V
Reforms of Meiji
Meiji Kabuki is less a record of achievement than a reign of amateurs,—well-meaning outsiders acting under the illusion that Kabuki was flat, stale, and unprofitable, and that its only hope lay in abandoning its old-fashioned conventions for the realism of the Western stage.
At the beginning of the forty-five years of the Meiji period, reform was the idea uppermost in men’s minds, and Kabuki, like some family heirloom that has been relegated to the garret, was dragged out into the full glare of new criticism. Those who were loudest in their denunciation were officials and scholars who had returned from abroad and regarded their own stage as an inferior product. Everything was wrong; the plays were termed immoral, obscene, barbarous. The gentlemen of the aristocratic classes who suddenly turned their attention to Kabuki wished to make the stage refined and elegant. They objected to the artificial stage voice, the imaginative costumes and make-up, the symbolic gestures; the onnagata was an absurdity, and the revolving stage, the inconsistencies of the plots, the vulgarity of language, all came in for censure.
For three centuries the upper classes had held themselves aloof from the people’s theatre, and officialdom had wellnigh regulated it out of existence; now the leaders among intellectual circles wished to “improve” Kabuki, aiming to confine the Oriental temperament within Western stage conventions.
This fever to reform Kabuki was based on the belief that Kabuki’s exploitation of the unrealities was wrong, while the realism of the Western theatre was right.
It was, moreover, a conflict between those who put their trust in the idea that the aim and end of the theatre is to be literary, and those for whom the whole purpose of the theatre is to be theatrical.
A Dramatic Reform Association was established by Viscount Suyematsu, son-in-law of the great Prince Ito, with Marquis Inouye, Baron Kikuchi, Baron Shibusawa, and other men of importance as leaders. This society encouraged Danjuro to act in new historical plays based on accuracy of fact, correct settings, and appropriate costumes. Danjuro called this new form of play Katsureki, or Living History.
But the people soon lost interest in such offerings. Weak in dramatic values, the whole emphasis in these pieces was placed on the dialogue, which, however, had little significance. These imitations of the talking play of the West were quite opposed to the forms of Kabuki, whose whole worth lay in the unity of the theatre arts,—colour, movement, music, and acting. Danjuro was criticised on all sides for his proud attitude and noble bearing, and he was advised to come down to the people and perform something they could understand and appreciate.
In consequence Danjuro returned to the masterpieces of his family, pleasing the audience with aragoto and jidaimono, the very theatrical play-forms the reformers had decried; Kikugoro was popular in sewamono, depicting the life of Yedo as written by Mokuami. All was well with Kabuki again, and the people forgot that the decadence of their stage had set in, and that it had become inert and lifeless, according to the higher criticism of the time.
Literary men discussed the theatre in magazines and the press, and societies were formed to produce imported plays. Scholars and professors were arrayed on one side, the people who liked Kabuki undiluted shouted on the other. It was clear that the new ideas were in direct conflict with the popular taste.