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The Himeyuri Student Corps consisted of underage female students, most of whom eventually died in the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. This presentation explores the Takarazuka revue depicting them in 1953, by analyzing how the scriptwriter weaved the issue of wartime responsibility into the revue.

Paper long abstract

The Battle of Okinawa was characterized as a fierce "storm of steel." The Himeyuri Student Corps consisted of mostly underage female students from the two elite girls’ schools of Okinawa. When the Battle of Okinawa began, they were mobilized to work as assistant nurses on the battlefields, where most of them eventually lost their lives. After Japan’s defeat in 1945, a variety of narratives about the Himeyuri Student Corps were born. Of all these narratives, this presentation focuses on those which were published or released specifically between 1945 and 1953, aiming to clarify how their depictions of the Himeyuri Student Corps influenced the Takarazuka Revue Company’s revue titled “The Tower of Himeyuri” in 1953.

Kikuta Kazuo, the scriptwriter of the revue, acknowledged his responsibility for writing propaganda theatrical scripts during wartime, and thus, for lifting the spirits of audiences for the war. This presentation considers how Kikuta reflected his wartime responsibilities as a propagandist upon his descriptions of the Himeyuri Student Corps. It is neither my aim here to defend Kikuta nor to absolve him from his wartime responsibility. Rather, this presentation aims to explore the ways in which Kikuta weaved the issue of wartime responsibility into his revue, and how his approach differentiated his revue from other narratives of the Himeyuri Student Corps.

The foremost characteristic of Kikuta’s "The Tower of Himeyuri" is that the story focuses on the relationship between the “present” (which means 1953 when the revue was made) and the “past”. It is narrated through the past memories of fictional Okinawan survivors directly to Japanese mainlanders who understand neither the Battle of Okinawa nor the Himeyuri Student Corps well. The other preceding narratives on the Himeyuri Student Corps all presented their stories as completed events of the past, and no connections are drawn between the past and the present. In contrast, Kikuta’s “The Tower of Himeyuri” sought to address the Himeyuri Student Corps as an ongoing issue by focusing on this missing link between the past and the present, as well as the link between Okinawa and the Japanese mainland.

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This presentation focuses on the problematic of war, death and suffering as orchestrated by the all-female popular musical theater Takarazuka Revue in Japan. It is based on more than 20 years of fieldwork, with particular focus on the last 5 to 7 years, and extensive literature research.

Paper long abstract

This presentation focuses on the problematic of war, death and suffering as orchestrated by the all-female popular musical theater Takarazuka Revue in Japan. During the first half of its history since 1914, Takarazuka Revue intensively supported Japan’s nationalist, expansionist project of a “Great East-Asian Sphere” under Japanese domination. Since 1945, though, Takarazuka Revue has intently shifted towards a performance policy which does not allow for the representation of Japan or Asia in modern and contemporary times and instead focuses on plotlines located in atemporal Asian or Japanese societies as well as mythological or science-fiction narrative environments. Approximately one third of the live performances staged at Takarazuka Grand Theater in the city of Takarazuka and at Tokyo Takarazuka Theater in Japan’s capital respect this performance policy, with the remaining one third adhering to the parimono genre (performances with plots located in Paris, categorized as such since 1927’s Mon Paris) and one third concocting stories with Western topics, oftentimes wrapped up in incredulous narrative developments and characters’ construction, rather faithful to Japanese traditions of dramatic architecture than to Western worldviews of late-modern perception and processing.

The past five to seven years, nevertheless, have seen an astonishing increase in war-related performances: the years 2015 and 2017 were game-changers, each with six out of nine performances dealing with wars, riots, revolutions and general militarization. By comparison, 2016 had three out of nine performances tackling wars occurring exclusively in premodern Japan. In addition, 2018 and 2019 brought into the foreground of performance strategy the gradual return to the pre-war performative vision of Takarazuka Revue’s founder Kobayashi Ichizô (1873-1957) of a “mass-theater” representing Japan and Japanese people in their advancement towards becoming world leaders. Based on 20+ years of fieldwork and extensive literature research, the current presentation analyzes the increasing display of warfare, death and suffering on Takarazuka Revue’s stage during the last five to seven years in an attempt to elucidate its mechanisms of instrumentalizing violence and pain as a means to sensitize audiences towards the evils of war on the backdrop of emotional-mental complacency and indifference in the affluent, post-industrialized, service-based societies.

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A recent theatrical attempt at the Japanese-Korean conflict was a shinsaku nō play by Tada Tomio entitled "Bōkonka" (Longing Song). The drama focuses on the traumatic inheritance of the occupation. The author will examine two recent stage realizations of the play by the Tessenkai Nō Theatre.

Paper long abstract

It is incredibly challenging to make balanced judgments about the colonial wars and conflicts that shook the Asian continent in the 20th century. One of these conflicts was the war and Japanese colonial domination of Korea (1910-1945). One of the theatrical attempts on this subject is the play by Tady Tomio (1934-2010), a Japanese immunologist and playwright writing mainly shinsaku nō theatre dramas, entitled "Bōkonka" ("Longing Song"), which premiered in 1993. The drama focuses on the traumatic inheritance of war, occupation and related memories. The principal role (shite) in the "Longing Song" is the wife of a young Korean man who was forcibly taken to Japan in the 1930s when Korea was a Japanese colony and died during forced labour at a coal mine on the Kyūshū island. The years pass, and the wife, now an older woman, reads a letter by the young Korean man brought to her by a Japanese Buddhist monk… The letter becomes essential memorabilia, triggering the process of coming to terms with the loss of a family member and the trauma of colonial domination. The figure of a Japanese monk going on a trip to Korea can also be interpreted as an endeavour, in the general social sense, to compensate the victims of war and the inhuman system of forced labour established by the Japanese state. In terms of the current politics, it may also be an attempt to speak on behalf of the Japanese society in the face of the policy of abandonment of the Japanese political elite, which for many years aimed to minimize the scale of the crimes committed in Korea.

The author will examine two recent stage realizations of the play, both produced by the renowned Tessenkai Nō Theatre members. The 2019 Bōkonka production starred actress Uzawa Hisa, and the 2021 one was staged by Shimizu Kanji shite kata actor playing the central part. The latter blended the Japanese nō theatre convention with Korean nongak, rural and ritual performance. The author would also like to examine how gender relations, war and occupation memories are represented on the nō stage.