874 – 1950) and Kawaguchi
Hideko (1927 – 2009) were all born in Kansai and were active in Tokyo.
Takehara Han is noted for her relationships with a broad range ofwriters, artists and other creative people. Kanzaki En was the founderof the Kanzaki school of jiuta dance, while Kawaguchi Hideko is noted
for her work with her husband Takechi Tetsuji (1912 – 1988) who was atheatrical and film director and critic who is famous for his efforts to bringtraditional arts and the modern world together.

093

Hirano, Hidetoshi
Nihon buyō (Japanese classical dance) critic. Born in 1944 in Sendai andgraduated from the theater division of the literature department of Waseda
University majoring in kabuki. Worked for a publishing house as an editor forsuch periodicals as “Okinawa Performing Arts,” the quarterly journal “Folk
Performing Arts,” the monthly magazine, “Japanese Music and Classical Dance.”
As a critic, his interest is in investigating the art of physical expression. He is amember of advisory committees for the Japanese Cultural Agency and theSociety for the Advancement of the Arts in Japan. In 2016, his book “Critique:
History of Japanese Physical Expression – Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern
Period” (Nihon Buyō-sha) was published.
(Translation: Mark Ōshima)

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BALLET

BalletCreative Energy
in the Unfavorable Wind;
More Disparity between Regions
Urawa Makoto

Political, Economical, Environmental Situations around
Japanese Ballet
In 2017 internationally, the world reacted to Trump, the US president,
and East Asia having increased political friction. Global warming
resulted in significant damage in many locations worldwide. Nation094

ally, the economic policies collectively known as “Abenomics” provided certain positive macroeconomic effects, yet they also accelerated disparity in economic development within and between local
regions. In the aging Japanese society, many Japanese people foundno improvement in their sense of quality of life. On the other hand,
the Japanese government placed considerable focus on the success of
the upcoming 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics, putting effort
and resources into building national sports stadiums and training athletes, but not into the arts and culture. Now, the Japanese government is beginning to put more focus on culture and its proponents.
The Japanese ballet world is supported by children and their families. The number of children being born has been decreasing due tothe decrease of the population in the current generation of prospective mothers.
The number of theaters has also been decreasing. Owners ofolder theaters that require expenditures for earthquake proofing andbarrier-free renovations must either close their theaters or change
their facility’s intended use unless they can both afford the cost ofrenovation as well as absorb the loss in revenue while their structure
is closed for renovation. Therefore, it is becoming increasingly difficult to secure the use of performance venues.

Characteristics of the Japanese Ballet World
I intend to review the Japanese ballet world in 2017 given thesituation above.
Before reviewing, I would like to raise three characteristics of theJapanese ballet world in comparison with the West.
First of all, the location of ballet companies and their activities
are concentrated in a few metropolitan areas: the Tokyo Metropolitan
095

area, the Kansai area (Osaka, Kyoto, Hyogo), and the Chubu area
(Aichi). If we define a professional ballet company as one that a) can
produce all the acts of a piece; and b) can produce a couple of showsin a year, then thirteen companies in the Tokyo Metropolitan area
meet these conditions. Under somewhat less strict conditions, eightcompanies in Kansai, and six in Chubu also qualify as professional.
In terms of the number of performances, the Tokyo Metropolitan area has significantly more that the other regions. These professional companies are all private except for the National Ballet ofJapan. They are funded mainly from the tuition of students andticket sales to students’ friends and families, without much support
from public and social sources. Also, it is a characteristic of Japanthat ballet companies are is not associated with a particular theater.
Other than the twenty-seven companies concentrated in thesethree regions, in all of the rest of Japan there are no additional

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BALLET

companies which meet the conditions, even though the rest of thenation has many sizable cities with populations of one to two million
people. Regional disparity is evident. Yet, there are ballet schools
nationwide, providing dancers to ballet companies and supporting
ballet competitions, which will be discussed later in this paper.
The second characteristic of the Japanese ballet world areso-called “produce system” festivals and concerts, which gather andproduce companies, schools, and dancers, showing small works, solos,
and pas de deux. The “produce system” productions range from thosewith popular foreign dancers to those that introduce young Japanese
dancers who are active abroad and in Japan. Performances unifying
ballet companies and schools are seen nationwide.
Thirdly, the large number of ballet competitions is also an unique
phenomenon of Japan, not only in classical ballet but many different
096

categories of dance. The length of the competition period is from two
weeks to just one day. There are many categories in competitions,
including so-called “pre-competition” in which judges give advice toyoung dancers, as well as nationwide franchise-style competitions.
Probably about 150 competitions exist across Japan, though it is hardto pin down the exact numbers.

The Creative Energy in Regional Disparity: Overview 2017
< The Tokyo Metropolitan Area >The characteristics mentioned above basically had not changed
during this year. Despite harsher financial conditions due to thedecreasing number of children learning ballet, major ballet companies
still produce performances by lessening the days of performances, orby minimizing creation of new works and new production.
Even so, this year some remarkable new works were premiered

by major ballet companies. These included long full-act works,
unique middle-sized new works, remakes, and new works. The
National Ballet of Japan produced a new version of The Nutcracker
and the Mouse King choreographed by Wayne Eagling. This production provided roles for a number of skilled and new dancers such as
Ono Ayako and Fukuoka Yūdai, who are also active abroad. K Ballet
Company headed by Artistic Director and Choreographer Kumakawa
Tetsuya, premiered Cleopatra (Music by Carl Nielsen) in Tokyo,
Aichi, and Osaka. The presence of Nakamura Shōko, who played thetitle role, as well as the idea and large scale performance garnered
public attention. Also, NBA Ballet Company newly produced Romeoand Juliet, in which Martin Friedman utilized movement to deftly
depict details of the work’s human relationships.
These relatively young companies have been active. The New
National Theater just celebrated its twentieth anniversary; it has rep-097

ertories like Roland Petit’s Coppelia, and also premiered Beethoven
Sonata by a contemporary choreographer, Nakamura Megumi.
K Ballet Company has performed its repertories such as Giselle and
The Corsair a number of times. NBA Ballet Company got attention
with Nutcracker utilizing projection mapping. Ballet Chamble Ouest
employed young choreographers for triple-bill-type performances.
On the other hand, companies with longer histories – closer toseventy years – mainly perform their repertories. Yet, In Matsuyama
Ballet Company, with the legendary ballerina Morishita Yōko, whose
dancing career spans sixty years, Director Shimizu Tetsutarō remade
The White-Haired Girl (Hakumōjo), a ballet choreographed in 1955
based on a story depicted in a Chinese opera and movie. This ballet,
which has a strong social message, has been performed in China

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BALLETseveral times and was enthusiastically received by Chinese audiences.
In Toyama prefecture, Asami Maki Ballet Tokyo company, which has
a similar long history, mounted a performance of Asuka in 2016. Nina
Ananiashivili, a 2017 recipient of the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold
Rays with Neck Ribbon, was a part of this renewed work with a contemporary touch. Tani Momoko Ballet company, founded by thelegendary ballerina Tani Momoko, who passed away in 2015, appointed a new artistic director, Takabe Hisako, who had been cultivated inthis company.
Founded in the 1960’s, a number of somewhat younger balletcompanies recently appointed female artistic directors such as Saitō
Yukari in Tokyo Ballet Company, Adachi Etsuko in Tokyo City
Ballet company, and Oyama Kumi in Star Dancers Ballet company.
The increase of female leaders shows the trend of our time. These098

ballet companies produced triple-bill-type performances of classic andmodern large works together with Western middle-sized masterpieces.
For example, Tokyo Ballet produced works by Maurice Bejart andRoland Petit, Star Dancers Ballet made performances of William
Forsythe and George Balanchine, and Noriko Kobayashi Ballet
Theatre produced Kenneth MacMillan programs with two premierworks in Japan.
Public Juridical Foundation Japan Ballet Association, enjoying
the membership of all the ballet professionals in Japan, produces performances unifying its regional branches and competitions. In termsof noteworthy performances of groups and individuals, Choreographer Shinohara Seiichi had a series of recitals primarily casting his
famous dancer wife Shimomura Yurie, producing works such as
Romeo and Juliet, which in 2006 received the Grand Prize at the
National Arts Festival of the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs.

Shakujii Ballet Academy got attention with Pas de Quatre, casting theworld-class dancers Yoshida Miyako, 2017 Person of Cultural Merits;
Sakai Hana; Nishida Yū ko; and Oki Kanako. Sakai Hana, whoreceived the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon this year, assayed awide range of performances in classical and modern works, as well as
in collaboration with Japanese traditional performing arts. Chacott,the ballet-related goods maker and retailer, produced “Ballet for the
Future” with Yoshida Miyako and Horiuchi Gen as the main cast inTokyo, Osaka, and Sapporo.

< The Other Regions >In the Kansai area, the most active group is Kobe’s SadamatsuHamada Ballet company, which was awarded the Arts Festival Excellence Prize by the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs. It produces099

all the acts of classical pieces as well as modern creative works. This
year it produced Jiri Kylian’s Falling Angels as well as Die Toteninsel(Music by Rachmaninov) with a contemporary atmosphere. These
in-depth productions were choreographed by Mori Yū ki, Artistic
Director in Regensburg, Germany. A symbolical Macbeth was also
performed as Mori’s production in Tokyo and Kobe. In terms of new
production, previously mentioned Shinohara Seiichi choreographed a
new work, La Traviata, for Sasaki Michiko Ballet Company. Thisgorgeous and tragic drama was one of the more fruitful works thisyear, casting Shimomura Yurie and Sasaki Dai. Homura Tomoi
Ballet Company had its eightieth anniversary performance; Noma
Ballet Company had its fiftieth anniversary performance. Jinushi
Kaoru Ballet Company, a relatively young company, had a triple-billed
performance in the theme of Ballet Russes. Okumura Yui received
the Award of Arts Festival New Face Prize by the Japanese Agency

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BALLET

for Cultural Affairs. Arima Ryuko Memorial Academie de Ballet deKyoto, which has a long history in Kyoto, had a memorial performance for Yvette Chauvire, who passed away in 2016, inviting dancers
from Paris. Producer Arima Eriko received L’ordre national de lalégion d’honneur.
In Nagoya, Aichi, Swan Lake productions were performed byregional leading companies: Ochi International Ballet and Matsuoka
Reiko Ballet. On the other hand, Theatre de Ballet Company had
reproduced works by Fukagawa Hideo and a new work Ryūgū by
Iguchi Hiroyuki. Setsuko Kawaguchi Ballet company produced newworks by Kawaguchi and others. This region has promising choreographers: the previously mentioned Fukagawa, Iguchi, Kawaguchi, as
well as Ichikawa Tōru and Ōshima Masaki.
In regards to regions other than those mentioned above,100

Okinawan Midorima Ryōki held a performance in Tokyo, participating in the Arts Festival by the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs.
Yet no other noteworthy activities of other regions were seen. The
reasons could include reduction of population and economic problems, as well as large-scale damage from typhoons, cataracts of rain,
and earthquakes.

The Touring Companies to Japan and Their Dancers
Japan invites numerous performances by foreign ballet companies, and this fact shows that there is a large market for foreign ballet.
World famous companies visited Japan such as Paris Opera Ballet,
Bolshoi Ballet, Bejart Ballet Lausanne, English National Ballet, andthe Kiev Ballet. Each of them showed characteristic programs andunique dancers. In particular, performances starring popular dancers
in Japan like Nina Ananiashivili, Svetlana Zakharova, Manuel Legris,and others attracted large audiences.
On the other hand, many Japanese dancers who joined foreign
ballet companies won foreign competitions. Matsuyama Ballet
Company and Tokyo Komaki Ballet Company (now renamed as
International Ballet Academia) had successful performancesin Mongolia.
On a sad note, as the last news of 2017 I would like to mention
that Usui Kenji, the former chairman of Public Juridical Foundation Japan Ballet Association, well known worldwide as a ballethistorian and researcher, passed away at the age of ninety-three on
December 24th.
Urawa, Makoto
His autonym is Ichikawa Akira. He was formerly a professor in the Faculty ofBusiness Administration and Corporate Culture at Shōin University. He works as
the advisor to the Association of Theaters and Halls in Japan. As a dance critic,
Urawa has written articles for newspapers and magazines, and has also held
positions in various committees such as the committee for the Agency for
Cultural Affairs. He has also worked as a member of the jury for a number ofdance competitions.

101(Translation: Satō Michiyo)

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Contemporary Dance and Butoh

For Dance,
Is Social Media a Friend or Foe?
Tsutsumi Hiroshi
Instagrammable and ‘Building Buzz’‘Instagrammable’ (insutabae) was chosen as the Japanese buzzword of
the year in 2017. A YouTube video called ‘Bubbly Dance’ by the danceclub at Tomioka High School in Osaka Prefecture, who came secondat the 10th Japan High School Dance Championship, became a viralsensation. While we might not think that the popularity of social
media has a direct connection with the performing arts, its influence102

on the dance world is growing stronger. Music artists around theworld are increasingly releasing new music videos on YouTube,
making the need for choreographers and dancers to express the visionof the songs ever greater.
Takase Fukiko has choreographed a music video for Utada
Hikaru, while Hirayama Motoko has choreographed for Chris Hart,
crewimburnny’s Sugao Nagisa for Nogizaka46, and Honaga Yōko for
Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and Yuzu, and the Butoh dancer Kudō Taketeru
appeared in a Hirai Ken music video. Kudō also revived The Love ofTerror (Kyōfu no koi) and Honaga revived Diagonal Line Express(Naname rain kyūkō), but the activities of choreographers and dancers
are becoming more prominent online than in theatres. Morishita
Maki directed a dance adaptation of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5,
asking different artists to choreograph one of the four movements:
MIKIKO, who is known for her choreography for the music groupPerfume, the actor and dancer Moriyama Mirai, the photographer
Ishikawa Naoki, and the Butoh choreographer Kasai Akira. Further
professional opportunities are coming from corporations and government bodies, which are commissioning choreographers to create original dances and gymnastic routines, and make commercials. Thissocial media-friendly attitude is becoming ever more conspicuous
through ‘buzz-building’ events for the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic
Games in Tokyo.

Dance As Spectacle to Kick Off a (Politicised) Festival
Tokyo Caravan, which is the official preview project for the 2020
Cultural Olympiad programme, continued in 2017, holding performances around Japan with the likes of Ide Shigehiro and Kondō
Ryōhei. Ide also choreographs for music videos, having previously
worked with such artists as Hoshino Gen and Ringo Sheena (Shiina103

Ringo), and Avril Lavigne. Premiering Job Title Junction (Katagaki
jankushon) with his company idevian crew to much acclaim and alsosupervising choreography for Tokyo Gorin Ondo 2020, a song anddance created by the Tokyo Organising Committee of the Olympic
and Paralympic Games, he had a busy year indeed. At Roppongi Art
Night, a one-night art event held in the district of Roppongi in Tokyo,
photographer and film director Ninagawa Mika was selected as themain programme artist, and dance world contributors included
Yasumoto Masako, Kuroda Ikuyo (BATIK), Kitamura Akiko,
Yanagimoto Masahiro, Yamamoto Yū, and Kondō Ryōhei, but in theend it was an event dominated by ‘Instagrammable’ offerings.
The international performing arts event Festival/Tokyo 2017
produced the lively Toky Toki Saru, conceived and directed by Pichet
Klunchun. Almost like an outdoor disco convention, dancers dressed

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up as monkeys gamboled with Tokyoites on a specially made stage in
Minami Ikebukuro Park. Though promoted as the exploration of‘new territory’ by an artist who had hereto pursued a contemporaryinterpretation of the traditional Thai mask dance Khon, it was unclear
how its concept and background had emerged from his research conducted in Tokyo. In these kinds of free outdoor events organised at
the behest of government bodies, dance functions as a way to launchthe (politicised) festival that is the Olympics, transforming into spectacle for creating ‘buzz’ in the city. However, there is a problem withthis in that the talent and expression of the artists is not deeply understood by audiences.

Programmes for Children and Shows for Foreign Tourists on
the Rise
104

As we head towards the 2020 Olympics, nonverbal performances
accessible for non-Japanese tourists are enjoying long runs. The experiential show WA!! Wonder Japan Experience by Fuerza Bruta waspremiered in Tokyo as a special Japanese version of the popular spectacle by Argentinian director Diqui James, supported by a subsidy
from Arts Council Tokyo as part of its Tokyo Cultural Program
Grant that provides funding for ‘projects to foster momentum’. Other
examples of new shows include W3, a stage adaptation of a Tezuka
Osamu manga featuring the ballet dancer Nishijima Kazuhiro in thelead, and ALATA, a dance and stage combat extravaganza that opened
the Alternative Theatre in Yūrakuchō. GEAR, whose long run continues at a theatre in Kyoto for which it was specifically devised, opened
in a new Kantō region version as the first production at Chiba Port
Theatre with Fujisaki Ayane of the idol group Dempagumi.inc in thelead, who originally built up a following through her dance videos

on YouTube.
Dance that can be enjoyed regardless of language is also proving
popular among programmes for children at public halls. At Kanagawa
Arts Theatre, Moriyama Kaiji directed and choreographed an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that attracted
full houses for all shows thanks to the way it comically incorporated
onomatopoeia and rap, performed by a superb cast including
Tsujimoto Tomohiko, Shimaji Yasutake, and Shimotsukasa Naomi.
Condors head Kondō Ryōhei received the Minister of Education,
Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Prize in the dance divisionof the 2016 Art Encouragement Prizes by the Agency for Cultural
Affairs. The premiere of Never-Ending Story: The Errors of Condors(NEVERENDING STORY machigai no kondoruzu) at Setagaya Public
Theatre included the presentation of a children’s workshop and thenwent on a regional tour. Inspired by the lives of the performers when105

they were seventeen years old, 17’s Map was yet another popular show
for the company.
The unit Nivante, comprising Fujita Yoshihiro of Condors andtap dancer Murata Masaki, performed Light Brothers (Raito na
kyōdai). Developing a strange story of brothers infatuated with the
Wright brothers into an accessible dance piece, Fujita won the New
Artist Award in the dance division at the National Arts Festival,organised by the Agency for Cultural Affairs.
CHAiroiPLIN company head Suzuki Takurō choreographedand directed a stage adaptation of The Magic Finger, a children’s story
by Roald Dahl, for Toshima Art Summer Festival 2017. Performed bychildren recruited from the general public, it unfolded like anupturned box of toys spilling out fantastical elements. With Ballo:
Romeo and Juliet (BALLO—romio to jurietto), Suzuki also tried his

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hand at tackling Shakespeare.
Another of the characteristics of dance is the ease with which it
makes collaborating with artists from different cultures or fields.
Company Derashinera’s Onodera Shūji staged WITHOUT SIGNAL!
(Shingō ga nai!), an international co-production with Vietnamese
performers. With his group Physical Theatre Company GERO, Itō
Kim premiered I Just Want to Say (Iitai dake), a collage of language,
voice, and body, and expanded his dance activities into the fields of art
and music.

Contemporary Dance Goes Global
Teshigawara Saburō’s activities abroad are always conspicuous, as
shown by his being made an officier of France’s Ordre des Arts et desLettres. He staged the world premiere of Grand Miroir for Ballet de106

l’Opéra National de Paris (Paris Opera Ballet), while in Japan his
Update Dance Series, whereby he presents new work almost daily at
his space Karas Apparatus, continued to draw acclaim. He and Satō
Rihoko also won the Baku Ishii Memorial Award at Odoru. Akita
2017, and he revived Absolute Zero (Abusorūto zero) at Setagaya Public
Theatre. Moreover, the inspiration that poetry provides for his work
has become notable, such as Rimbaud for Illuminations, Hagiwara
Sakutarō for Howling at the Moon (Tsuki ni hoeru), and Baudelaire’s
Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) for Grand Miroir.
Ryutopia Niigata City Performing Arts Center resident company
Noism1 staged Liebestod (Ai no shi), a new work by the artistic director Kanamori Jō, in a double bill with Painted Desert, a representative
work of director Yamada Yūki. In Liebestod, Kanamori returned tohis creative roots by using music from the Wagner opera Tristan and
Iseult, which he had stored in his heart ever since he first heard it inMaurice Béjart’s M at the age of eighteen. Niigata City also organised
Niigata International Dance Festival 2017 (NIDF2017), inviting
Daegu Contemporary Dance Company from South Korea, T.H.E.
Dance Company from Singapore, and City Contemporary Dance
Company from Hong Kong, China. Noisim1 revived NINA—
materialise sacrifice (NINA—busshitsuka suru ikenie) with a young castand engaged with the task of passing on its repertoire.
Hirahara Shintarō had an energetic year, choreographing night tonight (Yoru no chi), a new work for Noism2. With his own company,
OrganWorks, he premiered Holy Beast: Live with a Sun (Seijū livewith a sun). Another work, Time of Conversation, was the accumulation of around fifteen years of exchange with the Spanish choreographer Carmen Werner.
Session House resident dance company Mademoiselle Cinema
107

ventured out on a two-nation tour to Mexico and Ethiopia. While thegroup has continued to create Tanztheater-style work inspired by thechildhood memories of the dancers, its homecoming performance ofWoman is a Journey (Onna wa, tabi de aru) was based on the grandparents of the work’s choreographer, Itō Naoko, and through dance
wove a portrayal of the attitudes of women who emigrated to theUnited States as so-called ‘picture brides’ as well as of a sense ofhomesickness or nostalgia, and family memories and history.
With an eye on performing overseas, Tani Momoko Ballet
Company had its first stab at contemporary dance, staging a triple billof new work by Shimaji Yasutake, Yanagimoto Masahiro, andHirosaki Uran.

Global Gazes Gravitating Toward Noh and Butoh
The year also saw many initiatives that re-examined Japan’s

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unique traditional dance forms. A co-production between Yokohama
Noh Theater and the Japan Society in New York, SAYUSA (LeftRight-Left) was adapted from the Noh plays Okina and Hagoromo(The Feather Mantle), based on guidance from Donald Keene, anddirected by the Italian Luca Veggetti, and performed by Kasai Akira
and Suzuki Yukio, who both come from Butoh, and Nakamura
Megumi, whose background is in ballet, and Nagayama Rinzō, who
is a child Noh actor. Bringing together performers in this way withvery different physical qualities, the resulting production expressed auniversal vision. On the other hand, Cerulean Tower Noh Theatre
attempted a fusion of Noh and contemporary dance with Mania(Kurui), based on the Noh plays Dōjōji and Kanawa (The Iron Crown),
and a version of Oimatsu (The Aged Pine), directed and choreographed108

by, respectively, Endō Yasuyuki and Kuroda Ikuyo.
Endeavors to reconsider Butoh from global perspectives are also
picking up pace. The Sapporo International Butoh Festival 2017 washeld, calling for Butoh to be recognised as one of Japan’s cultural
assets. The New National Theatre, Tokyo launched the ‘Butoh Today’
programme, starting with Sankai Juku’s revival of MEGURI—Teeming
Sea, Tranquil Land (Umi no nigiwai, oka no seijaku—meguri). The
series is set to continue with a new work by Dairakudakan in 2018. It
was as if, twenty years after it opened, this national theatre has finallygiven recognition to Butoh. Dairakudakan commemorated forty-fiveyears since it was founded with two performances, Super-human(Chōjin) and Pseudo-human (Gijin), on the theme of artificial intelligence and the singularity, suggesting that technological progress leads
to the absence of mankind.
Interest is also growing in Butoh heritage and archiving. The
nonprofit Dance Archive Network organised ‘Clear-Eyed Spirit’, aseries of performances and exhibitions that used new archiving
methods such as 3D and virtual reality technology, including the firstshowing in the world of photographs taken by William Klein in Japan
in 1961 of street performances by Hijikata Tatsumi, Ohno Kazuo, andOhno Yoshito. Kōzensha head Waguri Yukio passed away at the ageof sixty-five. He made a significant contribution to passing on the heritage of Butoh to the next generation by publishing Transmission of the
Butoh Flower (Butō Kaden) (1998), a CD-ROM of Hijikata’s oral
instructions of his Butoh notations. Fujiyama Annet, led by Hasegawa
Ney, premiered ENIAC, depicting the life of a Kōzensha dancer,
Ishimoto Kae. Iwatabuchi Teita was able to surmount the death of
Murobushi Kō with his solo performance, missing link, uniquely
re-interpreting the Butoh-esque body.
Butoh research overseas has also entered a new phase. A Japanese109

translation was published of the French scholar Sylviane Pagès’s Lebutô en France: Malentendus et fascination (Butoh in France:
Misunderstandings and Fascination) (2015), which analyzes how
Japanese Butoh has been received in France since 1978. It offered aperspective on Butoh distinct from the research that is conducted inJapan. Brazilian prodigy Marcelo Evelyn premiered in Japan Sick
Dance (Yameru mai), based on Hijikata Tatsumi’s concept of the‘weak body’ (suijaku-tai) at Kyoto Experiment 2017. In order to investigate the legacy of Butoh, the Singaporean artist Choy Ka Fai stayedin Japan, summoning and interviewing the spirit of Hijikata Tatsumi
in northeast Japan. The results of his work in progress were then presented at TPAM 2018.

The Millennial Generation and Dysfunctional Theatre
There are increasing opportunities in the Japanese dance scene

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to present work at competitions. At Yokohama Dance Collection
2017, Kurosu Ikumi won the Jury Prize in the Competition I
division. Moreover, Suzuki Ry ū swept several accolades this year,
winning the French Embassy Award for Young Choreographers, theMASDANZA Prize, and the Sibiu International Theatre Festival
Award. In the Competition II division for newcomers, Shimojima
Reisa broke the mould by taking home both the Best Newcomer
as well as the Hungary Touchpoint Art Foundation Prize, which
is usually only awarded to finalists in the Competition I category.
Yokohama Dance Collection also partnered with dance festivalsin Hong Kong and Seoul to launch at new East Asia dance platform called HOTPOT. For the first edition in Hong Kong, works
by Seki Kaori, Yamada Un, and Kimura Reina were selected. At
NEXTREAM21 2017, tantan (led by Kamegashira Kanae) won Best
110

Artist, Imamura Akari won the Excellence Award in the solo and duo
division and Suichu-Megane ∞ (led by Nakagawa Ayane) won for thegroup division. At Odoru. Akita 2017, Mitō Ruri received the Tatsumi
Hijikata Memorial Award, while the Judgment Committee Special
Award went to Kim Seoljin from South Korea and the AudienceAward to Hung-Chung Lai from Taiwan.
However, we can also see a growing tendency among younger
artists to seek out the kinds of bonds with audiences that cannot be
obtained at competitions and such places where short works are presented. Hasegawa Tatsuya’s DAZZLE used an entire building for
Touch the Dark, an immersive theatre experience where the performance unfolded in various places as the audience moved around.
Okamoto Yū’s TABATHA, whose forte is performances in the styleof parties that envelop the audience, premiered CARNIVAL!! Rio!!!!!
and revived its signature piece FIESTA!! My Mexico, both of whichportrayed the differences between South American and Japanesesociety. It also created a longer, standalone version of the 2015 show
Manual (Manyuaru). Uyama Ayumi (of TAG) opened the U.F.O.
Club, a fictional ‘show pub’ (cabaret) for contemporary dance in thewest Tokyo live music hub of K ō enji. Nakagawa Ayane ofSuichu-Megane ∞ planned 1991, a show featuring seven sets of young
individual choreographers or choreography teams all born in thetitular year. The omnibus performance presented an interpretation of
our times by this generation born and brought up after the collapse of
the economic bubble. Tokikatachi, led by Obana Aiko, launched along-term project called ‘Following the Path’ (Michi o tadoru), a
unique endeavour that choreographs the process of travel from theaudience relying on a letter to find the performance venue and thenencountering the human body in a space.
We can see increasing attempts to create places for experiencing

111

dance more intimately in alternative spaces, shifting away from thedysfunctional aspects of the existing theatre system and forming aseries of foxholes. On the other hand, Condors and Owlspot Theater
teamed up to launch Creatures of Potential 2017, a festival that showcases this next generation of dance companies. The future dilemma
for the dance world is surely how to motivate the millennial generation, for whom direct communication through social media is a
default, to return to the theatre.

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Tsutsumi, Hiroshi
Born in 1966 in Kawasaki City. He graduated from Bunka Gakuin’s theatre course.
He is an editor and performing arts critic. After serving as an editor for art,
entertainment, theatre and drama magazines, he now works freelance. His
writing and editing includes The Flying Dangorō Party in the Sky: The Rebirth ofAcharaka (Sora tobu kumo no ue dangorō ichiza: Acharaka saitanjō), Performing
Arts Magazine Bacchus, Performing Arts in Germany Today (Gendai doitsu nopafuōmingu ātsu), and Peter Brook: The Way of Creation (Pīta burukku: Sōsaku
no kiseki).
(Translation: William Andrews)

112Television Dramas

The Rise of On-demand
Streaming Services andthe Challenge of Screenwriters
Kotaki Tetsuya / Nakamachi Ayako

The hottest trend in the recent television drama scene is the rise of
on-demand streaming services. As represented by Spark (Hibana)(Yoshimoto Kōgyō, NHK, Netflix / 2016), Solitary Gourmet (Kodoku
no Gurume) (MBS, Netflix / 2016) and others, television networks anddistributors are actively working on co-productions and some of thedramas are broadcast via ground wave, making their presence stronger

113

both in volume and quality. Satellite television broadcasters are also
continuing to produce original dramas, which include Fujisawa
Shūhei: New Drama Series – Bridge Stories (Fujisawa Shūhei Shin
Dorama Sirīzu – Hashi Monogatari) on Jidaigeki Senmon Channel andWeakling Pedal (Yowamushi Pedaru) on BS Skapa!. The changes in theenvironment surrounding the media have affected the world of television dramas. With this trend in mind, a new category called “Satellite
and Streamed Drama” was established for the Tokyo Drama Awards
and in 2017, Midnight Diner (Shinya Shokudo) (Netflix) and Weakling
Pedal (BS Skapa!) both won the Award for Excellence in the Satellite
and Streamed Drama category.
Let us take a look at the world of television dramas in Japan
during 2017. In terms of programming, the fact that TV Asahi

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TELEVISION DRAMAS

allocated A Comfortable Home (Yasuragi no Sato) to the afternoon
time slot (12:30–12:50) drew attention. Fuji Television Network’s
Tokai TV has been broadcasting television dramas in the afternoon
slot since 1964 with Snow Burning (Yuki Moe) but this trend ended
after Tears of the Storm (Arashi no Namida) aired in February 2016
due to difficulties in the situation of programing and production.
However, TV Asahi took on the challenge of inserting a drama seriescatered for the elderly into this time slot.
A Comfortable Home (director: Fujita Meiji and others, chief producer: Igarashi Fumio, producer: Nakagome Takuya) was a serial
drama for the afternoon time slot that was planned by Kuramoto Sō,
who is now 83 years old, as “a drama series about the elderly, made forthe elderly and created by the elderly”, taking a realist approach to the114

rapid increase in the number of elderly viewers. Kikumura Sakae(played by Ishizaka Kōji) used to be a successful screenwriter during
the golden age of television and he enters an exclusive home for theelderly called “Yasuragi no Sato (A Comfortable Home)”, which
admits only people who were successful in the world of television.
He reencounters actors and actresses who dominated the TV world(played by Yachigusa Kaoru, Asaoka Ruriko, Satsuki Midori, Nogiwa
Yōko, Kaga Mariko, Fuji Tatsuya, Mickey Curtis and YamamotoKei), a singer (played by Arima Ineko) and a musician (played by
Kamijō Tsunehiko) among others. Through the exchanges among thecharacters, the various yearnings that the elderly have are delivered
through the dialogues that are rich in nuance such as “I want to meet
my wife not when she was young but when she has aged and is about
to die because there’ll be more to talk about.” At the same time, thepresent television world is criticized with humour to give unboundedtribute to the television culture. The drama won the Tokyo Drama
Award for Best Screenplay in 2017.
This afternoon drama series was rerun in the morning time slot
on BS Asahi and the initial goals, including the targeted viewing rate,
were achieved. It was followed by Totto-chan! (director: Hoshida
Yoshiko, cast: Seino Nana, Matsushita Nao and Yamamoto Kōji).
The screenwriter Ōishi Shizuka turned it into a carefully-writtenfamily-history drama about Kuroyanagi Tetsuko (a famous actressand talk show host, etc.) and her family, and contributed to theongoing development of the renewed afternoon drama series.
If A Comfortable Home was a challenge to the programming ofdrama series, TBS’s serial drama titled Quartet (directed by Doi
Nobuhiro, Kaneko Fuminori and others) was a mentally stimulating
drama through Sakamoto Yūji’s script, which could not be catego-

115

rized into a certain type of drama. Four men and women in theirthirties, who look like social dropouts, come to know each otherwhen they are practicing their musical instruments in a karaoke box,
form a quartet and start living together in a villa located in Karuizawa(a mountain resort in Nagano Prefecture). It was a drama based on
dialogues among complete strangers, which made us think about life
choices and human relations.
Each character’s persistence (habit) is expressed subtly in theirconversations right from the beginning. For instance, they start anendless discussion about whether lemon juice should be sprinkled on
the fried chicken served on the dining table. They seem to be foolingaround when they mock each other and persist in their own theories
in all seriousness, but it also reflects their unconscious persistence(way of thinking). The drama elucidates the habits that are not even

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distinct personalities of the characters and mirrors their respective
family relations being jeopardized by their habits. Maki Maki (playedby Matsu Takako) and her husband (played by Kudō Kankurō), who
has disappeared, are both lying and their lies have consequences. The
lie of Sebuki Suzume (played by Mitsushima Hikari) is clouded byher hatred toward her father. The complex toward his elite family
creeps into the persistence of Beppu Tsukasa (played by Matsuda
Ry ū hei). The persistence of Iemori Yutaka (played by Takahashi
Issey) has led him to divorce his wife. Above all, these conflicts are
depicted not as symbols, but as feelings, expressed by words revealing
uncertain and insecure states of mind, which is also the appeal of
Sakamoto Yūji’s new style of dramaturgy. The drama won the Award
for Excellence in the Serial Drama category of the Tokyo Drama
Awards 2017.
116

The good thing about NHK’s Morning Drama Series (asadora)is that the producers are constantly trying to take on new challenges such as having a non-Japanese actress play the heroine in
Massan (latter half of 2014) and setting the period of Sunshiny Asa(Asa ga Kita) (latter half of 2015) to the last days of the shogunate
rule, which was an earlier time setting than the previous morning
dramas. Hiyokko aired during the first half of 2017 was also a challenging scheme in a sense. The heroine was a girl, born to a very
normal farming family, and in the drama, all she did was to go to
Tokyo from Oku Ibaraki in the heart of Ibaraki Prefecture, andwork at a transistor radio factory and a restaurant in Akasaka.
Nevertheless, even though the heroine, the setting and the story
were very plain and ordinary, the atmosphere and the stream oftime that the drama created for half a year were quite relaxing towatch. The screenplay was written by Okada Yoshikazu and it was
directed by Kurosaki Hiroshi.
The story of Hiyokko is about an ordinary girl and it begins in
1964, which is the year when the first Tokyo Olympics was held
during the peak of the high economic growth period in Japan. The
protagonist is in her third year of senior high school and her name isYatabe Mineko (played by Arimura Kasumi). She lives in Oku
Ibaraki, where green fields spread out, and is leading an idyllic life
surrounded by her grandfather (played by Furuya Ikkō), mother(played by Kimura Yoshino), and her little sister and brother. She has
good friends called Tokiko and Mitsuo and commutes to school withthem. However, she feels a bit lonely because her father (played by
Sawamura Ikki) is away from home as he has gone to Tokyo to dosome extra work for the family. First of all, plenty of time is taken to
carefully depict how she spends time with her family, such as talking

117

about things that happened that day, taking meals and tending thefields. The moments of life that are not dramatic at all are made tofeel precious and irreplaceable. The atmosphere and time made by
the family and how they spend time together become the drama in
Hiyokko. Soon they stop hearing from her father, who had gone toTokyo. Therefore, Mineko goes to Tokyo and starts working there inorder to look for her father. However, even at the transistor radio
factory, which is her first workplace, and then at the restaurant in
Akasaka, she spends time in the same way as she has done with herfamily back in Ibaraki. In the last week of the series, she finds out
from an actress called Setsuko (played by Kan’no Miho), who lives
alone in the same apartment, that she used to live with Mineko’s
father and that he has lost his memory. Setsuko opens her heart andsays to Mineko, “I’ve always wanted to live in a place like this...It’s like

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being with my family and I feel at home here. We can talk about anything, both good things and bad. We can laugh together and eat
meals together…”
If the asadora series Hiyokko was a drama providing a sense of“relaxation”, the word “comforting” goes well with Miwotsukushi
Cookbook (Mi wo Tsukushi Ryōrichō), which is a period drama series
broadcast on Saturdays, also on NHK. The drama features a plain
and modest girl called Mio (played by Kuroki Haru), who comes toEdo (i.e. former name for Tokyo) from Kamigata (i.e. Osaka), encounters various people and grows into a competent cook, putting malechefs into shame. The original story (written by Takada Kaori) was
already interesting and to add to that, the “comforting” aura createdin the television version was mesmerizing (screenplay by Fujimoto
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Yuki, directed by Shibata Takeshi and Satō Mineyo).
First, the viewer is attracted to how Kuroki Haru alluringly
expresses the personality of the heroine, who has plain features but anice smile. The storyline, which delivers the warm feeling of thepeople around the heroine without getting too sentimental, the set
and lighting, which gently highlight the acting at the Inari shrine,
shops and tenements, as well as all the other elements of the sort
gently surround the drama about “eating”. Besides each character’ssorrow and how they show their compassion to others all the more
for having experienced sadness, the drama portrays the difference
between the food culture of Edo and the Kamigata region (i.e. Kyoto
and Osaka) and the passion about the food ingredients. The elaborate
and graceful rendering without any contrived depiction makes the“people” and “food” in this drama look beautiful.

Two dramas portraying overprotective mothers and their daughters, namely Overprotected Kahoko (Kahogo no Kahoko) (Nippon TV)
and then Mother, Can I Quit Being Your Daughter? (Okāsan, Musume
wo Yamete Iidesuka?) (NHK) were broadcast one after another.
Overprotected Kahoko (screenplay by Yukawa Kazuhiko, directedby Nagumo Seiichi and others) is a story about Kahoko (played by
Takahata Mitsuki), who is inspired by a young man (Takeuchi
Ryōma) she met at her university, and how she eventually gains independence. Kahoko is attracted to the young man, and her aspiration
to leave home and to have a family of her own gets stronger. Her
mother (played by Kuroki Hitomi) is attached to her daughter and is
not able to let go of her, while her father (played by Tokitō Saburō)
has no say, and their daughter Kahoko cannot do anything by herself.
It was a comedy caricaturing such family but at the same time, it wasa classic love comedy about a fine young man stealing the heart of a

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young woman, who had been living in a bubble. Mother, Can I Quit
Being Your Daughter? (screenplay by Inoue Yumiko, directed by
Kasaura Tomochika) is a family drama about the severe dependency
relationship between a mother and daughter. Mitsuki (played byHaru) is a teacher at senior high school and whenever she encountersa problem, she would call her mother, whose name is Akiko (playedby Saitō Yuki), to seek for advice. Akiko gives advices to her daughter thoroughly. For Akiko, who is a full-time mom, Mitsuki is heralter ego and motivation in life. Matsushia Taichi (played by Yagira
Yūya) works for a house builder and is in charge of their new house.
Akiko takes a liking for him but before long, Mitsuki starts dating
him as if to turn away from her mother. Akiko gets shaken by her
daughter growing away from her and starts falling apart as she tries
to hold on to her daughter. The unfocused bewilderment of theTheatre in Japan

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mother and daughter in Mother, Can I Quit Being Your Daughter? waspainful to watch.
These two serial dramas were both based on original screenplays
and reflected one extreme aspect of families in today’s society withdifferent touches.
Inoue Yumiko also wrote the screenplay for Emergency
Interrogation Room (Kinkyū Torishirabe-shitsu) (directed by TsunehiroJōta and Motohashi Keita), which became a quality human drama. If
Mother, Can I Quit Being Your Daughter? was a human drama with astrong focus on the workmanship, then the latter is more or less apiece of entertainment dealing with social subjects that was turned
into a thrilling psychological suspense drama.
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Makabe Yukiko (played by Amami Yū ki) is an interrogatorworking for the Emergency Interrogation Department (Kinkyū Jian
Taiō Torishirabe-han), which is commonly called “Kintori”, and she
conducts investigations in a special interview room that is fully
equipped with audio and video recording facilities for visualization.
Of course she is not alone. With other staff members of “Kintori”(played by Tanaka Tetsushi, Denden, Ōsugi Ren and Kohinata
Fumiyo), she wages seesaw psychological warfare with vicious criminals. The series began in 2014, and after the bills on criminal justicereforms were enacted in May 2016, police dramas conditioned on visualization seemed more real. Yukiko and her team deal with cases
and face issues related to a broad range of subject matters such as solitary elderly people falling in love, the severity of the longevity society,the aid and abet of mercy killing, reinvestigation of false accusations,
how investigations should be carried out, how compliance and apologies should be dealt with and so forth. Saying, “every behavior has aconvincing motive,” she probes into the psychology of the possible
suspects and queries them eloquently. In this police drama, the verbal
sparring and the exchange of words between Makiko and the suspects
are full of thrilling implications. In other words, the dramaturgy of
the “psychological investigation using words” presupposing visualization has borne fruit in the form of entertainment. There is also theappeal of the relationship among the staff of the investigative team.
Yukiko spews venoms to the male team members, either right into
their faces or by looking away at times. Moreover, even when people
call her “Obahan” (derogatory way to call middle-aged woman), shedoes not care. However, instead of setting Yukiko against the teammembers unnecessarily, ordinary day-to-day workplace scenes are
depicted to make the suspenseful team investigation, which is basedon the members’ non-verbal synchronization, even more appealing.
When it comes to TBS’s serial dramas originally written by

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Ikeido Jun, screenplay by Yatsu Hiroyuki and directed by Fukuzawa
Katsuo, we are immediately reminded of passionate corporate
dramas including Hanzawa Naoki (starring Sakai Masato / 2013) and
Downtown Rocket! (staring Abe Hiroshi / 2015). Land King (Rikuō)
created by the same members was no exception. How the disadvantaged (the employees in weak positions and a president of a smaller
business) challenge the powerful (big firms) to make their dreams
come true is portrayed passionately. In Land King, the protagonist
Miyazawa Kōichi (played by Yakusho Kōji) is the fourth-generationpresident of a traditional company called “Kohazeya” that has been
manufacturing traditional tabi socks, and tries to revitalize the small
company. Miyazawa is suffering because the demand for tabi socks
is declining year by year but one day, by mere accident, he becomesinterested in running shoes and sets out developing running shoes

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by making use of the sewing technique and other skills that he had
acquired through producing tabi socks. Meanwhile, Mogi Hiroto(played by Takeuchi Ryōma), who is a marathon runner having
problems with his leg injury, is frustrated by the high-and-mighty
attitude of his sponsor. In the drama, the passion and bond of thetwo characters are depicted by crossing their timelines. By creatinga moving scene in every episode as well as using heroic music, imagesof the sun glaring down and large crowd scenes, the story is portrayedpassionately and delicately. It is an entertainment sending rousing
cheers to people who work, which is a consistent theme in Ikeido’s
novels. It may sound strange to refer to Agawa Sawako as a veteranrookie but she did shine with dynamic energy when she played thepart of Masaoka Akemi, who headed the sewn products division.
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As for one-off dramas, Prison Break (Hagoku) (TV Tokyo), which
depicted the struggle between a runaway prisoner and a prison guard
during the wartime, and Kurara: The Dazzling Life of Hokusai’s
Daughter (Kurara – Hokusai no Musume) (NHK), which depicted the
crazy pathos of a female painter set in the world of ukiyo’e (i.e. woodblock prints of the fleeting world during the Edo period), were by far
the best.
Prison Break was adapted into a television drama from Yoshimura
Akira’s famous novel for the first time in 32 years, and man’s primordial aspirations and sufferings were depicted intensely through thescreenplay written by Ikehata Shunsaku, the direction of Fukagawa
Yoshihiro and the acting of Beat Takeshi and Yamada Takayuki. The
drama takes place in the 17th year of the Showa Era (1942) when there
was a growing sense of urgency in the midst of the Pacific War. Urata
Susumu (played by Beat Takeshi) is the chief warden of Kosuge Prison

in Tokyo and he is informed that an inmate named Sakuma Seitarō(played by Yamada Takayuki), who has been sent to life in prison, hasescaped from Akita Prison. The drama depicts the struggle between
Urata, the prison guard, and Sakuma, a habitual jail breaker. In otherwords, “the meaning of life” is questioned under extreme situations oflife and death. Sakuma shows his tremendous desire to escape in the
super-cold Abashiri Prison because he longs to be free; the prison
guards are driven into the corner by Sakuma’s strong desire to escape;Urata acts heroically by saving the lives of prisoners in the Great
Kanto Earthquake but loses his family as a consequence; andSakuma’s wife (played by Mitsushima Hikari) lives in poverty but stilltalks about her love for her husband. Prison Break turned into a heavy
human drama because each member of the four parties were full ofenergy. “If Japan is destroyed, everyone will forget him. And then123

he’ll be free…I want Japan to lose the war!” The madness acted out by
Yamada and Takeshi’s quiet but intense gaze were wonderful butthese words written by Ikehata Shunsaku also struck home. It won
the grand prix in the Single Drama category of the Tokyo Drama
Awards 2017 and the Grand Prix of MIPCOM BUYERS’AWARD
for Japanese Drama held in Cannes, France.
Kurara: The Dazzling Life of Hokusai’s Daughter (original novel
written by Asai Makate, screenplay by Ōmori Mika and directed by
Katō Taku) was aired as NHK’s special drama and it portrayed half
the life of O’ei (played by Miyazaki Aoi), who was the daughter of thegenius painter Katsushika Hokusai (played by Nagatsuka Kyōzō) andalso an accomplished painter in her own right. The visual tone of thedrama leaves us feeling the deep aesthetics of the female painter.
O’ei’s eyes sparkle when she sees the flame from a fire that has broken
out faraway, saying, “What a bloody colour!” She is fascinated by the

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deep blue pigment (Bengalese blue) used by Zenjir ō (played by
Matsuda Ry ū hei), who studied painting under Hokusai, and shedtears when she identifies her affection toward Zenjiro with the soft
blue colour. While she paints Yoshiwara Night Scene (Yoshiwara
Kōshi Sakinozu), she reaches a deep state of mind and says, “The worldis made up of light and shadows. Shadows give shapes to everything
and light makes them emerge.” Hokusai teaches her how to prepare
herself to become a professional painter, saying, “You must clamp
your teeth together and show the world your works even if you are
not satisfied with them.” O’ei continues to paint single-mindedly andmutters, “I want to be a good painter, too.” Each character is full ofburning passion for beauty. Through light and shadow in the studio,
the illumination from the licensed quarters in Yoshiwara, the brightcolours, and the background pictures of Edo painted with light ink, it
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was elevated into a deep human drama about art. The drama won theGrand Prix in the National Arts Festival of the Cultural Agency.
In 2017, the Tokyo Drama Awards held under The International
Drama Festival in Tokyo, which is aimed at delivering Japanese television dramas internationally, marked its tenth year. With the international market in mind, dramas with high marketability have been
awarded for ten years and nowadays the award is well known domestically as well. Among the award-winning dramas in 2017, the dramathat deserves special mention is the Turkish television drama titled
ANNE (the international title is Mother, directed by Merve Girgin
Aytekin and screenplay written by Berfu Ergenekon) that won theSpecial Award for Foreign Drama. It was a remake of Mother(directed by Sakamoto Yūji, Nippon TV) that won the Award for
Excellence in the Serial Drama category of the Tokyo Drama Awards

2010 and it was very popular in Turkey, where it had the highest viewership (originally it consisted of ten 46-minute long episodes, which
was then remade into thirty-three 110-minute long episodes). Additionally, ANNE has been sold to more that twelve countries including
Latin American countries such as Mexico and Chili, East European
countries such as Croatia and Servia as well as Indonesia. Moreover,in October 2017, Kadin (the international title is WOMAN), which is aremake of Nippon TV’s Woman – My Life for My Children went on
air and on the day it was broadcast, it achieved the second highest
rating among all the programmes broadcast in entire Turkey. The
sale of Mother as a scripted format in South Korea closed before it
entered the Turkish market and the remake version is on air fromJanuary 2018.
“J Series Festival” is held as part of the International Drama
Festival in Tokyo to publicize Japanese television dramas abroad. Up

125till now, it has been held in Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and othercountries, and at the 2017 festival in Indonesia, Isomura Hayato, who
appeared in the asadora series Hiyokko, Ōgoe Yūki, who starred in
Weakling Pedal, and Yahagi Honoka, who starred in Playful Kiss
(Itazura na Kiss), among others took part in talk shows.
While selling formats for television dramas has been successful,regional television stations have started to look for foreign counterparts to work on co-productions. A drama titled Under the Same Sky(Tōku Hanareta Onaji Sora no Shita de / Duoi Bau Troi Xa Cach)(screenplay by Shimojima Mieko and directed by Matsuda Ayato, Vu
Truong Khoa and Dao Duy Phuc) was made through a collaboration
between Ryūkyū Asahi Broadcasting and Vietnam Television, whichis the state-run broadcaster of Vietnam. The story is about Eri(played by Miyagi Karin), a reporter working for a local television

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station in Okinawa, who starts collecting information on the relation
between Okinawa and Vietnam after encountering a student from
Vietnam, who is called Hai (played by Quang Su). Other than theirconversations about the warplanes that departed from Okinawa tohead for the battlefields to fight in the Vietnamese War and therespective country’s distressing memories of war, the cultural differences are depicted as well. Through the drama, you can also learn
about the different styles of expression in both countries’ television
dramas such as the elements that make up romantic dramas andlikings for particular dialogues. It won the Award for Excellence inthe Local Drama category of the Tokyo Drama Awards 2017.
I would also like to add that The Full-Time Wife Escapist (Nigeru
wa Haji daga Yaku ni tatsu) (TBS) broadcast in 2016 won The GrandPrix of the Serial Drama category at the Tokyo Drama Awards 2017.
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It also won the Japan Commercial Broadcasters Association Award
for Best Drama.

Kōtaki, Tetsuya
Kōtaki Tetsuya is a critic and also a professor emeritus at Nihon University(specializing in the history of television culture). He has also held positions as
the executive director for the Association of Broadcast Critics, Special Advisor to
the Executive Committee of The International Drama Festival in Tokyo, thedirector of the Consortium for the Promotion of Japan Broadcast Script Archives
in Japan (NKAC), a member of the Broadcast Program Collection Advisory
Committee, the Chairman of Galaxy Awards Recommended Project Committee,
a member of the Reviewing Committee for the National Arts Festival of the
Agency for Cultural Affairs, a member of Broadcast Ethics & Program
Improvement Organization (BPO) among others. He has supervised A
Handbook for the History of Television (Terebi Doramashi Handbook) (published by
Jiyū Kokumin-sha), co-written The Fifty Years of Television Scenario Writers (Terebi
Sakkatachi no Gojūnen) (NHK Publishing) and has worked on other publications.
He is currently working on The History of Television Dramas (Terebi Doramashi)(Eijinsha), which is scheduled for publication this year.

Nakamachi, Ayako
Nakamachi Ayako is a professor at Nihon University College of Art. She is also amember of the Reviewing Committee of the National Arts Festival of the
Agency for Cultural Affairs, and a member of reviewing boards of various
awards related to broadcasting such as serving as the Vice Chairman of theTokyo Drama Awards of the International Drama Festival in Tokyo. She has
written critiques on television drama, mainly in newspapers such as This Line
from That Drama (Ano Dorama Kono Serifu) in Nikkei Newspaper and “Antenna”
in Yomiuru Shimbun. Her published works include 21 Quotable Lines in Japanese
Television Dramas (Nippon no Terebi Dorama Nijūichi no Mei-serifu) (publishedby Kōbundō).

127(Translation : Sumida Michiyo)

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DEVELOPMENTS IN JAPAN AND OVERSEAS

The Imperial Theatre was completed in March 1911.
© The Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University

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DEVELOPMENTS IN JAPAN and OVERSEAS

The Birth of Shingeki
Ozasa Yoshio
In 2017, Bungaku-za Theatre (i.e. Literary Theatre), which is the oldest“shingeki” (modern theatre) troupe in Japan, celebrated its eightiethanniversary. On this occasion, I would like to look back at thehistory of shingeki.
Looking from another angle, this subject is related to howWestern theatre was introduced to Japan. In this regard, as with somany other things, the big turning point was the Meiji Restoration.
In 1868, Japan officially opened the country and joined theinternational community. Among historians, it is conventional todefine the time before the Meiji Restoration as the pre-modern period
and the time afterwards as the modern period and I will follow thesedefinitions in this report.
Pre-modern Japanese theatre consists of Noh, Kabuki andBunraku puppet theatre. They have all been designated as
UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage. They are also forms ofentertainment that still attract many audiences today and are notmuseum relics as one may imagine from the word “heritage”. All ofthese forms of theatre have continued for hundreds of years.
Although they have undergone some changes, they have continued asliving traditions. This is very different from ancient Greek theatre,
which is regarded as the origin of Western theatre but is not a living
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tradition. We can only guess at how it might have been performed
from the remaining texts, masks and the remains of theatres. On theother hand, you can still go and see Noh, Kabuki and Bunraku at theatres dedicated to these traditional art forms.
The three theatre styles, namely Noh, Kabuki and Bunraku, arealso referred to as Japanese classical theatre or traditional Japanesetheatre and they share certain characteristics as described in thefollowing:1) Only men can take part, whether it be actors, playwrights
or staff.
2) Music and dance are deeply imbedded in classical theatre
forms. For instance, Noh will not work without the chanting,hayashi flute and percussion music called yōkyoku; in Kabuki,
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musical accompaniment called geza is often used during theplay and gidayū was indispensable for Kabuki plays that originally came from Bunraku, and the actors perform to themusic. Moreover, dance was and is still considered an independent act on its own and therefore, good Kabuki actors arealso excellent dancers; in Bunraku, puppeteers manipulate thepuppets to the gidayū sung by a narrative singer called a tayū
and to the music played by shamisen players.
3) A s mentioned above, each of these theatre forms had to be
performed at specific theaters, such as Noh at Noh theatres,
Kabuki at Kabuki theatres and Bunraku at dedicated spaces,
and not elsewhere.
4) As can be seen from the fact that men play female roles, at avery fundamental level, classical theatre forms are unconnected132

with realism.
5) All characters are portrayed as being examples of “yakugara”
or “role types” rather than unique individuals.
6) T heatre existed just for the sake of entertainment and fornothing else whatsoever.
Now I would like to look at what kind of theatre the Japanesepeople discovered when Japan came into contact with the West for real.
Briefly speaking, women performing on stage as actresses musthave been the most striking discovery.
From the end of the Edo Period till the early years of the Meiji
Period, the Shogunate (i.e. feudal government) and the new Meiji Government sent delegations abroad several times. Acknowledging that

Western culture and civilization were more advanced, for Japan tocatch up and overtake the West became a national policy by the mottoof increasing wealth and military power as well as “De-Asianizationand Entering Europe (Datsu A Nyū Ō)”. The latter means “leaving
Asia that is backwards in every respect and to take a place among
European countries.
The delegations that were dispatched overseas to prepare for
implementing the new policies were invited to theatres at every
Western country they visited. Each country had its own state-run
theatre or royal theatre, where people socialized regardless of class orsocial status. The members of the delegation were at first surprised bythis fact because in Japan, people from the upper class were prohibited from entering theatres, which were con133

sidered as places that should be excluded fromthe society.
When the members of the delegation realized that it was quite normal to be invited totheatres, they thought it would be better tohave prior knowledge of the shows performed
there. That is why it became necessary to havesomeone explain to the group about the plays
and these people began to read the plays
beforehand so that they can explain the storyline to the rest of the delegation before
watching the play. Fukuchi Ōchi was one ofthem. Ōchi, who later became a journalist andeventually a playwright, was also one of the

Picture of Fukuji Ōchi by Kobayashi Kiyochika(from Instructions in the Fundamentals of
Success (Kyodo Risshi no Motoi) published in1885) © The Trustees of the British Museum

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people who worked on the creation of the Kabukiza Theatre.
Under the slogan of catching up with the West, there was a big
wave of “reform” in every field during the early stages of the Meiji
Period. The word “reform” was combined with words such as literature, women, clothes, food and beverages, houses, schools, education,
bureaucrats, novels, religion, manners and chignon hairstyles to create
idioms. Theatre was also no exception.
The delegations’ experiences were used for “theatre reform”.
Fukuchi Ōchi, who had been reading plays before watching them inorder to explain to the members of the delegation, came to know thatplays considered as works of literature existed. Up till then, plays
were written by the writers or actors who belonged to a particular
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theatre. Seeing the conditions in the West, Ōchi could justify the ideathat anyone, not just a writer could write a play. As with Ōchi, whobecame one of the founders of Kabukiza Theatre, the system waschanged so that everyone was able to build theatres at their own free
will. Additionally, women played female characters in plays that thedelegation saw in Europe. The actresses also performed in proscenium theatres, where a curtain divided the stage and the audience
seating, which did not exist in Japan—though there were curtains at
Kabuki theatres, there were also permanent hanamichi runways thatwere extended outside the curtains. Therefore, people began to feelthat it was necessary to create Western-style theatres, where the worldof the stage was clearly divided from the audience by a curtain thatwas raised and lowered, and also to encourage the birth of actresses in
the real sense.
As part of this flow of events, there were various plans to build anational theatre like the ones the delegations saw in the West.
However, there were various obstacles to this particular goal and it
was not until March 1911 when the Imperial Theatre, built by leadersof the business world, became the first Western-style theatre with astage and audience area that were completely divided by a proscenium
arch and raised curtain. At the new theatre, actresses, who hadlearned Kabuki-style acting, performed on stage with Kabuki actors.
Of course, there were actresses in “new theatre (shin engeki)”, (*)
which was the first form of theatre that emerged in the modern
period, besides Kabuki. Kawakami Otojirō, who had actually visitedthe West and was the leader of the new theatre movement, made it aprinciple to cast women to play female roles in plays and the actressin his theatre troupe was his wife Sada Yakko. However, there is a
crucial difference between Sada Yakko and the actresses in shingeki

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The Imperial Theatre © The Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University

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that emerged slightly later. She used to be a geisha (i.e. professional
female entertainer) and as a geisha, she danced old-style dance andwas also familiar with traditional music, which meant she was notalien to the old theatre system for better or worse. Moreover, “newtheatre” had a deep connection to Kabuki both in terms of acting
style and direction. The actresses who performed at the Imperial
theatre and in new theatre productions were so to speak a bridge forthe birth of shingeki actresses.

Then how were actresses born in shingeki?
When Japan entered the Meiji Era, the elites who were interested
in novels and plays came to know that plays existed as literature andcould be separated from live theatre. This was how translated literature came about. As people thought that Western literature were136

superior, works by Western literary giants were translated and introduced one after another. It included works by writers such as William
Shakespeare to begin with as well as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Victor Hugo, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Anton Chekov, Maxim Gorky,
Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen and Maurice Maeterlinck.
As a matter of fact, Kawakami Otojirō, who was the founder of“new theatre”, also had his eyes on plays written by Western playwrights. However, when it came to putting them on, since theJapanese were still not familiar with foreigners or their livelihood, heworked on the plays by transferring the world and the characters in
the plays to those of Japanese settings. In other words, he turned theplays into adaptations. However, this approach created distortions inmany ways and reversely led to misunderstanding of the writers andplays. Some scholars of literature believed that Western plays should

be translated rather than adapted when they were mounted and actually took action, setting this stance as the main goal. The foremost
figure was Tsubouchi Shōyo, who was also a translator of plays by
Shakespeare, and a group called the Literary Society (Bungei Kyōkai)was founded in 1906 led by Tsubouchi. The members sought to indicate the future direction of theatre through Shakespeare’s plays. Aftera preparatory stage, the group presented the full version of Hamlet in
May 1911. It was put on at the Imperial Theatre and female characters
were played by actresses, namely Ophelia by Matsui Sumako andGertrude by Kamiyama Uraji. It turned out to be an epoch-making
incident for being the first translated play in Japan with men andwomen performing together and the moment Japanese theatre
departed from its classical tradition.
Needless to say, preparations were being made behind the scenes

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Hamlet (Hamuretto) presented by the Literary Society (May 1911) / Gertrude playedby Kamiyama Uraji (back left) © The Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda
University

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that enabled actresses to emerge
at this timing. In 1909, theLiterary Society inaugurated
a drama school and started
to train actors, both men andwomen. In other words, an
education for amateurs, who
initially had nothing to do withtheatre, to become professional
Hamlet presented by the Literary Society (May 1911) /Ophelia played by Matsui Sumako© The Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University

actors had already started.
The training bore fruit as thesaid production of Hamlet andit had reputedly solved the

problem of the absence of actresses. Ibsen’s A Doll’s House presented
138

by the Literary Society in November that year at the Imperial Theater
made this point even clearer. Through the success of Matsui Sumako
playing Nora, the heroine, a new profession of shingeki actresses
gained citizenship. At the same time, it consequently expanded thenotion of theatre beyond entertainment.
Nora decided to leave her family, abandoning her husband andchildren. Nora is not a character that can be approached through theclassical ideas of role types. Moreover, the example of Nora went
against traditional Japanese ideas about women. The way Nora acted
stirred a controversy. The people in charge of education for women,
which had begun when Japan entered the Meiji Period, banned students from watching the play, saying that Nora’s behavior went
against the basic education policy. On the other hand, some women
saw the future of Japanese women through Nora’s choice of living for

A Doll’s House (Ningyō no Ie) presented by the Literary Society (November 1911) / Nora
played by Matsui Sumako © The Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University

her own sake, as Japanese women had been subservient to men for along time during the feudal era. In short, one stage production captured the attention of the society and some audiences began to identify their own way of life with Nora. Theatres are not just for enter-139

tainment and can at times provide time and space to influence boththe people’s way of living and the society. The Japanese had never had
such experience before and it was also the first time for them toencounter an individual like Nora, who had her own identity and had
decided to live independently.
The plays that made the audience think about those kinds ofissues were also made up of dialogues and were mounted as straightplays purely based on text. There was neither dance or music to overshadow the drama as in classical Japanese theatre, and the stage andthe audience were divided in the theatre. On the other side of thecurtain that served as the fourth wall, living spaces were replicated,
and the plays were founded on aesthetics of realism. They were plays
born in the modern era and were different from previous plays.

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Therefore, they required a new naming and the name “shingeki” wasdevised in due course. Regardless of whether the play was original ortranslated, the word “shingeki” indicated pure spoken drama performed by both men and women. These were the essential characteristics of shingeki, which were different from classical plays and thesetype of plays are most often and widely performed as of today.
* This “new theatre” developed by Kawakami Otojirō later developed into a
melodramatic style of theatre with both onnagata and eventually actresses
called “shinpa” or “new wave theatre” to distinguish it from Kabuki, or “oldwave theatre.” However, “shinpa” in its later form is very different from thesituation when Kawakami was first working, so the term “new theatre” will
be used here instead.

Ōzasa Yoshio
140Ōzawa was born in Osaka in 1941 and graduated from Waseda University. After
working as an editor for a theatre magazine, he became a free-lance theatre
critic. He worked as a professor at Osaka University of Arts from 1998 to 2007.
He has written books as represented by History of Japanese Contemporary
Theatre (Nihon Gendai Engeki-shi) (consisting of 8 volumes and was published by
Hakusuisha Publishing Co., Ltd.) and is currently writing The Whole History of
Shingeki in Japan (Nihon Shingeki Zenshi) (consisting of 3 volumes and to be
published by Hakusuisha Pubishing Co., Ltd.). He has received many prestigious
awards such as Yomiuri Prize for Literature and Minister of Education Award forFine Arts.
(Translation: Sumida Michiyo)

The gods in the “Great Prelude.” Upper level, from left: Daikokuten (Bandō Rakuzen),
Shiva (Onoe Kikunosuke), Naraen (Onoe Kikugorō), Bonten (Onoe Matsuya), Lower level,from left: Taiyōshin (Ichikawa Sadanji), Taishakuten (Nakamura Ganjirō). © Shochiku

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Developments in Japan and Overseas

Creating the New Kabuki
The Wars of Mahabharata
Aoki Go
When there is an order to write a play, I think that there are basically
two approaches. One is to listen to the voice inside myself and write.
The other is to listen to the heart of the person who has requested theplay. In the case of The Ultimate Indian Epic: The Wars of Mahabharata(Kiwame-tsuki Indo-den Mahābārata Senki) from the very beginning,
it was very clear that the second approach was needed.

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I think it was the winter of 2014 when theater critic Hasebe
Hiroshi introduced me to Onoe Kikunosuke, who said that he wasvery moved when he saw Miyagi Satoshi’s production of Mahabharata
and wanted me to write a kabuki version. I was very flattered, but
wondered, “why me?” and I wondered if I was up to the job. I’ve loved
kabuki since I was an elementary school student, but I’ve neverstudied it seriously and I have absolutely no knowledge of India or
the Mahabharata. Kikunosuke said that he was interested in having
me do it because he knew that in 2008 I had taken the very long
Manga story Glass Masks (Garasu no Kamen) and boiled it down intoa script for a musical play directed by Ninagawa Yukio, so first I reada digest of the Mahabharata. I was overwhelmed by the scale of theepic and considered refusing, but I was drawn by the happy temptation of the opportunity to work with kabuki and finally decided to142

accept the challenge.
I had seen the SPAC (Shizuoka Performing Arts Center) production of Mahabharata – Nalacharitam directed by Miyagi Satoshi andhe would be directing the kabuki production, so to begin with, I
thought it would be interesting to have Kikunosuke play two roles,
Damayanthi, the wife of King Nalan and as a male role, Karna andmapped out an overall plot. But none of the others agreed. The aim ofboth Kikunosuke and Miyagi Satoshi was to create a totally new
kabuki Mahabharata different from the SPAC production, so I madeKarna the center of the play and set to rewriting the plot.
It is said that the original of the Mahabharata is about 4 times aslong as the Bible and it is so long that the Japanese translation fromthe original text is still not complete. The title translates as “the great
Bharata clan.” It is a story of the gods and human beings, with the
Bharata clan the center of focus. Simplifying ruthlessly, you could saythat the story of thesecond half of the
Mahabharata is thestory of a struggle
for the k i ngsh ip
between 5 princes
and the 100 princes
that are their
cousins. But these 5

In rehearsal: (center) Onoe Kikunosuke (Karuna), (back) Nakamura Mantarō(Gatōkicha). © Shochiku

princes are not actually the children of the previous king. The previous king was burdened with a curse that said if he had sex with a woman, he would die.
These 5 princes are the children produced when the queen Kunti useda magical spell to attract the gods. The three older princes have Kunti
as their mother. The younger two princes are the children of the143

king’s secondary wife. But Kunti learned this magical spell when she
was still a virgin and she threw the boy that she had with the Sun
God into a river. This boy was raised by a carriage driver. He becomes
Karna. When Karna grows up, due to certain events, he becomes theenemy of the five princes and instead allies with Duryodhana, theoldest of the 100 princes.
I had a hunch that by making Karna the focus of the play, I
would be able to tell the story from the side of both Karna and theworld of the five princes and set about writing my rough first draft.
In this first draft, I modeled the first act on the kabuki play The
Thief, Ishikawa Goemon and Hideyoshi (Sanmon Gosan no Kiri.) (*1) In
the world of the gods, the Sun God falls in love with Kunti and wants
to have a child with her, but the god Taishakuten stops him. The
SPAC production began when the gods fall in love with Damayanthi

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and I was taking the same kind of starting point. Moreover, I wanted
to show events in the world of the gods as though they were taking
place on top of the gate of Nanzenji temple and then to have the set
piece rise on a stage lift to reveal the human world below.
When I read my first draft to the production staff, the overall
reaction was a desire to shape the entire story of the wars over thekingship so that it was clearly a war where humans are fighting inplace of the gods. The other request was to show Karna not as a dark
anti-hero, but as pure and noble hero that strives to carry out thewishes of the gods.
It was at this time that all of us had to re-recognize that one of
the main themes of this working process was thinking very carefully
about what aspects of the original could be changed and what aspects
must not be changed. Another request that emerged was the idea that144

somehow, the different scale of existence of human beings and thegods had to be distinguished very clearly theatrically. For this reason,
instead of Sanmon Gosan no Kiri, it was decided to model the opening
scene on the “Daijo :Great Prologue” of The
F o r t y - s e v e n L o ya l
Retainers (Kanadehon
Chūshingura.) (*2) Also,
even though thisbecame a part of theplan at this very earlystage, I could not write
speeches in proper
kabuki style. For the
final script, the actual
Finale: The final fight scene with Karuna (Onoe Kikunosuke)
using his bow and arrow, © Shochiku

lines were re-written by Kikunosuke and the literary department of
the Shochiku production company so that the use of words could
clearly indicate the differences in scale of existence of the gods,
royalty and non-royal humans.
With regard to this problem of what could be changed and what
had to be preserved, I think that it was Miyagi Satoshi who gave me
the hint that the key to this was probably in having a feeling ofrespect. He said that if you approach this production with the proper
respect for kabuki and the proper respect for the Mahabharata, toanswer to the question of what to preserve and what to change willprobably emerge naturally.
There was no risk that I would lose my respect for kabuki andthere were so many people around me that could give helpful advice
that I didn’t have to worry. For example, when I suggested that the145

five princes announce who they are like the five thieves in The Five
Thieves (Shiranami Gonin Otoko,) (*3) Kikunosuke had his own suggestion, that he wanted one scene to be a kabuki shosa (*4) dance and that
could be when Bhima, the third of the five princes falls in love withthe daughter of a monster in a forest. When I suggested that although
the climactic fight between Karna and Arjuna is with bows andarrows in the original, that might be hard to show in kabuki andmaybe this should be a fight with swords, Miyagi Satoshi said that if
we use banners in the fight it will be interesting and look right for
kabuki, so let’s keep it a fight with swords. Every time we had a script
conference, there were all kinds of ideas and I was always careful not
to miss any of these opinions, including my own. I watched several
kabuki plays on DVD that I had missed watching previously thatmight provide hints for this production. While so doing, I completed
a second and a third draft of the script.

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To pay proper respect to Indian culture and philosophy
required quite a bit of study. Miyagi Satoshi has spent years studying the subject and when I had questions about the nature of thedifferent gods or the caste system, he was a ceaseless source of helpfuladvice. I was full of questions, like the word “dharma” is translated
into Japanese with the word “hō,” meaning “law,” but what does
dharma really mean? How should I read and interpret the original
Mahabharata? How are the stories of the Mahabharata changed in theIndonesian shadow plays of Wayan Jawa? How should I understandthe section called Bhagavat Gita, known as “the poem of the gods”?
After conference after conference the discussion turned to
casting. When Nakamura Shichinosuke was selected to play
Duryodhana, the oldest of the one hundred princes, since he plays
both male and female roles, the idea popped up of transforming
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Duryodhana into a woman. Gradually the overall plan for the stage
set became clear. Finally this piece that was created by assembling
everyone’s voice took a shape that could be seen by everybody’s eyes.
In the end, I have no idea how many drafts I went through.
When I finally completed my script, Kikunosuke went through every
line himself, then, with the help of the literary division of Shochiku
made many fine changes in the exact wording. After that, finally the
script was complete and the summer of 2017 had already passed.
A play cannot be created by a person alone. Even a script cannot
be completed by one person. This is the experience I have every time I
write a script, but I have never felt that so strongly as I did with thisplay. I would like to take this opportunity to once again thank all thepeople whose cooperation made this play possible.
*1

In the kabuki play Sanmon Gosan no Kiri, the larger-than-life thief Ishikawa

Goemon wants to kill Mashiba Hisayoshi (the name used in the theaterfor the historical Toyotomi Hideyoshi) since he is the killer of Goemon’s
adoptive father. In the key scene which is the only part commonly
performed today, at dusk, Goemon sits on top of the gate to Nanzenji
temple in Kyoto. He looks out calmly at the view with the cherry trees
in full bloom and gloats that this is the realm that he rules. Men attack
Goemon, but he handily defeats them in a brief dance-like tachimawari fightscene. Then the entire set piece is raised on a stage lift to reveal Goemon’s
quarry standing under the gate disguised as a humble pilgrim.
*2

The “Daijo” or “Great Prologue” is the very stylized opening scene of a
jidaimono history play originating in the Bunraku puppet theater and it isfull of ritualized conventions and has a very solemn mood. Usually there
are very high-ranking characters like the emperor and imperial court
aristocrats or the shogun and high-ranking samurai lords and it takes
place in the imperial palace or an important temple or shrine. When the
curtain opens, all the characters look down and do not move, then when
the narrator speaks their name, they start to move as though a Bunraku
puppet were coming to life. Although this is a standard part of jidaimono
plays in the puppet theater, in kabuki, today it is only performed regularly
in Kanadehon Chūshingura.

*3

In the “Inase River” scene of Shiranami Gonin Otoko, or The Five Thieves,the thieves appear grandly on the hanamichi runway with big paperumbrellas and then, while they are being threatened by arresting men, one
by one describe themselves in leisurely speeches full of colorful images in a
poetic rhythm of alternating lines of seven and five syllables.

*4

In kabuki, a shosa is a dance or a dance drama.

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Aoki, GōIn 1997 he organized the theater troupe “Gring.” Since that time he has been
playwright and director for the group until it stopped activities in 2009. Hereceived acclaim for creating plays with dialogue deftly using the words ofordinary people. In 2013, he was sent by a special program of the Japanese
National Cultural Agency to spend a year studying in London. In recent years he
has tried a wide range of writing styles and in addition to his own productions,has written a rich variety of plays for many other theater troupe. He is also highly
regarded for his television dramas.
(Translation: Mark Ōshima)

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Ninagawa Macbeth, the enormous butsudan with the screen painting of a cherry tree
by Senoh Kappa (stage designer) © Watanabe Takahiro

Developments in Japan and Overseas

Thirty Years On, Remembering
Ninagawa and Macbeth
Rosalind Fielding

Thirty-two years since Ninagawa Yukio’s production Ninagawa
Macbeth was first seen in the UK, and exactly thirty years since
its London premiere in 1987, it was brought once more to Britain.
The original production received high critical acclaim and irreversibly launched Ninagawa into the awareness of UK audiences, andNinagawa’s relationship with the British theatre-world was very

fruitful and resulted in a number of tours and co-productions. It istherefore entirely fitting that the revival of Ninagawa Macbeth, theproduction which began it all, should be performed at the Barbican
Theatre in London in celebration of Ninagawa’s achievements. Part
revival and part memorial, the production ran for four days at the
Barbican (5-8 October) and a further two at the Theatre Royal in
Plymouth (13-14).
To mark the tour, a number of related events were held aroundthe UK, including a pre-show talk at the Barbican with Ninagawa’s
long-term collaborator Thelma Holt. Waseda University, the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute and the Japan Foundation hosted an event at the Embassy of Japan in the UK entitled‘Ninagawa Shakespeare: A Memorial Symposium’, attended by theJapanese ambassador, Tsuruoka Kōji, academics, Shakespeare students and admirers of Ninagawa’s work. I participated in a panel

149

called ‘Ninagawa Remembered’, alongside Shakespeare Institutedirector Michael Dobson, Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington
and director Phillip Breen. Dobson, a preeminent Shakespearean academic, spoke of his recollections of seeing Ninagawa’s productions
over the years, marking out Pericles (2003) in particular as a remarkable and unforgettable performance. Billington, who reviewed theoriginal with the much quoted ‘achingly beautiful’, spoke of his feelings about finally seeing Macbeth again after thirty years. He delivered
a powerful and moving tribute to the beauty and empathy inherent
in Ninagawa’s work, based on decades of watching his productions.
Breen, who had worked with Ninagawa and attended his rehearsals
in Saitama, also spoke of his experiences and memories of Ninagawa
the man and director. As a researcher working on contemporary
Shakespeare performance in Japan, I discussed the power of his

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Michael Dobson (left) and Michael Billington (right)

Phillip Breen (left) and author (right)

2015/16 Richard II and its connections to contemporary social anxieties, as well as his use of Matsuoka Kazuko’s translations in the Saino-kuni Shakespeare series. Finally, we spoke about his political visionand influence on the theatre world, both in Japan and overseas. The
event concluded with Kodama Ryūichi (Vice Director of the Theatre
Museum, Waseda) interviewing Nakamura Kyōzo about his experiences performing as a witch in Macbeth, his memories of working
150

with Ninagawa, and his thoughts on the place of Shakespeare in
Japanese theatre. The event provided a timely opportunity to sharevivid memories of Ninagawa’s productions from various perspectives
to an audience of around ninety, and to consider what both artists
and academics can do with his legacy from here. In his talk Breen
had said that Ninagawa was ‘as responsible as anyone for Shakespeare
becoming a world figure, not just an English export’, and this event,delivered to an international audience, only served as a reminderof that.

Nakamura Kyōzo, who played the witch in Ninagawa Macbeth

Ninagawa Macbeth is a legendary production both in Japanand overseas, famed for moving
the play to Japan in the AzuchiMomoyama period (1568-1600),
and for the enormous butsudan

Ninagawa Macbeth, Macbeth (Ichimura Masachika) under the cherry tree. © Kiyota Seigo

151(Buddhist family altar) framing the stage. I saw the 2017 production
three times, once at Ninagawa’s base in Saitama and twice at the
Barbican. Watching it for the first time in Saitama I was very awareof the production’s long history and influence on subsequent yearsof Shakespeare adaptations in both Japan and the UK, and its partin the Ninagawa legend. I saw it from a different perspective at the
Barbican, this time more aware that history was being re-played toa mixed audience, some of whom were returning to the production
and others who were seeing it for the first time. In Saitama we werein Ninagawa’s home theatre, but among the London crowd there
also seemed to be a sense of the production finally ‘coming home’.
For those who were lucky enough to see it (since every performance
was sold out), there was an undeniable sense of excitement and expectation in the auditorium. Each time it received a standing ovation,
intensifying when Ninagawa’s photograph was brought on during theTheatre in Japan

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curtain-call.
Times have changed in the interim between performances, and,arguably ushered in by Ninagawa and Holt’s collaboration, British
audiences are more familiar now with Japanese theatre than they werethirty years ago. It’s much harder now for critics to dismiss a nonEnglish language production purely because it is missing the familiar
Shakespearean lines, and this was evident in the almost overwhelmingly positive response to Macbeth. It received a sweep of four- andfive-star reviews, with many critics responding to its visuals and stylisation, as well as to the overlying sense of melancholy and tragedy.
Billington for example wrote that what made the production so powerful was that ‘Ninagawa’s gift for painterly spectacle is accompanied
by a sense of sadness at mankind’s folly and impermanence’, and The
Stage described it as ‘beautiful, horrific and deeply moving’. The
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reviews acknowledged its legendary status and the importance ofseeing it in the post-Ninagawa age, and for those who were watching
it first time there was a sense of its freshness and deep insight into theplay. Ōishi Keita, in particular, was praised for his affecting performance as Macduff, but the ensemble as a whole were well received.
There were differences between the audience reactions in the UK
and Japan, with the London audience laughing in unexpected places,
for example, and some people applauding when Banquo and Macbeth
appeared on horses. Subtitles were displayed on screens on either sideof the stage, which some argued were distracting, although others
wrote that the meanings were evident enough through the acting andvisuals. It’s certainly arguable that for a play as familiar as Macbeth isfor many people, subtitles are an unnecessary crutch that inevitably
draw attention away from the stage itself, and at some points there
was a dislocation between the subtitles and what the actors actuallyAfter London, Ninagawa Macbeth performed in Singapore © Piet Defossez / HoriPro Inc.

said, with for example ‘England’ substituted for ‘southern country’.
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But their inclusion also led to moments of frisson when the screens
failed to catch up with the actor and displayed nothing: in these
moments, were the actors gaining agency, or were they, like Malcolm
at the end of the production, shouting into the darkness?
During the event at the Embassy, I referred to Richard II as abaton for the next generation of theatre makers to take up, and despite
its age Ninagawa Macbeth is surely another. In his talk Nakamura said
he believed that this production should be preserved and performed
again and again ‘in ten, twenty, thirty, forty years time’. I had wondered at the time how the production would age, whether it would
still retain its meaning after another thirty years. And yet, leaving thematinee on Saturday, I overheard one young audience member
exclaiming to his parents that he had ‘never, and probably wouldn’t
again for a very long time’ seen anything like it. Macbeth is therefore
another baton, a tangible link with everything Ninagawa achieved

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and came to represent, and is a powerful testament to his ability tomove audiences in spite of age, location, and time. Ninagawa has
gone, but there’s no reason why his work cannot continue on withouthim. The soldiers leave for war, and the two women watching at theside of the stage cry as they hold up paper cranes.
A photograph of Ninagawa is brought on, and those in the audience not already standing surge to their feet. In London, in Tokyo,
Singapore, Hong Kong...
Fielding, Rosalind
Rosalind Fielding is a fourth-year Doctoral Candidate at the Shakespeare
Institute, University of Birmingham. Since March 2017 she has been a Visiting
Research Fellow at Waseda University. She graduated from the University ofManchester with a degree in Japanese Studies. Her current research is on thecontemporary hybrid performance of Shakespeare in Japan and Britain.

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Developments in Japan and Overseas
Talk Event“Theater Reviews and Theatrical Journalism”

Theatrical Criticism as an Instrument
to Raise Theater to the Level of Culture
Uchida Yoichi

In recent years, I have increasingly been considering the question of
why theater reviews exist. In the past, newspapers and magazines
monopolized the forums for expressing opinions on theater, but now
with SNS and blogs, anyone can express their opinions about a play.
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But even though it may look like theatrical criticism is flourishing, I
can’t help but feel that theatrical criticism is actually losing theimpact that it should have. What will become of theatrical criticism
in the future?
When the Japan Centre of the International Theater Institutegave me the assignment of writing on the theme of “Theater Reviews
and Theater Journalism,” to be honest, as someone working for anewspaper company, I was very hesitant. Both theater reviews andtheater journalism are right in the middle of a period of transition and
I was afraid that I couldn’t give a clear answer. But I was also tempted,
because this would be a chance to encounter many people withinterest in this question, so in the end, I accepted the assignment.
In order to organize the talk event “Theater Reviews andTheatrical Journalism” on which this article is based, I was fortunate
to have my senior colleague in the newspaper business Kitajima

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Takashi asking questions. He runs an unusual site that contains
reviews of small theater performances. In addition to Kitajima’s reliable guidance, I was also supported by the enthusiasm of the 40 participants on his site. Through them, I learned of the site NESTA (Nextgeneration Stage Alliance) run by college students, which posts
theater reviews and reports. Learning of all this activity, I was
ashamed that my ignorance led me to believe that theater criticism
was in a state of decline.
Nakamura Kichiemon is a kabuki actor who is constantly
seeking to raise the artistic level of kabuki. He once told me thatkabuki is supported by the common people and that it reached maturity in the early 19th century because of the advice of the many audience members who had seen a lot of kabuki and had very discerning
eyes. Even though kabuki is a commercial art form that depends on
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ticket sales to survive, it is only because it also has an aesthetic of notjust pandering to the public that it has reached high levels of achievement. Theatrical performances vanish with the end of a production,and therefore criticism is necessary as evaluations and records of theseephemeral events, raising and maintaining them at the level of culture.
In “The Empty Space,” the internationally famous director
Peter Brook said that an art form
without critics is in much greater
danger than an art form with critics.
He also said that in short, critics
search for flaws in what we do andthat always works to the benefitof theater.
Brook discussion of theater
critics is filled with sarcasm, butthat is because theater must view itself objectively. The readers of a novel can endure sometedium, but you cannot expect the same from atheater audience. It is a heavy responsibility to
demand the public to be in a space together for
two hours. If they think it is dull, that is twohours of imprisonment. But there are all kinds ofproblems and restrictions in creating a theater
piece and there is a tendency for things todevelop as the result of a halting process of trial
and error. Brook continues that it is the unfortunate fate of a theater
critic to be called out night after night to watch and judge the products of this process. For Brook, theater critics are annoying, but at thesame time, absolutely indispensible.
Sometimes, performers will be furious at what a critic says. Back-157

stage, there are usually all sorts of problems before opening night,
and the performers are easily swayed by all kinds of changes of mood.
It is a big job just to overcome all these problems. But when the
curtain opens, a theater reviewer must not be blinded by the strengthof passion of the performers. The poet and critic Paul Claudel wrotethat criticism is to evaluate if the result carries out the intention of thecreator. That is indeed the mission of the critic.
But it is not easy to become a person capable of making thesekinds of judgments. To actually do this unthankful task requires alogical mind and rich experience of watching theater. Before you getto the position where people will give you free tickets, you have to beprepared to spend a good deal of your own money seeing theater inorder to gain the capacity to be a theater critic. It probably requires
much more money than for a literary or art or film critic. I believe

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that for this reason, atheater reporter for anewspaper who gets
free tickets from thestart must be resolved
to the idea that precisely because of that,they have the responsibility of taking up theburden of theater criticism. To my mind, theater journalism always has serious theater criticism at its base. Articles that only pursue the activities of popularcelebrities have nothing to do with proper theater journalism.
However, in the group discussion, someone asked the difference158

between a reaction piece and a theater review. This was a very sharpquestion and I felt that behind it was a sense that this person wasstung by the fact that many simple reaction pieces are labeled asserious theater criticism. This is actually a very difficult question toanswer and at the time, I made do by saying that a true theater review
required specialized knowledge like the history of theater and a richexperience of actually watching plays. But that is really not quite it. I
believe that the difference between a mere reaction piece and real
theater criticism lies in the level of commitment, how firm your commitment is to doing this thankless task properly. This has always beendifficult, but is even more difficult today when declining circulation isleading many newspapers to cut theater reviews and every year it
becomes more and more difficult for theater magazines to survive
economically. Even though you can’t eat on theater criticism, you haveto be prepared to go to the theater almost every night and to performthe thankless task of writing theater reviews. The late newspaper
theater critic Senda Akihiko once said that, “I’ve wasted my entire
life, but from the bottom of my heart, I’ve enjoyed it.” In the deep
commitment concealed in this paradoxical offhand statement lies thedifference between a mere reaction piece and true theater criticism.
Gradually the forum for theatrical journalism is moving fromprint media to the Internet. But it is still too early to see what shape
theatrical criticism will take in the world of the Internet.
Uchida, Yōichi
Cultural journalist. Born in Tokyo in 1960. In 1983, graduated in government
from Waseda University and started working for the Nihon Keizai Shinbun
newspaper. As a cultural journalist he has covered theater, art and music andhas repeatedly reported on the cultural activities of private companies with theJapan Meceret Association for Corporate Support of the Arts and government
cultural policy. A book he edited, “Nihon no Engekijin Noda Hideki (Noda
Hideki: Japan’s Man of Theater, Hakusuisha)” won the AICT prize for theater
criticism from the International Association of Theater Critics. Other books
include, “Gendai Engeki no Chizu (Map of Contemporary Theater)” and “Kiki to
Gekijō (Crisis and Theaters)” from Bansei Shobō, “Kaze no Tenshudō (The
Basilica of the Wind)” from Nihon Keizai Shinbun Shuppansha and “Aruhi
Totsuzen, Izoku ni Natta: Hanshin Daishinsai no 10 Nen (That Day, We Suddenly
Became the Bereaved Family: Ten Years After the Great Hanshin Earthquake)”from Hakusuisha.

159

Note: There were also three programs for high school and university students
sponsored by the Tokyo Theater of the Arts, with the cooperative sponsorshipof the Committee for the Grand Prize for a Theater Review by a High SchoolStudent and the planning and production of the Japan Centre of ITI: Saturday,
October 28, 2017 – Theater Review Workshop on Richard III, Saturday, November
11, 2017 – Theater Viewing Cafe One Green Bottle and Monday, January 8, 2018 –Talk Event “Theater Reviews and Theatrical Journalism.”(Translation: Mark Ōshima)

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S P EC I AL F EATURE‘Theatre Born in Conflict Zones 9’

SPECIAL FEATURE

Lilac Duhaa (Death in the Era of Da‘ish / Lilac (Urabe Fusako) and Duhaa (Tateyama Hayata)

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SPECIAL FEATURE

A Report on‘Theatre Born in Conflict Zones 9’
Two Arab Playwrights Cutting Throughthe Darkness of Night
Goto Ayako‘Theatre Born in Conflict Zones’ is a special series of the JapaneseCentre of the International Theatre Institute implemented as part of
the Theatre Yearbook project that is commissioned by the Agency for
Cultural Affairs of the Japanese government and it was held for theninth time in 2017. It is the Japanese Centre’s original project that ismodelled after the International Theatre Institute’s longtime research
project called ‘Theatre in Conflict Zones’ and plays from various
countries and regions of the world are researched and introduced bytranslating them into Japanese for the first time, carrying out reading
performances and talk sessions and then compiling and publishing
the translated plays.
Fortunately, the project is attracting an increasing number of collaborators, including information givers, and inquiries from the media
each time. Additionally, plays and playwrights that have been introduced through this series have developed into new projects in various
ways. For instance, Djihad (written by Ismaël Saidi), which was introduced at ‘Theatre Born in Conflict Zones 8’, is planned to be producedby Saitama Arts Foundation and presented at Saitama Arts Theatre.

163

In 2017, two plays from conflict zones were introduced throughreadings and talk sessions held between December 14 (Thu) and 17

Khail Taiha (Lost Horses) / Khail (Matsuyama Aika) and Taiha (Inatsugu Miho)
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Theatre Yearbook 2018

SPECIAL FEATURE(Sun) at Atelier West of Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre as an event
co-hosted by Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre (Tokyo Metropolitan
Foundation for History and Culture).
In October, Ghannam Ghannam, who is the author of Lilac
Duhaa (Death in the Era of Da‘ish) that was introduced this time andalso operates the Arab Theatre Festival as the PR Manager of the
Arab Theatre Institute, was invited from Sharjah in United ArabEmirates (UAE) and he gave a special lecture titled ‘Arab Theatre
Today’ (at Atelier East of Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre), which was
jointly hosted by Festival/ Tokyo.

<< Reading >>164

Khail Taiha (Lost Horses)
Written by Adnan Alaoda, Syria
Translated by Nakayama Toyoko / Translation supervised by Aya Khalil
Directed by Sakata Yukari
Cast: Matsuyama Aika (Bungakuza), Inatsugu Miho, Hayashi Shūichi (Fūren
Dance), Shirasaki Emi (Tōhoku Rokken Roll Show), Ōhira Kiyoshi.
Performance dates: December 14 and 15

The author Adnan Alaoda(1975-) was born and bred in avillage in northern Syria andstudied in Damascus. Besides
writing poems, novels, plays, screenplays for short films and lyrics, he isalso a popular writer of historicaldramas. However, he was arrested
Khail Taiha (Lost Horses) / Taiha (Inatsugu Miho) andHozan (Hayashi Shūichi)

Khail Taiha (Lost Horses) / Emi Shirasaki (vocal) andŌhira Kiyoshi (oud)Khail Taiha (Lost Horses) / Khail (Matsuyama Aika)

by the Syrian authorities for taking part in a peaceful demonstration165

led by artists in Damascus in March 2011 and he was demanded tosupport the Assad regime. Then he sought for freedom of expression
and applied for residency in ICORN (International Cities of Refuge
Network) (*2), which is a shelter for writers and artists who weredeprived of freedom to express themselves due to censorships andother constraints. He found an asylum in ICORN through an invitation from Rotterdam and he is now continuing his writing based in
Verhalenhuis Belvédère, which is located in the city.
Thinking that Syria can be identified by its diversity, Adnan has
been carefully integrating different cultures, namely dialects, lifestyles
and folkways of several tribes and ethnic groups in Syria. Khail Taiha
was also written in a dialect spoken by the people living in the plainsof northern Syria. To quote the words of the translator Nakayama

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SPECIAL FEATURE

Khail Taiha (Lost Horses) / Mohamad (Hayashi Shūichi) and Khail (Matsuyama Aika)

Toyoko, Adnan is a writer who sheds light on the people that havebeen forgotten.
Khail Taiha is a narrative set in the fifty-year period between the166late 1950s to around 2008 and depicted through half the lives of adaughter named Khail (‘horse’) and a mother named Taiha (‘lost’). It
was published in Arabic by Mamdouh Adwan Publishing House in2008. Then it was premiered by Yes Theatre (*3) based in Hebron,
Palestine, at the Arab Theatre Festival in 2015, and won the Sultan
Al-Qasimi (Ruler of Sharjah-UAE) Award for Best Arabic Play in the
Arab Theatre Festival held in Rabat, Morocco, in January 2016 (cf. *1).
In the deeply-rooted conventional tribal society, the motherchooses to live with a Kurdish man that she loves instead of abiding
by the codes of the community, while her daughter leaves the rural
town and goes to the rapidly-changing capital city, Damascus, tostudy. The tough heroines, who live in different times and places anddispel their confusions to hold to their decisions, give us courage.

The author sent us the following message for the reading of
his play:“Before the rise and fall of the Islamic State, a fascinating worldcontinued in Syria’s Mesopotamian area and the vast plains of theBedouins. I was born there and my grandmother taught me songs.
Khail Taiha is a play like Akira Kurosawa’s films and is rooted in my
fascinating childhood experiences. In a world that has fallen apart,our voices are for peace and love. I invite you all together with thechirping birds. Wishing for a new bright morning.”<< Reading >>Lilac Duhaa (Death in the Era of Da‘ish)
Written by Ghannam Ghannam, Jordan/Palestine

167

Translated by Watanabe Maho / Translation supervised by Nahed Almeree
Directed by Manabe Takashi (Haiyūza Theatre Company)
Assistant to the Director: Nakamura Keigo (Haiyūza Theatre Company)
Cast: Urabe Fusako, Tateyama Hayata (Saitama Next Theatre), Takayama Haruo(PRODUCTION ACE), Uchida Kenshi (Saitama Next Theatre), Sudō Saya (PCompany, Ltd.), Ishikawa Shūhei (Haiyuza Theatre Company)
Performance dates: December 16 and 17.

Ghannam has Palestinianroots. He decided to “defy bloodshed through art, music, songs andtheatre” (*4) and wrote Lilac Duhaa,
which is a play about a village
under the rule of the Islamic State.
In 1948, the year the state of
Lilac Duhaa (Death in the Era of Da‘ish) / Humud (Uchida Kenshi)
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SPECIAL FEATURE

Lilac Duhaa (Death in the Era of Da‘ish) /Abu Bara’ (Ishikawa Shūhei)168

Lilac Duhaa (Death in the Era of Da‘ish) /Fatima (Sudō Saya)

Israel was founded, the Ghannams fled Kafr ’Ana, which is located in
the suburbs of Jaffa and a place where his family had lived for many
generations and thousands of years, and moved to Jericho. Ghannam
was born in Jericho as a Jordanian and was educated as a Jordanian at
his primary school. At school, he was taught that Palestine had close
relationship with Jordan. In other words, it meant that Palestine wasregarded as a foreign country. However, at home, he was leading a life
with his Palestinian family that was involved in the Arab Nationalist
Movement. Because of these circumstances, Ghannam started toquestion his identity.
In 1967, his family was forced to leave Jericho and moved toJerash. Ghannam, who was thirteen years old at that time, felt theneed to express who he was. He was also involved in music andtheatre activities that were related to Palestine. Around that time,an armed resistance movement
against Israel was launched andhe met the Palestinian writer
Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972), who
served as a spokesman for PFLP
(Popular Front for the Liberationof Palestine). Kanafani’s earlyworks were engraved in Ghannam’s
mind “like tattoos” and he started
writing poems and plays, aspiring

Lilac Duhaa (Death in the Era of Da‘ish) /Sheikh Baldawi (Takayama Haruo)

to become the “New Kanafani”.
Ever since Kanafani was brutally murdered in 1972, Ghannam has
been engaged in theatre activities, holding in his mind a line from
Kanafani’s play, which is “Do not die until you get square with your169

enemy”. Moreover, Ghannam’s magnum opus as an actor is based on
Kanafani’s short novel titled Returning to Haifa, which he adapted
into a play himself.
In regions ruled by the Islamic State, women are forced to offer
sexual services to or to marry jihad warriors to boost their morale,
which is the so-called ‘sexual jihad’ and it is widespread. Ghannam
was shocked by the news of a Syrian couple that committed double
suicide because of sexual jihad and wrote Lilac Duhaa in 2016, forwhich he won the Creative Prize from the Ministry of Culture of
Jordan. This reading performance in Tokyo became the world premiere of the play. It was also directed by Ghannam himself and presented on March 15, 2018 as part of Sharjah Theatre Days.
“Da‘ish” used in the secondary title is a derogatory term for

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SPECIAL FEATURE

Islamic State. Many Arabs and Arabic media that do not support theIslamic State use this term to address the organisation.
The play is set in an imaginary rural village under the rule of theIslamic State and beyond the reach of the central government. Thereis a young couple living there. The Muslim husband called Duhaa
and the Christian wife called Lilac both teach art to young people.
One day, the village elder approaches Lilac and says, “A jihad warrior
is planning to execute Duhaa in order to get hold of you, Lilac. Afterhe has slept with you for a couple of nights, he is going to give you
over to his men to share and then abandon you in front of a mosque.
If you want to avoid this dangerous scheme, you must convert toIslam under my mentorship and marry me.” Soon the school isturned into a military base and their students become fighters, so the170

couple decide to commit double suicide.
Ghannam added the following introduction to this play: “No
one can say that he or she lived during the days of Da‘ish. In the ageof Da‘ish, life dies. I wrote this play so that ‘lilacs’ (‘flowers’) will not
die and ‘duhaa’ (‘morning’) will not be killed at the doorway to night.
I also wanted children to be able to love and sing as they grow up.”
He concluded, “I am not calling out to death through this play. If one
does not do anything to protect life, death is inevitable. Therefore, Iam calling out to go against this trend.”
Suicide is forbidden in both Islam and Christianity. Some people
in the Arab theatre world who read this play gave their comment andsaid, “It is a good play but please change the ending in which thecouple commit suicide.” In the January 18th edition of Bukkyo

Times, Kōno Takashi wrote, “The Arab Spring that occurred in
Tunisia was initiated by a young man who burned himself to death to
make a protest to the police. To commit suicide, which is religiously
forbidden, is nothing less than an act demonstrating against an
extreme situation.” In The Christ Weekly, Fujimori Tōru wrote, “It
was an ultimate conclusion of the Muslim husband and the Christian
wife. The ghastly dialogue between the couple that leads to deathturns into a desperate appeal for life and I was shocked.”
In October, Ghannam was interviewed by Yamane Yukiko of
The Asahi Shimbun and he said, “Sexual jihad is a vicious practiceunder the guise of religion and it makes society retrograde to the past.
I depicted various aspects of the society, such as love relationships anddestruction of social connections. Presenting the play in Japan could
possibly become a new doorway to know about the mental conditions

171of the people living in the state of war.” (*5)

Special Lecture: Arab Theatre Today / (from the left) Watanabe Maho (interpreter),Ghannam Ghannam, Ichimura Sachio Photo by Festival/Tokyo

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SPECIAL FEATURE<< Special Lecture: Arab Theatre Today 1 >>‘Arab Theatre Festival’Date: October 6
Lecturer: Ghannam Ghannam

Moderator: Ichimura Sachio (Director, Festival/Tokyo)
Interpreter: Watanabe Maho<< Special Lecture: Arab Theatre Today 2 >>‘Theatre in the Arab World and I’
Date: October 7
Lecturer: Ghannam Ghannam
Moderator: Oka Mari (researcher of modern Arabic literature/ Graduate Schoolof Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University)
Interpreter: Watanabe Maho

172
Notes:*1

Arab Theatre Festival:It is the largest theatre festival in the Arab world andhas been held every January since 2009. Each year, a different country andcity hosts the festival and it has been held so far in Cairo, Tunis, Beirut,
Amman, Doha, Sharja, Rabat, Kuwait and Algiers. The Arab Theatre
Institute (ATI) and the host country’s theatre-related organizations, bothpublic and private, work in tandem to operate the festival. There is one
condition to host the festival, which is not to censor.
During the festival period, works selected from among applicants arepresented and the Al-Qasimi Award is given to excellent works. The prizebears the name of His Highness Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed Al-Qasimi
the Sultan Al-Qasimi (Ruler of Sharjah-UAE), who is the president of Arab
Theatre Institute (since 2011). Adnan Alaoda’s “Khail Taiha”, which wasintroduced at the latest event of the ‘Theatre in Conflict Zones’ series, also
received the award.
The conditions for applying to the festival include the following:- It must be a work presented in the past year.
- The work must reflect important issues in the Arab world.
- The writer, director, cast and staff must be from Arab nations.

- The text should preferably be written in Standard Arabic.
- The text should preferably be newly written, etc.
*2

ICORN:A shelter for writers and artists whose freedom of expression havebeen limited due to reasons such as censorship. Its headquarter is locatedwithin Stavanger Cultural Centre (Sølvberget) in Norway. Its predecessor
was INCA (International Network of Cities of Asylum).
In July 1993, over three hundred writers around the world launched an
appeal in reaction to the assassination of writers in Algeria during the civil
war. In June 1994, IPW (International Parliament of Writers) was formed
and Salman Rushdie was selected as its ﬁrst president. Wole Soyinka,
Russell Banks, Václav Havel, Halord Pinter, Margaret Drabble, J. M.
Coetzee, Jacques Derrida and Pierre Bourdieu were among its members.
Soon after IPW was founded, they created an inter-city shelter network
called INCA for endangered writers and twenty-five cities took part.

*3

Yes Theatre:A theatre troupe with a playhouse based in Hebron, whichis the largest Palestinian city in the West Bank. Yes Theatre’s production
titled 3 in 1, was read and introduced at ‘Theatre Born in Conflict Zones 5’.
Ihab Zahdeh of Yes Theatre was also invited to take part in the event.

*4

From Ghannam’s message sent for the reading performance of Lilac Duhaa(Death in the Era of Da‘ish)*5

From the December 12th digital edition and December 13th paper editionof Asahi Shimbun

173

Ayako Gotō
Ayako Gotō was born in Sendai in 1982. She studied at the University of Vienna
while she was attending the Department of German, Faculty of Foreign
Languages at Dokkyō University and then completed the postgraduate courseof Language and Society at Hitotsubashi University. She has worked with themarionette theatre company Yūkiza, Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC)
and then received on-the-job training at the Dramaturg Division of Residenz
Theatre (Munich). She is now a staff member working for ITI Japanese Centre.
Her published translations include Infinite Incompleteness by Afghanistan
Human Rights and Democracy Organization (AHRDO).
(Translation: Sumida Michiyo)
Khail Taiha © Miyauchi Katsu
Lilac Duhaa / cover photo © Ishizawa Chieko

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Theatre Yearbook 2018

紛争地域から生まれた演劇シリーズ

Theatre Born inConflict Zones series
since 2009
The Theatre Born in Conflict Zones series is a response to the Theatre in Conflict Zones project
organized by the ITI headquarters and Cultural Identity and Development Committee.
Launched in 2009, it has now introduced 24 plays from various countries and regions
around the world, conveying the raw reality of conflict zones andattracting great interest in the local theatre scene.

Scripts of plays in the

Theatre Born in Conflict Zones series (2018)
Khail Taiha (Lost Horses) by Adnan Alaoda (Syria)
Lilac Duhaa (Death in the Era of Da‘ish) by Ghannam Ghannam (Jordan / Palestine)

3 in 1 by Yes Theatre (Palestine)

2014 Infinite Incompleteness by AHRDO (Afghanistan Human Rights Democracy Organisation, Afghanistan)
Le Cadavre Encerclé by Kateb Yacine (Algeria)of the Burning Star by Nir Paldi (U.K./Israel)2015 Ballad
Burqavaganza by Shahid Nadeem (Pakistan)
Madmen and Specialists by Wole Soyinka (Nigeria)

2016 Ismail at Isabel by Rody Vera (Philippines)
Before Dinner by Yaser Abu Shaqra (Syria)

Rabbit, Red Rabbit by Nassim Soleimanpour (Iran)2017 White
Djihad by Ismaël Saidi (Belgium)

Searching for New Plays

mail@iti-j.org

ITI Japanese Center accepts new submissions for plays in
the Theatre Born in Conflict Zones series. Please contact us
at mail@iti-j.org.

Tel: +81-(0)-3478-2189

ITI is expanding its on-line contents!

http://iti-japan.or.jp

Follow us on

itijapan@itijapan

Japanese Centre of International Theatre Institute
President

Nagai Taeko

Vice-Presidents

Abiko Tadashi
Yoshiiwa Masaharu

Managing Director Sota Shuji
Directors

Ataka Risako
Ito Hiroshi
Ozasa Yoshio
Odagiri Yoko
Kasuya Haruo
Kano Toyomi
Kida Yukinori
Saimyoji Ikuko
Sakate Yoji
Shindo Yoshikazu
Nakayama Kaori
Hayashi Hideki
Hishinuma Yoshiaki
Matsuda KazuhikoMiwa Elica
Wazaki Nobuya

Auditors

Kishi Masato
Kobayashi Hirofumi

Advisers

Otani Nobuyoshi
Sakomoto Jun-ichi
Tanokura Minoru
Nagae Iwao
Nomura Man
Hatano Yoshio
Fukuchi Shigeo
Hori Takeo
Matsuoka Isao
Mogi Shichizaemon(As of March 27, 2018)

Companion Volume‘Theatre Abroad 2018’(Japanese)
These articles do not appear in‘Theatre in Japan 2018’.

176

World Theatre Day Messages

by Wèrê Wèrê Liking, Maya Zbib, Ram Gopal Bajaj, Simon McBurney, Sabina Berman

Theatre in Asia and Africa
China
Revivals of Masterpieces and New Performance Venues------------------------------------ Tamura YokoSouth
2017, a Year of Change in Korean Theatre------------------------------------------------------------- Lee Seung-gon
Korea
Singapore Cosmopolitan Elan and Melancholy--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Takiguchi Ken
Yemen
Rich Theatre for Enduring the Trauma of Civil War------------------------------------- Katherine Hennesy
Burundi Burundi Theatre Evolving in the Face of Civil War---------------------------------------- Freddy Sabimbona

Theatre in the Americas and Oceania
CanadaU. S. A.
Mexico /Peru

The National Arts Centre Activities
for the 150th Anniversary of Canadian Confederation------------------------------------------- Kanzaki Mai
American Theatre in the Post-Truth Era---------------------------------------------------------------- Tonooka Naomi
The Fabric of Humanity in Aztec Mythology,
the Mexican Revolution, and Kepler’s Laws----------------------------------------------------- Yoshikawa EmikoAustralia

The Elephant Man and Masterpieces of Disability Theatre---------------------------------- Sawada Keiji

Theatre in Europe
U.K.
Politics of Truth and Trust------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Motohashi Tetsuya
Scotland Theatre Driven by Founding Mottos--------------------------------------------------------------------- Nakayama Kaori
Germany /Austria / The Volksbühne, Berlin, and the End of the Frank Castorf Legend----------------------- Terao Itaru
Switzerland
FranceAmid Signs of Stability---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fujii Shintaro
Italy
A Requiem in 21st-Century Theatre?!--------------------------------------------------------- Yamanouchi Haruhiko
Spain
Beautiful Dialogue Layering Up Contemplation-------------------------------------------------------- Tajiri Yoichi
Portugal A Year of Searching for a New Era in Public Theatre------------------------------------- Kakumoto Atsushi
PolandPolitical Crisis and Theatre Nomads------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Iwata Miho
Romania/ The Activities of Silviu Purcărete and the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj------------ Shichiji Eisuke
Moldova
Sweden The ‘Quiet Actions’ of a Nation Where Gender Equality Is the Norm------------------- Komaki Yu
RussiaCafé Culture and Theatre------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Shinozaki Naoya

177

Developments in Japan and Overseas<Three Theatre Criticism Events for High School and Other Students>
Richard III Theatre Review Workshop: New Perspectives Through Language ——————— Tani Kenichi
One Green Bottle World Café:
Discovering Your Own Language Through Dialogue with Others ——————————— Fujiwara Kenta

Overseas Tours ReportSingapore Residency Report:
Theater Collective HANCHU-YUEI + The Necessary Stage, SANCTUARY ————————Sakamoto Momo
Mochinosha’s Space Hippo: From Creative Development to the 2017 Canadian Tour ————— Yanai Seri

Special Feature ”Theatre Born in Conflict Zones 9”
Critique: Formalism Demonstrated in a Tale of Narration:
Adnan Alaoda’s Khail Taiha (Lost Horses) —————————————————————— Takahashi Hiroyuki
Critique: On Ghannam Ghannam’s Lilac Duhaa (Death in the Era of Da‘ish) —————————— Oka Mari
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Theatre Yearbook 2018

ITI Centres (as of 27th March, 2018)

North America
U.S.A.

AfricaLatin America andCaribbean
178

Argentina
BrazilCuba
MexicoPuerto Rico
Venezuela

Algeria
Benin
Botswana
Burkina Faso
Cameroun
Central African Republic
Chad
Congo Dem. ReP
Congo ReP
Egypt
Ghana
Cote d'Ivoir
Mali
Mauritania
Morocco
Niger
Nigeria
SenegalSierra Leone
South Africa
Sudan
Togo
UgandaZimbabwe

Europe
Austria
Belgium (Flanders)Belgium (Wallonia)
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Croatia
CyprusCzech ReP
Denmark
Estonia
Faroe Islands
FinlandGermany
GreeceHungary
Iceland

Italy
KosovoLatviaLuxembourg
Macedonia F.Y.R.
MonacoNetherlands
Romania
RussiaSerbiaSlovakia
Slovenia
Spain
SwedenSwitzerland
United Kingdom

Middle East
Fujairah
Georgia
Iraq
JordanKuwaitOman
Palestine
Saudi Arabia
Sharjah
Syria
TurkeyYemen

Asia / PacificArmenia
Azerbaijan
Bangladesh
China
Chinese Taipei
India
Indonesia
Iran
IsraelJapan
South Korea
Mongolia
Philippines
Sri Lanka
Vietnam

179

The list of ITI Centres is updated as needed on the ITI website below.
International Theater Institute ITI / Institut International du Théâtre ITI
Office at UNESCO UNESCO, 1 rue Miollis, 75732 Paris Cedex 15, France
Headquarter in Shanghai 1332 Xinzha Road, Jing’an, Shanghai 200040, China Tel: +86 (0)21 6236 7033
info@iti-worldwide.org / www.iti-worldwide.org

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Theatre Yearbook 2018

国際演劇年鑑ITI Japanese Centre’s
Theatre Yearbook
since 1972
ITI is an NGO under the umbrella of UNESCO
and has some ninety branch centres around the world.
ITI Japanese Centre, which was founded in 1951, has been publishing ‘Theatre
Yearbook’ since 1972. From 1997, the planning and editing of ‘Theatre Yearbook’ isbeing carried out in two parts, of which one is titled ‘Theatre in Japan’ for readers
overseas and the other is titled ‘Theatre Abroad’ for Japanese readers.

Theatre in Japan (in English)
Noh, Kyōgen, Kabuki, Bunraku, Musicals, Contemporary Theatre, Theatre forChildren and the Youth, Puppet Theatre, Japanese Classical Dance, Ballet,
Contemporary Dance, Butoh, Television Dramas and other special topics including
a report on ITI Japanese Centre’s reading project ‘Theatre Born in Conflict Zones’.
Additionally, if you have any comments or requests regarding ‘Theatre Yearbook’,
please contact our centre and give us your feedbacks.

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Please let us know if youcome up with any topics
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We are searching for writers inyour countries who can kindly
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whom you can recommend,
please introduce them to us.

東宝演劇