Paper short 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. 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.