Paper short abstract:

Based on immersive fieldwork in Takarazuka city and in-depth interviews with Takarazuka fans, this paper argues that the Takarazuka Revue phenomenon offers an example of a distinctive fan culture fundamentally tied to the regional urban development and a unique geographic city landscape.

Paper long abstract:

In 2014 the Takarazuka Revue's centennial anniversary received a widespread attention across various types of Japanese mass media. Much of the coverage focused on the cross-gendered performance of the otokoyaku (male role players), defining it as the distinguishing feature of this all-female Japanese theatre company. This has also been the case with scholarly research about Takarazuka, with many studies addressing the otokoyaku's onstage and offstage performance, as well as the actresses' zealous fans. So far, there has been little attempt made at understanding Takarazuka's phenomenon beyond the prism of "a theatre popular with Japanese women" and little efforts made at further characterizing Takarazuka's fan culture, especially when it comes to issues such as locality, tourism, consumption, or fan practices not limited to the activities of fan clubs. In this paper I focus on the Takarazuka fans' perceptions of Takarazuka Revue's birthplace, the Takarazuka city, to explore their personal relations with the spatial location of the Takarazuka Grand Theatre (Takarazuka's main "home theatre") and analyse how their everyday lived experiences as fans are influenced by their interactions with the core of the Takarazuka city. Reminiscent of Walter Benjamin's study of Parisian arcades, much attention will be given to the formation of geographic space as observed through the strolling movement of individual and collective fans and their characteristic practices.

Using ethnographic research methods this paper is informed by three months of immersive fieldwork conducted in the Takarazuka city in 2017, with additional short-term fieldwork sessions conducted in 2017-2018, and draws on data derived from participant observation and in-depth interviews with long-term fans of the Takarazuka Revue localised in the Kansai region.

This paper argues that, as a theatre company owned by a private railway enterprise which performs its plays in exclusive and location-bound "home theatres", Takarazuka offers a unique example of how the establishment of a theatre building can not only shape its immediate surroundings along with the urban development of an emerging city, but also lead to the creation of a distinctive fan culture fundamentally tied to a geographic city landscape.