ONNA KABUKI: THE WOMAN’S STAGE
Companies headed by women were formed in imitation of the O-Kuni Kabuki.
They appeared not only in Kyoto, but made grand tours to distant
parts of the country. A feudal lord whose domains were near the
present prosperous tea-trade centre, the city of Shidzuoka, invited a
Kyoto actress and her company, and when the famous Nagoya castle was
completed, the daimyo who had co-operated in the building, celebrated
by giving an Onna Kabuki entertainment. Even Date Masamune, lord of
Sendai, one of the first daimyo to accept the Christian faith, and who
sent an embassy to Rome, asked an actress to perform in his fief.
About this time, the O-Kuni Kabuki had finally settled at Shijo Bridge
in Kyoto, the head of which was the third O-Kuni.
The popularity of these players was so widespread, that the women
of the gay quarters followed their example, and companies of women
performers were recruited from the ranks of the prostitutes. A man
called Sadoshima Yosanji taught these women dancing, and erected a
theatre. Schools for the training of actresses were established, and
talented dancers were developed who competed with each other for the
favour of the public. One of these women, Sadoshima Shokichi, gave a
performance at the Yoshiwara, in Yedo, and at the time a placard was
set up on Nihonbashi, the Bridge of Japan, which was one of the chief
landmarks of Yedo, as it is of modern Tokyo. The male musicians who
performed at this time were very expert, according to this bridge
advertisement, and attention was called to the comic nature of the
pieces to be performed.
Although the name Onna Kabuki signified a woman’s theatre, it was not
long until the two sexes were playing together indiscriminately, men
taking the rôles of women, and the characters of men being assumed by
women. Upon one occasion Ikushima, an actress, appeared at Nakabashi
in Yedo. When the curtain was drawn, the head actor of the company
advanced in most gorgeous attire, wearing swords ornamented with gold.
With him was an equally resplendent actress. More than fifty females
danced together during the performance. They took the rôles of men and
wore swords. The musicians sat on camp stools, and the singers recited
to the strains of the samisen.
This is the first mention of the samisen in the theatre, the
three-stringed instrument that was in after years to revolutionise
Kabuki as well as the Doll-theatre. The instruments in use until the
introduction of the samisen were the Nō drums and flute, but the
samisen with its strident, irregular rhythms was to be associated from
this time onward with the whole gay, frivolous world, far removed
from the austerity, dignity, and ritual with which the flute and Nō
drums were associated. The samisen had been brought to Japan from the
Loo Choo Islands. A similar instrument had long been in use in China,
so that it seems probable that it had its origin in China, but was
imported into Japan from the islands to the south-west, where Chinese
influence had long been uppermost.
When Onna Kabuki was at its height, there were four companies in Kyoto
called O-Kuni, Sadoshima, Shinobu, and a company managed by a man named
Dansuke. Shinobu removed to Ise province, Dansuke and his company
established themselves at Osaka, that was then as it is to-day the
leading commercial centre of Japan. The Sadoshima party was divided
into two, headed respectively by Takeshima and Sadoshima, both
of whom had sons who became noted actors in the first period of the
male theatre. They were Takeshima Kyozaemon and Sadoshima Dempachi.
The latter was a dokegata, or comic actor. Sadoshima’s grandson wrote
_Sadoshima Nikki_, or the Journal of Sadoshima, which deals with the
Kabuki of his time, and is a theatre classic.
Had the women companies remained exemplary in conduct and kept their
ranks free from the other sex, the history of the Japanese theatre
might have been quite different. But the leading actresses were
prostitutes; their art was a means to an end, and they abused their
privileges as entertainers. No permanent and self-respecting theatre
could have continued to exist on such an immoral foundation. The
degradation of the Onna Kabuki was due in no small degree, however,
to the playing of men and women together. The public very soon came
to look down upon these players, and they were referred to as Kawara
Kojiki, or Riverside Beggars, derived from the fact that the first
Kabuki players had erected their temporary stages on the dry beds of
Kyoto rivers. The term was from this time handed down to besmirch the
reputations of generations of honest, legitimate actors that followed.
In 1608 a proclamation by the Shogun’s Government was made limiting
the Onna Kabuki to the outskirts of the cities, where its baneful
influence might be less of a contamination to society. Several court
ladies who had carried on flirtations with the handsome young actors
of the Onna Kabuki were exiled, in punishment of their misdemeanours,
and Government interference was frequent. In 1626 a notice advertising
a performance was ordered to be taken down. In 1628, when a company of
actresses played at Takanawa near Shinagawa, in the suburbs of Yedo,
the theatre was so crowded that great confusion ensued, and the place
was ordered to be closed.
The climax came when the Government of the third Shogun, Iyemitsu,
issued a strict order (1629) forbidding female performances of any
kind. At one stroke the performances of women dancers, the actresses of
the Onna Kabuki, and even the women minstrels who sang to the movements
of the marionettes in the puppet show, came to an abrupt end.
Again in 1630 a company of mixed players attempted to give a
performance, the actors appearing as women and the actresses as men,
but an order was immediately issued excluding all females from the
stage. In 1640 a company of male and female players announced they
would play together, but their performance was stopped, and in 1645
the proprietor of a theatre was severely punished for employing female
players. This was done as an example, for violations were frequent.
In the history of the Doll-theatre, also, there had been companies
of women who handled the marionettes while female minstrels sang
and recited the ballad-dramas to which the dolls moved, and women
accomplished in the samisen accompanied the minstrels. These
Doll-theatre companies of women were not long to endure, and soon came
to grief.
Somewhere about the time that O-Kuni was beginning to dance on
her temporary stage by the riverside in Kyoto, Ono-no-Otsu, a
lady-in-waiting in the household of the great general, Oda Nobunaga,
had composed a long ballad called _Joruri Hime Monogatari_, or the
Story of Princess Joruri. It had been sung by a minstrel to the
accompaniment of the samisen.
This was an improvement on the balladry of the blind musicians, who had
recited their stories of love and battle to the mournful minor strings
of the biwa. The first tayu, or minstrel, to sing the improved balladry
inaugurated by Ono-no-Otsu, was a woman called Rokuji Namuyemon. After
her there were both male and female minstrels, but the prohibition of
the Onna Kabuki also included the female minstrel. The talent of woman
had repeatedly tried to express itself in the realm of the theatre, but
now the heavy hand of the puritanic shogunate fell upon her activities,
and the result was the suppression of all stage aspiration on the
part of females for three hundred years.
Ihara Seiseiin, commenting on this in his _History of the Japanese
Stage_, says that although the Shogun’s Government was under the
necessity of maintaining the morals of the people, the prohibition had
an ill effect upon the theatre, and the injury has not been completely
healed. He thinks that if the Onna Kabuki had been left to develop
naturally, it is most probable that there would now exist a different
state of affairs, and actresses would have adorned the Japanese theatre
as they do in the Occident. But, he continues, it was impossible for
the Tokugawa Shogunate to have such foresight with regard to art, and
the fact that there are no names of actresses adorning the history
of the Japanese stage must be attributed to this initial, stern,
prohibitive measure of the shogunate.
These strict laws regarding the appearance of females on the stage were
enforced until the last days of the shogunate, when its grip loosened
on many of the measures that had been made to regulate the morals of
the people and to control their democratic tendencies.
With this relaxation there again came into existence a woman’s theatre,
headed by a brilliant actress, Kumehachi, who was a contemporary of
Danjuro, the ninth, the great star of Meiji. She took male rôles as
did other women of her company. With her death her company disbanded.
A successor to Kumehachi exists to-day who also acts men’s characters
most successfully, Nakamura Kasen, but she loses much of her prestige
by acting with mixed players. The establishment of a school of
actresses in connection with the founding of the Imperial Theatre in
Tokyo belongs to the modern history of the Japanese stage.
Judging from the conditions that have been brought about by mixed
players on the Western stage, it was a fortunate thing that women were
excluded, for the actors were able to develop a masculine theatre
unhampered by petticoat influence. Whether this is an advantage to
the art of the theatre remains to be seen when Kabuki, the unique
masculine stage of Japan, will become known outside the land of its
origin.
In order that men should reign supreme in the world of make-believe,
the creativeness of the Japanese woman in the direction of the theatre
has thus been clearly sacrificed. But in the future their talent may
be able to find scope for development in a theatre of their own, as an
expression of the spirit of women. The tendency of the theatre art in
Japan is toward a separation of the sexes, and there is hope that in
the future a women’s theatre, free from the immoral influences that
caused the downfall of the Onna Kabuki, will coexist with Kabuki, the
firmly established masculine stage.
O-Kuni’s prominence began in 1596, when she first met Sansaburo, and
she reached the height of her fame in 1601. By 1629 women were strictly
prohibited from performing in public. Thus the women’s theatre she had
founded came to an abrupt end, after an existence of three decades.