Please note that this is a paper presented at the second Annual International Conference on Humanities & Arts in a Global World, 3-6 January 2015 Athens, Greece. Its final (revised) published version can be found at http://www.athensjournals.gr/humanities/Cover-2015-03.pdf – Athens Journal of Humanities and Arts (open access) 2(3) July 2015: 151-161.

Reconsidering the Traveling Theater of Today’s Japan

Yukihide Endo

The topic of my talk is “a marginalized form of Traditional Theater of Japan”. Usually, traditional Japanese theater refers solely to kabuki, nô, and bunraku puppetry that are traditionally acclaimed as “high art”. Today it is believed that they cater to educated and sophisticated theater lovers. But what is typically classified as “low art” is an illegitimate form of theater, known as taishû-engeki. This term means “a kind of theater catering to the working-class people.” Despite its physical presence, conventionally there is no or little media coverage. I will historicize the germination and development of these two groups of traditional theater, one labeled “high art” and the other “low art”. By doing so, I will argue that they share a common origin or ancestral form and contribute to the development of theater arts each in their own way.

I’ve divided my presentation into three parts. Firstly, I will briefly describe what today’s taishû-engeki is like. Secondly, I’m going to trace both artistically acclaimed theater such as kabuki and marginalized taishû-engeki offering mere entertainment back to one common origin. Finally, I would like to shed light on the value and importance of this stigmatized taishû-engeki in present-day Japan.

I would describe taishû-engeki as live stage entertainment, characterized by an emphasis on male-to-female cross-dressed dancing and a period drama in the kabuki style. Each taishû-engeki company travels widely around Japan on a monthly basis and presents a two-and-a-half-hour-long show twice a day throughout the year, with only two days off each month. Traditionally these companies change their dance and acting program on a daily basis because they need to meet their audience’s diverse expectations and encourage frequent visits from them. Their members cannot avoid rehearsing late at night before the next day’s noon and evening shows. This lifestyle is physically and mentally tough and demanding. Despite these difficulties, they have to keep going. But only a few are artistically and financially successful by attracting a large audience each month.

 We now turn to the second point of my talk. From a historical perspective encompassing a wide temporal span, be it mainstream or not, all these forms of traditional theater share a common origin. As for the mainstream legitimate theater, nô emerged in the 14^th century and both kabuki and bunraku did in the 17^th century. On the other hand, illegitimate taishû-engeki in its current form was born in the 1960s. Needless to say, this direct ancestor was preceded by a wide variety of popular theater that had continually imitated mainstream kabuki’s skills and techniques in one way or another since the birth of kabuki.

Although nô, kabuki, bunraku, and taishû-engeki each have distinctive characteristics, it is necessary to look at the 7^th century when their common most distant ancestors emerged. These ancestors presented various forms of street performance designed for entertainment. Initially, this kind of entertainment was introduced by traveling performers from China around the 7^th century. This original form of outdoor entertainment was called sangaku, meaning a variety of entertainment forms, such as singing, dancing, magic, weaponry displays, and acrobatics. But as time went on, it was usually referred to as sarugaku meaning comic entertainment for reasons that are yet unproven.

Genealogically speaking, this motley array of entertainment shows can be seen as the most distant ancestor of what is now widely known as nô. But by the late-13^th century, this primitive form of performance art was gradually refined by itinerant, yet artistic-minded, groups of performers, i.e. dancers. It was finally perfected into high art by the nô actor and theorist Ze-ami who flourished around the turn of the 14^th century. Thus, Ze-ami’s nô theater disconnected itself from its ancestor, sarugaku and has since continued to pursue metaphysical excellence. Despite its pursuit of idealism, nô players had been considered as outcasts because of its origins in sarugaku until the samurai class began to patronize them in the 17^th century.

Just as nô strived to demonstrate itself distinct from its distant ancestor, so too did kabuki and bunraku puppetry that emerged two centuries after nô, each in their own way. These ancestors were traveling sarugaku entertainers, such as a group of dancers and one-man puppeteers. Both kabuki and bunraku have managed to maintain their status as not mere entertainers but acclaimed artists. Roughly speaking, they have something in common, especially their scripts. The 17^th-century author Chikamatsu Monza-emon was the most prominent writer of kabuki and bunraku. Among other writers, Chikamatsu sought the deep understanding of humanness. Both forms of traditional theater have since been approved of by society throughout premodern and modern times.

On the other hand, taishû-engeki has survived and developed to its full potential by picking up anything useful piece by piece from old traditions and new trends in theater. This is essentially comparative to a survival strategy adopted by sarugaku entertainers during the period of the 7^th through the 17^th centuries. After the samurai-dominated government was established at the beginning of the 17^th century, the term sarugaku almost exclusively referred to nô theater. Taishû-engeki’s strong desire to cultivate its own potential suggests that no doubt sarugaku is the distant yet true ancestor of taishû-engeki. Unlike artistic idealist nô pursuing metaphysical excellence, taishû-engeki has devoted itself to more entertaining the audience than pursuing artistic accomplishment. Whereas nô, kabuki, and bunraku are legitimized as high art, taishû-engeki alone remains socially stigmatized and subconsciously perceived as a group of outcasts. Would this imply that taishû-engeki deserves such a humiliating stigma?

Lastly, I’d like to discuss how today’s taishû-engeki strives to encourage the audience to not only enjoy dramatic illusion and unreal fantasy on the stage but also grasp the deeper layers of human nature and the nature of reality. You may wonder if such a typical popular theater can philosophically explore humanity. Usually, it is believed that mainstream traditional theater, especially nô, has a great contribution to this metaphysical exploration. But, just as kabuki and burnaku illumine a pure form of humanity in their depiction of real men and women deeply mired in physical reality, so too does taishû-engeki. It is wrong to say that taishû-engeki’s portrayal is much less excellent than kabuki and burnaku or even unskilled and amateurish.

As is often with the case of the players of mainstream traditional theater, especially kabuki and nô, many of those of taishû-engeki are from the families of professional traveling players. They undergo, or are forced to, training since their young childhood. Additionally, they have more or less often inherited acting and/or dancing talent across generations. Of course, this mode of inheritance is mostly true of other forms of traditional theater. Determined dissidents aside, most youngsters begin to learn acting and dancing, whether they like it or not. Not only naturally talented but also diligent and laborious trainees are likely to be skilled and creative enough to be successful players.

As pointed out above, despite their constant efforts, taishû-engeki players are the victims of invisible and silent social stigmatization and even discrimination. Naturally, their human rights and freedom are protected by the Constitution. Nonetheless, the social status of taishû-engeki remains stigmatized at least on a subconscious level. Yet, paradoxically, this stigmatized social status helps taishû-engeki players appeal to their enthusiasts’ subconscious minds. More important, they thereby awaken the audience’s dormant desire to imagine and experience universal—though often culturally conditioned—human emotions, such as love, anger, fear, grief, despair, and hope.

To conclude, I would like to point out the delicate and contradictory nature of taishû-engeki. Paradoxical though it may seem, while deserving full media attention, this essential quality of taishû-engeki is most likely to be undermined by greedy media. Media by nature is so extremely curious and inquisitive that in such a manner of a criminal investigator’s they will delve into the old-fashioned lifestyle of taishû-engeki and fabricate a series of gossips. In addition, the continuing stigmatization of taishû-engeki reinforces the illusion of media’s fabrication. Despite being stigmatized but invisible, or more correctly, because of it, taishû-engeki is able to inspire both awe and admiration in the 21^st century Japan.