Kabuki

by Zoë Kincaid

Interference even went so far as to plays. The sakusha, or playwrights, were strictly forbidden by the Government to write real history into their dramas. In consequence, they were obliged to camouflage fact with fiction. Reports that were circulated far and wide, matters that had been discussed in every household, were represented as belonging to a distant period. The playgoers, however, were quick to understand the reference. This is the reason why the opening scene of Chushingura is placed a hundred years or more previous to the date of the sacrifice of the Forty-seven Ronin.

A quarrel broke out in the audience at the Yamamura-za at one time because the name of a contemporary personage had been used in a play, and thereafter no reference was allowed to living persons. Great care had to be taken in the choice of names given to the characters in a play, for if a cognomen selected was already in the possession of some high family complaints were lodged with the authorities.

When fire again destroyed the Nakamura-za and Ichimura-za, they were ordered to be rebuilt away from the centre of the town. The Kawarazaki-za, which stood somewhat apart from the other theatres, and had been untouched by the fire, was left undisturbed. The removal of the theatre site was explained as due to the laxity of the actors, who were forgetting themselves and mingling with the people; because they played such common, vulgar things that had a bad influence upon society, and because shibai was the source of changes in the fashions that incited the citizens to extravagance.

The severest period of interference the theatre had to undergo was during the administration of Mizuno, Lord of Echizen, the prime minister of the shogunate, who began his sweeping reforms in 1842, hoping thereby to prop up the falling Tokugawa Government. And when the Ichimura-za and Nakamura-za were burned down, this dignitary decided that the time had arrived to put an end to the fortunes of shibai. It was his intention to crush this institution of the people at a blow, in order that the widespread immorality alleged should be suppressed.

Mizuno stopped the work of theatre reconstruction, and would have carried out his reforms with a high hand if it had not been for the head man of the theatre district, called Toyama. This official was brought in for consultation. The fate of Yedo Kabuki hung in the balance, and the whole question depended on Toyama’s views as to the right of the people’s theatre to exist. Whatever his defence it proved an effective checkmate to Mizuno’s plan to abolish shibai, and a compromise was made by means of which the theatres were to be removed as far as possible from Yedo castle, and at a safe distance from the homes of the citizens to preserve them from contamination.

The new quarter selected was Saruwaka-cho in Asakusa, the most thickly populated district of modern Tokyo, where the lurid pictures outlined by electric light of kinema houses, second-rate theatres, and many other places of entertainment are now to be found. This district is still called theatre street, although Tokyo’s leading playhouses are scattered throughout the capital.

Mizuno’s attempt to check the evils of society were all in vain. Soon after his time, Meiji era dawned with the restoration of the Emperor to power, and the lives of the people began to flow in new and unexpected channels. The thoughts of those in power were too much engrossed with the opening of their country to trade and outside influences to trouble about the shaving of the actors’ heads, and the innumerable and wellnigh insupportable restrictions that had so long been endured gradually became null and void.

For 244 years, from the prohibition of the Women’s Stage to the Restoration, or from 1624 to 1868, interference with the theatre had continued without relaxation in the three towns—the regulations in Yedo, which form the subject of Ihara Seiseiin’s painstaking researches in his History of the Japanese Stage, applying in a greater or lesser degree to the shibai conditions of Osaka and Kyoto.

One of the most deplorable results was the relegation of the actor and playwright to the lower strata of society. The repetition of the rules and regulations against the theatre as a nest of iniquity that had no right to existence caused the people to grow indifferent towards the actors and playwrights. They undervalued them personally, although they enjoyed their art. Yet had their genius attained a much higher level than it did, there would have been no recognition for them in the scheme of things made possible by the shogunate, since the spiritual products of the people counted for nothing.

The venerable and eloquent Marquis Okuma, addressing a gathering of literary men and women at his residence, admitted literature’s place in Japan. His past career, he said, had been taken up with politics, diplomacy, religion, and economics; but he had given no consideration to literature. He confessed that he now realised for the first time, after a long life of eighty years, that literature was necessary in the building up of a new civilisation and the reconstruction of a new society for human beings, just as the different branches of science were necessary. As he had been born into the serious Saga clan, which had no idea of pleasure, he had never once in his earlier career witnessed a theatrical performance. He had no taste for music, and was taught to look down upon literature.