Subtitled "the 1990s, part 1," this book traces the evolution of live Japanese theater by offering one play by each of the country's six most important dramatists of the last decade.
The end of the 1980s marked the end of an enormously prosperous era in Japan. New buildings were thrown up all over Tokyo, and the fashion of the day was such that several of these buildings contained small-scale theaters on one of their many floors. The small-theater movement had grown up, in Japan as in the West, in the late 1960s and was now demanding both official recognition and permanent premises.
Until its arrival on the scene, the dominant theater style had been the realism and social awareness pioneered over half a century earlier by Ibsen, Chekhov and Strindberg. This had been dutifully taken up in the 1920s by the new medium of film, so suited to the meticulous representation of "reality," both present and past.
The late-1960s generation called out for something different. So when the little theaters were born they opted for a shocking, surreal or dream-like style. The consideration of social problems was out, and the heady prosperity of the world economy only helped to endorse this fun-loving exuberance.
The beginning of the 1990s saw Japan's economic success begin to implode and the emergence of the more sober theater styles represented in this book.
Of the six plays translated here, two deal with the historical legacy of Japan's long occupation of Korea, one with the plight of men put out of business by the international ban on whale hunting, one with the rootlessness of urban life, one with the way conventional office life is a tight-rope walk over an abyss of insanity, and the last with the reaction of Japanese physicists at the time to the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These plays, then, are nothing if not social realist drama.
Because of the contrast these works offered to the larger-than-life style of the plays that preceded them, the Japanese media dubbed them "quiet theater." And it's true some of the plays in this book are rather undramatic when read. One of them, Hirata Oriza's Citizens of Seoul, for instance, depends on understatement, pauses, the expressions on the actors' faces, and gentle irony. Its purpose is to express the colonial assumptions of a Japanese family living in Korea at the beginning of the 20th century -- they utter liberal sentiments but their underlying anti-Korean racism is made clear. Apparently when the play was presented in Seoul, in both Japanese and Korean versions, in 1993, the audience received it in horrified silence.
The technique, nonetheless, is the opposite of melodramatic. Far different, however, is the strongest and most important play in the volume, Kaneshita Tatsuo's Ice Blossoms, the second play dealing with Korean subject matter
The piece is similarly set early in the last century and follows An Chung-gun, a Korean nationalist who assassinated the former Japanese Resident-General of Korea, Ito Hirobumi, in Harbin on Oct. 26, 1909.
The play is set in the prison in Lushun, also called Fort Arthur, where An is being held prior to execution. Wind howls around the building and snow piles up against the doors. The dramatic method is both naturalistic and didactic. Newspaper reports and extracts from the autobiography An is writing in prison are quoted in the text, and presumably are meant to be projected in performance and read by the audience. There are instances of on-stage brutality, with a prisoner who is being kept in solitary confinement punched and kicked in the presence of the prison doctor. His off-stage screams later accompany a scene in which prison staff and government officials are eating dinner.
This is a harsh, brutal play, in total contrast to the others, but what makes it so noteworthy is that its hard-hitting energy is deployed against the policies of the Japanese government of the period depicted. In a stage direction, Kaneshita notes that one of the most unpleasant characters anticipates the era that culminated in his country's aggression during World War II.
The condemned man, by contrast, is portrayed as an admirable figure -- amiable, selfless, and a devout Christian. He killed the resident-general in the bizarre hope that reconciliation between Korea and Japan would result, and peace spread throughout Asia. Indeed, at one point he is specifically compared with Christ, a member of an oppressed race under foreign domination who is executed by the occupying power.
Kaneshita has now become part of mainstream Japanese theater. One of his plays was revived for the opening of the New National Theater, and Ice Blossoms was first produced at the celebrations to mark the 60th anniversary of Tokyo's Literary Theater in 1997.
It might be interesting to see Ice Blossoms performed in Taiwan, possibly in the English translation published here. But its anti-Japanese sentiment is probably only acceptable in Japan, where it no doubt appears as healthy historical self-criticism. Anywhere else, it would come across as anti-Japanese prejudice.
Many of the social issues one reads about concerning modern Japan are touched upon by these playwrights. Kaneshita has written a play about suicides following school bullying. Sakate Yoji (author of the play printed here about the plight of unemployed whale fishermen, which performed in London with a British cast in 1998) has taken on the problems surrounding the presence of American troops on Okinawa. He has also written a play about hijackings, and another about an arson attack against the Liberal Democratic Party headquarters.
This is an era when the news media tend to mold most people's attitudes to social issues. But all political movements are led by small groups of determined individuals. And theater plays, even when staged in relatively small venues, can influence these kind of people. They, like the authors represented here, may seek to influence society as a whole, but they begin by converting each other to their views. Small theater may not be as marginal a phenomenon as it seems.
Publication Notes:
Half A Century of Japanese Theater
Kinokuniya
495 pages
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