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Paper short abstract

This presentation analyzes AKN PROJECT’s 2025 revival of Human Pavilion – A Comedy, arguing that spatial reconfiguration and a reinterpreted ending transform the play from a self-critical satire of discrimination imposed on Okinawa into a comedy that ironically laughs at Japanese society as a whole.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the 2025 revival of Human Pavilion – A Comedy by AKN PROJECT, originally written by Okinawan playwright Seishin Chinen and first performed in 1976. Since its premiere, Human Pavilion has been staged primarily in Okinawa by the theatre collective Sōzō and has been widely understood as a comedy intended to offer a self-critical satire of the history of recurrent discrimination and domination imposed on Okinawa by the Japanese mainland. In contrast, the AKN PROJECT version fundamentally repositions the work both aesthetically and politically.

The 2025 production, presented not only in Okinawa but also as part of the Performing Arts Program of the international arts festival Aichi 2025, introduced two crucial changes. First, the audience configuration was transformed from a traditional proscenium stage into a distorted circular theatre-in-the-round that places the audience in close proximity to the stage, destabilizing conventional relationships between stage and spectators. Second, although the script remained unchanged, the final scene acquired new layers of meaning through staging and performance choices. This paper argues that these two interventions shift the play’s comic focus from “laughing at Okinawa” to “laughing at Japanese society,” expanding the scope of its critique from a regional to a national framework.

This transformation is deeply connected to the historical context of 2025, which marks eighty years since the end of the Second World War for Japan, while wars, genocide, and the global acceleration of discrimination and division persist worldwide. To clarify why a play written shortly after Okinawa’s reversion to Japan continues to resonate today, this paper reviews the political and social conditions of Okinawa from 1976 to the present, paying attention to both continuity and stagnation.

Finally, by drawing on Henri Bergson’s theory of comedy and laughter (Laughter, 1900), the paper analyzes the comic mechanisms of Human Pavilion. It demonstrates how laughter operates not as mere humor but as a critical force that reveals rigidity, structural asymmetries of power, and the ethical position of the spectator, enabling the play to address contemporary audiences within Japan and beyond.