This panel invites us to reconsider where, when, and why do our expectations for theater as subversive potential run into more complicated realities? And what larger frameworks or assumptions about power or performance in premodern Japan do we have to reconsider to account for theater’s historical complicities?
Exactly how and under what circumstances kabuki theater was able to skirt official restrictions on forms of performance and dramatic content has long been a challenging question to answer because of the paucity of definitive primary sources. Ryo Kimura’s presentation, however, is a groundbreaking examination of records related to the performances of actor Ichikawa Danjūrō VII’s at the Naritasan Shinshōji Temple that reveals how multiple agents – the actor, the temple, and the local domanial authorities – collaborated to leverage the religious context and the fungible vocabulary of performance categories and titles to circumvent regulations from the central government.
Natalia Egorova’s presentation turns instead to the dynamics of advertisement and consumption in amateur and semi-professional theater. These performances were often parodies of popular kabuki narratives, sprinkled with improvisation, and culminating in the presentation of a keibutsu (seasonal delicacy, or free item). At their core, such performances were marketing ploys to advertise products, such as makeup, medication, food, or other merchandise, and thus, conformed to the rising consumerist and commodification in the urban capital. Egorova's paper promises to provide new perspective on the increasing cultural authority of merchants in early modern Japan and the networks between the stage and Japan’s economic development.
Hana Lethen’s paper examines medieval noh plays about madwomen as a site where noh sought to align its aesthetics with the cultural standards and ideology of capital-based warrior elites. Nuancing longstanding interpretations about the madwoman figure in noh as liberatory – figures whose madness enables them to transgress social and spatial boundaries – Hana reminds us that these characters were always already marginalized, and their bodies disciplined into objects of connoisseurship for noh’s warrior patrons. The plays thus evince an effort by noh performers to elevate themselves from their socially marginalized status. They did this not by resisting but rather participating in the social hierarchies that marginalized them, demonstrating the entanglement of noh’s aesthetics with the concerns of those who claimed political authority.
The papers will be responded to by Satoko Shimazaki, associate professor of early modern Japanese literature and theater at the University of California, Los Angeles. Satoko’s book, Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost (Columbia University Press, 2016), was the first English-language monograph to call into question just how subversive early modern kabuki truly was given its elevation of samurai values and complicity in censorship at points of its history. In this sense, her work serves as a vital point of departure for the papers of the panel.
This panel brings together scholars from both US and Japanese institutions at different stages of their academic careers to argue that premodern Japanese performance could be complicit in, even reinforce, dominant political or cultural forces. At the same time, theater could also leverage one form of authority – religious, political, or legal – against another to evade constraints on its practices. Premodern Japanese theater thus emerges as a medium through which authority is not only challenged or upheld, but actively reconfigured through practices of mediation, appropriation, and strategic alignment.