Toward a Modern Japanese Theatre: Kishida Kunio

by J. Thomas Rimer

Overview

Long accustomed to writing in the tradition of the flamboyant kabuki, Japanese dramatists had a more difficult struggle in modernizing their art than did writers of fiction and poetry. The work of Kishida Kunio, however, established and matured modern Japanese drama, modeled on the western psychological drama of Ibsen and Chekhov.

J. Thomas Rimer traces the initial modernization efforts undertaken by the first generation of Japanese playwrights of the shingeki, or "New Theatre.'" His study then concentrates on the work of Kishida Kunio, the most important figure in the Japanese theatre of the 1930s and 1940s.

Kishida, who studied with the well-known French director Jacques Copeau in 1921, returned to Japan with the goal of establishing a modern drama of psychological dimensions for the Japanese theatre. His work demonstrated his talent as a playwright and laid the foundation for later modern Japanese playwrights.

Originally published in 1974.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691618562
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/08/2015
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1633
Pages:	324
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 2.20(d)

About the Author

Date of Birth:

1894

Date of Death:

1971

Read an Excerpt

Toward a Modern Japanese Theatre

Kishida Kunio

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By J. Thomas Rimer

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1974 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06249-5

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The phenomenon of shingeki, or, literally, New Theatre, in Japan can be said to correspond roughly with the modern theatre in Europe and the United States. Sixty-odd years of New Theatre activity have attracted little attention outside the country, despite the fact that a considerable body of drama of generally high literary quality has been produced, actors trained, theatres built, and a generous amount of information compiled in modern Japanese literary histories on the movement and its playwrights.

The word "new" suggests an opposition to something "old," and many different styles of drama are currently performed in Japan, ranging from the traditional no and kabuki through several hybrid forms which use traditional themes and some modern acting techniques. The New Theatre, however, represents a Japanese version of the same kind of serious modern theatre available in Paris, London, or New York.

The New Theatre movement grew up among a variety of conflicting artistic forces and was influenced not only by them but by the general political and cultural phases through which Japan passed since 1900. Eric Bentley has written that "even more than the other arts — or more crudely — the drama is a chronicle and brief abstract of the time, revealing not only the surface but the whole material and spiritual structure of an epoch." The New Theatre movement provides such a chronicle for Japan, and every confusion of the modern period is mirrored in its activities.

The definition of the New Theatre movement given in the authoritative Engeki Hyakkajiten (Encyclopedia of the Theatre) suggests some of the complexities involved.

Until 1910, the works seen on the Japanese stage did not reflect the changes which had overtaken the country. As a result, a desire was felt for a new kind of theatre movement. This movement developed into shingeki.

First of all, the New Theatre movement placed itself in opposition to the pre-modern elements remaining in the older theatrical forms. However, as there were other similar movements in Japan at that time trying to add modern elements to the traditional theatre, and since they could not be disregarded, their styles became mixed with those of the New Theatre movement itself.

Moreover, the Proletarian Theatre movement, which had tried to oppose the New Theatre movement and to take the lead itself in developing new techniques was in the end also incorporated into the New Theatre movement.

The intermingling of these varying elements gives the New Theatre movement in Japan its special characteristics.

Many of the points touched on here will later be expanded upon, but even from these short paragraphs, it is clear that the writers participating in the establishment of a modern theatre in Japan faced crucial and complex problems. Much of what they did was a groping in the dark; the general course that the movement took seems clear now only by hindsight.

The history of this movement can best be examined through the career of a representative playwright. For this purpose I have chosen Kishida Kunio (1890-1954), the finest playwright in Japan before the Second World War. Kishida studied in France with the famous director Jacques Copeau in 1921 and 1922, and after returning to Japan did much to promote the growth of a theatre dedicated to literary and humanistic ideals. In a larger context, however, through the work of Kishida and others, the prewar New Theatre movement did make a crucial contribution towards creating a modern dramatic literature in Japan. The study of this process has social and cultural implications beyond purely literary ones. Concerning this last point, the critic Eto Jun has written with considerable insight concerning the importation into Japan of western literary forms.

If one observes [the history of modern Japanese literature] from a viewpoint that would differentiate "modernization" from "westernization," he will wonder at this paradoxical process that has induced Japanese literature to modernize since the beginning of the Meiji period without necessarily westernizing. ... I am almost tempted to say that the time may come when Japanese writers can express themselves more freely and confidently and achieve their real self-identification only when they are able to realize more clearly the fundamental differences, however subtle, between "modernization" and "westernization."

The question as to whether the "modernization" of Japan also requires its "westernization," and indeed the question concerning the extent to which the two terms may or may not be synonymous, has been an important intellectual and spiritual issue in Japan since shortly after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Of all literary forms the drama, as exemplified by the New Theatre movement, went furthest in incorporating western elements and abandoning the heritage of Japanese tradition. Thus a study of the activities of the movement may shed light on the means by which one culture can absorb ideas and techniques without losing its own identity, or, rather, can absorb them in the very process of trying to find a new and changing identity. Some tentative conclusions to these complicated questions will be suggested later. Before any discussion of Kishida's work can be presented, however, we must have some background on the early history of the New Theatre movement, in order to show the setting for the "chronicle and brief abstract of the time."

CHAPTER 2

Modernization or Westernization: The Movement for a Modern Theatre in Japan before 1925

What was the nature of the movement for a modern theatre in Japan? By 1925, Japan had several thoroughly professional playwrights who wrote works of considerable literary interest, dealing with concerns that would have seemed no less important to a European or an American audience than to a Japanese one. Yet the manner in which Japanese writers first came to take an interest in the theatre, and the problems they faced, suggest that their difficulties were more complex than any their European counterparts had encountered a generation or two before. A brief description of the early attempts made in Japan to alter the nature of the traditional theatre and elevate the function of the playwright will serve to indicate just how difficult these problems were.

In the development of the modern theatre in Europe, the playwrights appeared first. Producing organizations grew up in response to the literary and theatrical challenges thrown down by the authors. It is true that these theatre companies, in turn, stimulated the development of still newer writers, but the fact remains that Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, and many others had written many of their plays, usually unproduced and often unpublished, before the advent of the theatre companies that put them on the stage.

In Japan, however, the situation was quite different. The new theatrical organizations there were created in response to a desire on the part of many intellectuals for a new and a meaningful theatre in their country. The organizations were created before any Japanese playwrights of stature appeared. This reversal gave a very different emphasis to the New Theatre movement in Japan and presented it with a different set of problems.

In 1866, when the Emperor Meiji began his reign and Japan opened its doors to the western nations, the contemporary Japanese theatre was best represented by the kabuki, one of the great forms of stage art which, although perhaps in a period of decline of the quality of plays then being written, was still a powerful force in popular culture and the dominant form of theatrical entertainment. Any extended discussion of the art of kabuki would be out of place here, but the following points should be kept in mind.

The plays in the kabuki theatre were stylized to a far greater extent than in the traditional European theatre. It is true, of course, that the jidaimono (historical plays) were often based on famous historical incidents, and that the sewamono (domestic dramas) were dramatizations of recent incidents; but the manner in which the materials were ordered within the plays shows that the major effect aimed at was a theatricalization of emotion and action rather than any psychological analysis. Of course, if we say that the kabuki is an actor's theatre, then we must recognize that Shakespeare's theatre might be described in the same terms. But unlike Shakespeare's, the kabuki plays were constructed so as to provide a series of emotional and scenic climaxes, designed as ends in themselves, that do not necessarily represent the inevitable results of the interactions of character and plot. Such a theatre is artistically effective on its own terms, but the principles of dramaturgy involved are far removed from those that stimulated the movement for a modern theatre in Europe. Indeed the better works of even the early nineteenth-century European stage, albeit within a framework of convention, or even of cliché, do pay a certain amount of attention to psychological logic.

Kinoshita Junji, one of the foremost of modern dramatists, has written on the differences between kabuki and the traditional European theatre in a precise and informative fashion.

There is a great difference in the density of writing in the two forms. In the case of European drama, the speeches are usually written with an ample thread of logical psychology running through them. But in the case of kabuki, there are a great many leaps of a psychological and logical nature within the speeches. It is the art of the actor which creates a theatre where such leaps can give satisfaction. And any art that finds such elements essential will naturally be filled with the unexplainable and the surprising.

For Kinoshita, there is a logic in Shakespeare which guides even the passages of greatest bravura, but in kabuki the spectator takes his pleasure in seeing a brilliant actor bridge the gaps. Indeed, kabuki is a theatre primarily for actors. The companies were often managed by actors, plays were written to suit their talents, then changed to suit their whims. (It should also be noted that the word "actor" should be strictly understood, since men played the women's roles, just as they did in Elizabethan England.)

The function of the playwright under such circumstances was that of a craftsman, admittedly of the highest sort, who knew his company, his actors, and his audience. He would construct elaborate and exciting dramas to exploit all the prodigious resources available to the kabuki theatre. The last of the great traditional playwrights, Kawatake Mokuami (1816-1893), was active in 1868, but with him the great tradition of playwriting came to an end. The playwright's view of his own work and its significance within the total ensemble was totally different from that of the modern literary playwright, or even of nineteenth-century European playwrights like Scribe or Dumas who, for all their use of conventions, were very conscious of their important position in the triangle of author-director-actor.

The following brief description of the organization of the writers in a traditional kabuki company will serve to explain the differences.

There were four grades in the writing groups, with apprentices doing the odd jobs, to learn the theatre system. After this the apprentices were advanced to helping in the actual performance, prompting, moving properties, and helping actors. Next they were permitted to help with the writing, and did stage-management. The chief writer, having been given the plan for the new play by the actor-manager and the promoter, worked out the plot and wrote the main parts, while the assistants filled in the rest, which was edited by the chief writer.

At the first rehearsal, it was the chief writer's duty to read the play to the entire company, and it was necessary for him to give as highly effective a reading as possible, so as to make sure that all understood his ideas. After this the cue-scripts were given to the actors, and rehearsals began, while the stage plans were given to the set constructors by the writer. The design of the programs, posters, signboards was also his responsibility.

No modern playwright could conceive of working under such restrictions. True, the results might be as rich as a canvas of the school of Rubens (created by groups in the same way) but it should be no surprise that the results tended toward the pictorial and the decorative rather than the psychological or the spiritual.

The audience for these plays in 1868 was predominantly a city audience, of the merchant class. Others (samurai, and sometimes even the nobility) came out of curiosity, but the kabuki theatre, like the class that created and patronized it, had a rather bad name. Tanaka Chikao writes that for the elaborate New Year kabuki productions, "busy people saved their money to be able to go at least once. But such people were normally sufficiently troubled in their own lives by human and social problems that they surely wanted to avoid any representation of life as they lived it directly on the stage. A play was to represent a world, a beautiful world not of this one. In this sense, kabuki can be called a type of fantasy."

With the opening of Japan to the west, the pressures of conflicting civilizations were felt almost immediately, and the theatre began to reflect them. Beginning in about 1870, a variety of attempts were made to reform the theatre in order to make it more responsive to the social and spiritual realities of the time. First were those that strove to modernize the Japanese theatre by making it more contemporary, either in psychology or in subject matter. Second were those that, abandoning the traditional Japanese dramatic forms (specifically kabuki) altogether, made use of western dramaturgy to westernize the theatre and to create a new and contemporary Japanese drama.

Modernization involved four distinct experiments between 1868 and 1925.

The Modernization of kabuki: History as Education

By the 1870s kabuki had ceased to be a contemporary theatre. Attempts had been made to incorporate foreign elements, even foreign actors, into the new plays, but the whole mechanism of the female impersonator and the special world of the thief, prostitute, and petit-bourgeois that gave the early nineteenth-century plays their special and very real flavor made the new concerns of the Meiji period too difficult to deal with.

Kabuki actors and managers now began consciously to look back and seek out classic plays of the tradition written in periods of greatness. In a famous ceremony at the opening of a new theatre in 1872, Ichikawa Danjuro IX (18381903), the greatest of the Meiji actors, made a speech dressed in white tie and tails rather than in traditional costume. "The theatre of recent years," he stated, "has drunk up filth and smelled of the coarse and the mean. It has disregarded the beautiful principle of rewarding good and chastizing evil. It has fallen into mannerisms and distortions and has been steadily flowing downhill. ... I am deeply grieved by this fact and in consultation with my colleagues I have resolved to clean away the decay."

Danjuro and his manager Morita Kan'ya proceeded to do so and they gave kabuki a new role: education and morality for a new Japan.

Danjuro's reforms, such as they were, were centered on the so-called katsureki or living-history plays. In practice these plays represented only slight revisions of older texts. Until the Meiji period the kabuki theatre, always under the eye of the censor, had changed the dates and historical personages in the plays so as to avoid any overt suggestion of social criticism. Thus the traditional history plays were in one sense fantasies in historical settings. Danjuro decided to reverse course. He studied old prints and drawings and had consultants who tried to help him represent famous historical incidents on the stage in as literal and accurate a manner as possible. Costumes, properties, and scenery were made to look authentic, and history plays were assigned to their proper eras.

In addition, within restricted limits, Danjuro tried to introduce a freer method of performance than had heretofore been permitted. He accomplished with a look what other actors had indicated with gestures. In one play he caused a sensation by closing the curtain as the two characters on stage merely nodded at each other, rather than showing the traditional final scene of bravura histrionics.

Danjuro considered himself a realist, but the kind of changes he proposed, no matter how revolutionary, made no real change in the nature of the drama he was performing. Indeed, his new emphasis on realism could only be detrimental to a theatre like kabuki, founded as it was on fantasy, illusion, and spectacle.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Toward a Modern Japanese Theatre by J. Thomas Rimer. Copyright © 1974 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• Acknowledgments, pg. vii
• Contents, pg. ix
• List of Illustrations, pg. xi
• I. Introduction, pg. 1
• II. Modernization or Westernization: The Movement for a Modern Theatre in Japan before 1925, pg. 7
• III. Kishida Kunio and the New Theatre Movement in 1925, pg. 56
• IV. Kishida as a Man of the Theatre, pg. 79
• V. Kishida as a Playwright, pg. 123
• VI. The Plays, pg. 142
• VII. Kishida's Achievement, pg. 249
• VIII. Conclusion, pg. 270
• Appendix I: The New Theatre Movement Since 1939, pg. 276
• Appendix II: Biographical Notes on Kishida's Life, pg. 284
• Bibliography, pg. 287
• Index, pg. 301