Lost Japan

by Alex Kerr

  Afterwards, a friend of the Kaika master took me to Tamasaburo’s dressing room backstage. Out of make-up, Tamasaburo was a tall, thin young man, who looked not much different from somebody one might sit next to on the subway. In contrast with his sadness-tinged femininity of the stage, he was no-nonsense, cheerful, funny. He was then aged twenty-seven, two years older than me.

  Kabuki, an almost perfectly preserved remnant of Japan’s feudal past, is dominated by a handful of old families. Actors are ranked according to the importance of their hereditary names, like barons and dukes in the peerage. Actors not born into a Kabuki family are doomed to spend their whole lives as kuroko – the black-clad attendants, supposedly invisible to the audience, who appear onstage to supply a prop and remove or adjust a piece of costume. At best, they might appear in a row of maids or retainers. But occasionally someone manages to gain entrance to the hierarchy from outside, and Tamasaburo was one of these.

  Although not born into the Kabuki world, Tamasaburo began dancing when he was four. At the age of six he was adopted by the Kabuki actor Morita Kanya XIV, and appeared as a child actor under the name of Bando Kinoji. From then on, his entire life was devoted to the stage; he never went beyond high school. When I met him, he had just returned from his first trip to Europe and was dying to talk to someone about world culture. Fresh from Oxford, I seemed to him to be the ideal candidate. For my part, having just watched Sagi Musume, I was still marveling at his genius, and had a host of questions to ask about Japanese theater. We hit it off at once, and soon became fast friends.

  From then on, I neglected Oomoto and stole every opportunity to take the train to Tokyo to see Kabuki. Jakuemon and Tamasaburo gave me free run of the backstage, and Tamasaburo’s adoptive mother, Kanshie, was a master of Nihon Buyo (Japanese dance), so I would often watch her classes. For five years I more or less lived inside the Kabuki theater.

  Kabuki seems to me to have the perfect balance between the sensuality and ritual which are the two poles of Japanese culture. On one hand, there is Japan’s freewheeling sexuality, out of which was born the riotous ukiyo (floating world) of Edo: courtesans, colorful woodblock prints, men dressed as women, women dressed as men, ‘naked festivals’, brilliantly decorated kimono, etc. This is a remnant of ancient Southeast Asian influence on Japan, and is more akin to Bangkok than to Beijing or Seoul. In fact, early Jesuits traveling from Beijing to Nagasaki at the end of the sixteenth century wrote letters in which they contrasted the colorful costumes of the Japanese with the drab gowns of the common people of Beijing.

  At the same time, there is a tendency in Japan towards over-decoration, towards cheap sensuality too overt to be art. Recognizing this, the Japanese turn against the sensual. They polish, refine, slow down, trying to reduce art and life to its pure essentials. From this reaction were born the rituals of tea ceremony, Noh drama and Zen. In the history of Japanese art you can see these two tendencies warring against each other. In the late Muromachi period, gorgeous gold screens were in the ascendant; along came the tea masters, and suddenly the aesthetic was misshapen brown tea bowls. By late Edo the emphasis had swung back to courtesans and the pleasure quarters.

  Today, this war goes on. There are garish pachinko parlors and late-night pornographic TV, and there is a reaction against all that, which I call the ‘process of sterilization’: the tendency to fill every garden with raked sand and every modern structure with flat concrete and granite. Kabuki, however, has the right balance. It began as a popular art, and is rich in humor, raw emotion and sexual appeal. At the same time, after hundreds of years, it has been slowed and refined to the point where, within the sensuality, there is that timeless ‘stop’ – the meditational calm which is Japan’s special achievement.

  Kabuki, like all theater, is a world of illusion. With its extreme elaboration of costumes, make-up and the kata (prescribed ‘forms’ of movement), it may be the most illusionistic of all: when the elegant court lady removes her make-up, one is left facing an Osaka businessman. Once, I was translating for Tamasaburo when an Englishman asked him, ‘Why did you want to become an actor?’ Tamasaburo answered, ‘Because I longed for a world of beauty beyond my reach.’ I, too, was bewitched by this elusive world of illusion.

  In the play Iriya, there is a scene where the woman Michitose is about to meet her lover after a long separation. Her samurai is being hunted by the police but has crept through the snow to see her. He waits in front of some fusuma sliding doors. Hearing of his arrival, she bursts into the room and the lovers are reunited. When Tamasaburo was once playing the part of Michitose, we were sitting together backstage, next to the fusuma doors and more or less on the stage itself, just prior to Michitose’s dramatic entrance. Tamasaburo was chatting casually and was not the least bit feminine – very much an average man, although he was in full costume. When the time came for his entrance, he stood up, laughed, said, ‘OK, here I go!’, and walked over to the fusuma. He adjusted his robe, flung open the fusuma, and in that instant was transformed into a beauty straight out of an Ukiyoe print. In a silvery voice fit to melt the audience’s heart, he cried out, ‘Aitakatta, aitakatta, aitakatta wai na!’ – ‘I’ve missed you, I’ve missed you, I’ve missed you so much!’ A world of illusion had sprung up from one side of a fusuma to the other.

  The illusion is achieved by Kabuki stagecraft, probably the most highly developed in the world. The hanamichi (‘flower path’) through the audience is a particularly famous example. Actors enter and leave the stage via this walkway; separated from the action on the main stage, the actor on the hanamichi enters a solitary realm where he is free to reveal the inner depths of his role. For instance, the play Kumagai Jinya (Kumagai’s Battle Camp) is a traditional tale of giri-ninjo (the conflict between love and duty): Kumagai must kill his own son and substitute the boy’s severed head for the son of his lord. His ruse is successful, but in remorse Kumagai shaves off his hair to enter a life of asceticism, and exits down the hanamichi. When the late Kanzaburo XVIII played Kumagai, he imparted such a sense of personal desolation as he exited down the hanamichi that Kumagai Jinya seemed not a tale of giri-ninjo, but an antiwar play.

  Kabuki stagecraft sometimes seems symbolic of life itself. An example of this is danmari, or pantomime scenes, in which all the lead characters come silently out onto the stage at the same time. As though walking in pitch darkness, they move about in slow motion, oblivious to each other’s existence; they run into each other or drop things which are retrieved by others. There is an eerie quality about danmari which has nothing to do with any specific play. Watching scenes of danmari, where a man picks up a letter his lover has dropped, or two people looking for each other pass by unawares, one senses the blindness of human existence. What begins as just another bit of eccentric Kabuki stagecraft ends up symbolizing a deeper truth.

  Why did stagecraft develop to such a level in Japan? At the risk of oversimplification, I would say it was because Japan is a country where the exterior is more often valued over the interior. One may see the negative effects of this in many aspects of modern Japanese life. For instance, the fruits and vegetables in a Japanese supermarket are all flawless in color and shape as if made from wax, but they are flavorless. The importance of the exterior may be seen in the conflict between tatemae (officially stated position) and honne (real intent), which is a staple of books written about Japan. Listening to the debates in Japan’s Diet, it is abundantly clear that tatemae is given precedence over honne. Nevertheless, this emphasis on the surface is not without its positive side, for Kabuki’s unparalleled stagecraft is a direct result of such prizing of the outward.

  Though I learned many things from Kabuki stagecraft, the aspect I found most fascinating was the artistry used to capture and accentuate the emotion of a single fleeting moment. The mie, when actors pose dramatically with eyes crossed and arms flung out, is an obvious example of this. But it may be said of many other Kabuki kata as well. For example, there might be a scene where two people are casua
lly talking; then, from some detail of the conversation, the characters suddenly comprehend each other’s true feelings. In that instant, action stops, actors freeze, and from stage left wooden clappers go ‘battari!’. The two characters resume speaking as though nothing has happened; however, in the instant of that ‘battari!’, everything has changed. While most forms of theater try to preserve a narrative continuity, Kabuki focuses around such crucial instants of stop and start, start and stop.

  This can also be said of Kabuki audiences’ expressions of appreciation. At a Western play or concert, the audience waits politely until the very end before applauding; nothing could be more ill-mannered than to clap between movements of a symphony. In contrast, during highlights of a Kabuki play, audience members will show their appreciation by shouting out the yago (house names) of the actors. When the play is over, they just get up and leave.

  The shouting of yago is an art in itself. One doesn’t shout at any time, but only at certain moments of dramatic tension. You can recognise the amateurs in the audience by their poorly timed shouts. There is a group of knowledgeable old men, called the omuko (literally, ‘men in the back’), who are the masters of this art form; they frequent the upper rafters, where I sat at my first kaomise. From there, they shout yago such as ‘Yamatoya!’ for Tamasaburo or ‘Nakamuraya!’ for Kanzaburo. Or they will vary their repertoire with ‘Godaime!’ (‘Fifth generation!’), ‘Goryonin!’ (‘The pair of you!’) or ‘Mattemashita!’ (‘I’ve been waiting for this!’). I remember watching the legendary onnagata Utaemon, then aged seventy, appearing as the grand courtesan Yatsuhashi. At the climactic moment, when Yatsuhashi turns to the peasant following her and bestows upon him the smile which is going to destroy his life, there was a shout from the omuko: ‘Hyakuman doru!’ – ‘A million dollars!’

  I have only shouted once in my life; it was in the early days, for Kunitaro. His yago was Yamazakiya. I practiced and practiced, and then at the right moment I shouted ‘Yamazakiya!’ from the rafters as best as I could. It wasn’t easy. The timing is so important that the actors depend on the shouts to sustain the rhythm of the performance. I once saw Tamasaburo in rehearsal pause at a critical moment, whisper ‘Yamatoya!’, and then glide into the next movement of the dance.

  Focus on the ‘instant’ is characteristic of Japanese culture as a whole. In Chinese poetry, the poet’s imagination might begin with flowers and rivers, and then suddenly leap up into the Nine Heavens to ride a dragon to Mt K’un-lun and frolic with the immortals. Japanese haiku focus on the mundane moment, as in Basho’s well-known poem: ‘The old pond; a frog leaps in – the sound of water’. The frog leaps into the pond, not up to heaven. There are no immortals, just ‘the sound of water’. In the concision of haiku and waka, Japan created unparalleled literary forms. On the other hand, long poems of narrative or ideas are almost completely absent from the history of Japanese literature. Long verse was created by stringing pearls together into longer chains, as in renga (linked waka poems).

  This ‘instantaneous culture’ is something I also noticed in the real-estate world, where I was later to work in Tokyo. There are innumerable detailed building codes, but the overall design of a building and its aesthetic relation to street and skyline are ignored; the result is careless, disjointed, ugly. The sorry state of the highway system is also the result of renga thinking: there is no master plan, just a stringing together of annual budgets to build highways piecemeal.

  Kabuki is no exception. The arrangement of a play’s elements are ambiguous, and sudden narrative leaps are often made. For anyone expecting dramatic unity, Kabuki seems weak. My friends who value logic invariably dislike Kabuki. However, with its emphasis on the depth of a single instant, Kabuki creates an atmosphere of intense excitement which is rare in other theater. Tamasaburo once told me, ‘In ordinary drama, the story proceeds step by step. What a bore! Kabuki’s fascination lies in its outrageous leaps of logic.’

  Kabuki, like everything else in Japan, is torn between the poles of refinement and hedonism – hedonism being represented by keren (acrobatic tricks), refinement by the actors’ measured grace. These days, plays featuring multiple costume changes, actors attached to cables flying through the air, and waterfalls onstage are all the rage. The popularity of keren is a sign of the sickness currently plaguing the traditional Japanese arts in general. When one looks at Japan’s wilderness breathing its dying gasps, the traditional arts seem comparatively healthy. Kabuki has actually experienced a box-office resurgence over the last twenty years, and the theaters are often sold out. But trouble is brewing because of Kabuki’s irrelevance to any life a modern audience can now experience. There is hardly a single object on the Kabuki stage recognizable to young people today. When stage chanters sing of fireflies or autumn maples, such things are now almost mythical subjects in this land of vast cedar plantations.

  Actors such as Jakuemon or Tamasaburo spend hours with the kimono dyers discussing the precise shade of purple a certain kimono should be, what color the actor Kikugoro VI (‘the Great Sixth’) used, what is chic or not chic by standards of the Edo period. Certain older attendants, who came in from outside and therefore can never achieve major roles, have amassed incredible knowledge about such Kabuki arcana. In many cases, these men, not the actors you see onstage, are the true standard-bearers of the tradition; they know by heart not only what Kikugoro VI used, but what was used before him.

  An example is Tamasaburo’s old retainer Yagoro, now in his eighties, whom Tamasaburo inherited from his adoptive father Kanya. Yagoro performed major roles in his youth as a member of the small troupes that used to travel the countryside. As the tide of Westernization swept Japan after World War II, these smaller troupes disappeared or were gradually absorbed into one large troupe. The ‘Grand Kabuki’ we see today consists of several hundred actors (and their assistants), all based in Tokyo. ‘Grand’ though it is called, it is actually the shrunken remnant of a larger Kabuki world which once numbered thousands of performers spread throughout the provinces. Yagoro belongs to the last generation who knew that larger Kabuki world.

  Yagoro will come into the room backstage after a show and sit there with a smile on his face. Then Tamasaburo will say, ‘What do you think, Father?’ (actors address each other as ‘elder brother’, ‘uncle’, ‘father’). Yagoro will say, ‘The Great Sixth used a silver fan, but that was because he was short and it accentuated his height. For you it would be inappropriate. Use gold, like the former Baiko did.’ This is how their knowledge is passed down.

  But what use are all these refinements when you are performing to an audience whose familiarity with the kimono is about on a par with that of Americans? Fine details tend to be lost, and the audience goes for the obvious crowd-pleasers, like keren.

  Another problem is the generation gap. The training of actors, including those of Tamasaburo’s generation, used to be fierce. Intense dedication was required. Jakuemon told me how he used to memorize nagauta (long narrative lyrics) by chanting them on the train on his way to the theater; one day, the train suddenly stopped and he found all the other passengers staring at him as he chanted loudly in the ensuing silence. In those days, Kabuki was more of a popular form, and less of a formalized ‘traditional art’, so audiences were more knowledgeable and demanding. A bad actor would find the omuko shouting, ‘Daikon!’ (‘big radish!’), to his everlasting humiliation. Now there are no calls of Daikon!, and audiences sit reverently with their hands in their laps, no matter how good or bad the actor might be. The younger actors, born into privilege because of their family names, have it easy. Tamasaburo once said, ‘Communism in Russia was a terrible thing, but it produced great ballet dancers. In order to be great you need a Moscow in your background.’

  After I began watching Kabuki, I discovered Nihon Buyo (Japanese dance) and Shinpa (Meiji-style drama) as well. I realized that ‘Grand Kabuki’ is just the tip of the iceberg – the arts connected to Kabuki are vigorously active in their own right. There is a con
stant round of recitals, called kai (gatherings), of Nihon Buyo, flute, nagauta (long lyrics), kouta (short lyrics), samisen, and more.

  While one invariably sees foreigners at Kabuki theater, I have found it extremely rare to see another foreigner at any of these recitals. But given the diversity of Nihon Buyo, which includes dozens of styles, tens of thousands of teachers and millions of students, it is a broader world than Kabuki. Many of the finest dancers are women, which is a return to Kabuki’s pre-onnagata roots. Some of them are legends such as Takehara Han, who began as a geisha in Osaka and ended up as the premier master of Zashiki-mai (sitting-room dance), a subtle form of dance which originated in the intimate quarters of the geisha house. If you included classical Kabuki dance styles such as Fujima-ryu, as well as the numerous varieties of Zashiki-mai, Kyo-mai (Kyoto dance) and even enka (modern pop dancing), you could spend your life watching Nihon Buyo.

  When the Fates were planning my introduction into the world of Kabuki, they arranged not only the Kaika teahouse and my meeting with Tamasaburo, but also that I should become friends with a man named Faubion Bowers. Faubion traveled to Japan as a student before World War II, and had become enamored of Kabuki, sitting up in the rafters night after night learning from the omuko. He was especially a fan of the prewar actor Uzaemon.

  During the war he was a translator and ended up as General Douglas MacArthur’s aide-de-camp, and at war’s end MacArthur dispatched Faubion a few days in advance of his arrival to make arrangements. So, when Faubion and his group arrived at Atsugi air base, they were the first enemy soldiers to set foot in Japan. A contingent of Japanese officials and press nervously awaited them, fearful of what the Americans’ first move would be. But Faubion approached the press and asked, ‘Is Uzaemon still alive?’ The tension instantly relaxed.