THE JAPANESE THEATRE
“Saturated with the refinements of an old civilization,” as Dr. Dresser
says, and possessing all other arts in perfection, it is not surprising
that the Japanese drama should be so well worthy of its people. The
theatre has reached its present development slowly and with difficulty.
Caste distinctions hindered its rise, actors ranking next the _eta_,
or outcast class in feudal days, and the play-houses of such degraded
beings lying under ban. Only the middle and lower classes patronized
them, nobles never attending any public exhibitions, and all women being
excluded.
In the golden age of the Tokugawas the drama began to win recognition;
theatres were built by the Shogun; the marionette shows, the first
departure from the No Kagura, gave way to living actors and realism
succeeded. In the great social upheaval and rearrangement of classes
following the Restoration, actors rose a little in social esteem and
gained some rights of citizenship. But another quarter of a century will
hardly rank the dramatic with the other arts and honor its interpreters.
Noblemen now attend the theatre, but actors never receive an invitation
to their clubs. A few years since, Tokio founded an association for the
improvement of the theatre, and the development of the histrionic art of
the country in its own distinctive way. Viscount Hijikata and Viscount
Kawawa were elected president and vice-president of this Engei Kyokai,
but little is known of its actual work.
Instead of farce or recitative prologue preceding the play, come one or
two acts of classic pantomime or character dance, or an interlude of this
kind in the middle of the drama. These classic pantomimes resemble the No
Kagura simplified.
This No dance, or lyric drama, is the dramatic form current before the
seventeenth century. Bordering on the religious, it suggests the Greek
drama, and the passion and miracle plays of mediæval Europe. Originally,
the No was the pantomime festival dance of the Shinto temples, fabled to
have been first performed by Suzume before the cave of the Sun Goddess.
The sacred dance is still a temple ceremonial, and the dances of the
Shinto priestesses at Nikko and Nara are famous. In time the No became
the entertainment of honor in the yashikis of the great, and princes and
nobles took part in the solemn measures when greater princes were their
guests. To the slow and stately movements of the dancers, and their play
with fan and bells, dialogue was added, and an exaggeration of detail and
etiquette.
The No is wholly artificial, the movements of the actors being as
stiff, stilted, and measured as the classic idiom in which the dialogue
is spoken, and the ancient and obsolete ideographs which set forth
the synopsis of the action. Confined to the yashikis and monasteries,
the No was the entertainment of the upper classes, who alone could
understand its involved and lofty diction and intricate symbolism.
While the bare arguments of plays and dances are as familiar as fairy
tales or folk-lore, only scholars of great attainments can read their
actual lines, and the full translation of a No programme for the Duke of
Edinburgh, on his visit to Japan, busied the interpreters of the British
Legation for days, with the aid of all the old native poets and scholars
in Tokio.
The No is a trilogy, occupying four or five hours of three successive
days. The first set of scenes is to propitiate the gods; the second to
terrify evil spirits and punish the wicked; and the third to glorify
the good, beautiful, and pleasant. The _dramatis personæ_ are gods,
goddesses, demons, priests, warriors, and heroes of early legend and
history, and much of the action is allegorical. By a long gallery at the
left the actors approach the elevated pavilion or platform of the stage,
which is without curtain or scenery, and almost without properties. The
audience sits upon the matted area surrounding the three sides of the
stage. Flute, drum, and pipes play continuously, and a row of men in
old ceremonial dress sit statuesque at one side of the stage, chanting
and wailing the explanatory chorus throughout the performance. In the
great scenes the actors wear masks of thin lacquered or gilded wood, and
valuable collections of such ancient dance masks are preserved in temples
and yashikis. The costuming is superb, the old brocade and cloth-of-gold
garments showing the court costumes of centuries ago, and the great
families and monasteries hold their ancient No costumes as chiefest
treasures.
The actors enter at a gait that out-struts the most exaggerated stage
stride ever seen, the body held rigid as a statue, and the foot, never
wholly lifted, sliding slowly along the polished floor. These buckram
figures, moving with the solemnity of condemned men, utter their lines
like automata, not a muscle nor an eyelash moving, nor a flicker of
expression crossing the unmasked countenance. Their tones are unspeakably
distressing, nasal, high-pitched, falsetto sounds, and many performers
have ruined and lost their voices, and even burst blood-vessels, in
the long-continued, unnatural strain of their recitatives. The children
who take part equal the oldest members in their gravity and woodenness.
In some delightful scenes the demons, with hideous masks and abundant
wigs of long, red-silk hair, spread deliberate and conventional terror
among the buckram grandees, and, stamping the stage wildly, leaping and
whirling, relieve the long-drawn seriousness of the trilogy. It is only
when the performers are without masks that the scene is recognized as
intentionally a light and amusing farce, while the roars of the audience
are elicited by stately, ponderous, and time-honored puns, and plays upon
words that a foreigner cannot appreciate.
Fine representations of the No may be seen at the Koyokwan club-house in
Tokio, and in the audiences one beholds all the bureaucracy, the court
circles, and a gathering of aristocratic families not elsewhere to be
encountered.
The existing theatre and the legitimate drama are not yet three centuries
old, and the name _shibai_, meaning turf places, or grass plot, implies
the same evolution from out-door representations that the occidental
drama had. There is no Shakespeare, nor Corneille, nor, indeed, any
famous dramatist, whose works survive from an earlier day, to align
the stage with literature and make its history. Authorship is rarely
connected with the plays, and authors’ royalties are unknown. Many of the
novels of Baku have been dramatized, but most often anonymously. Plays
are usually written in the simpler _hirakana_, or running characters,
in which light romances and books for women are written, and this fact
alone shows the esteem in which dramatic literature is held. Incidents
in history, lives of warriors, heroes, and saints furnish themes for
the drama, and all the common legends and fairy tales are put upon the
stage. That great classic, the affecting history of the “Forty-seven
Ronins,” is always popular, and the crack-brained heroisms of the days
of chivalry fire the Japanese heart notwithstanding its passion for the
foreign and modern. The trials, tortures, and miracles of the early
days of Buddhism, and the warlike histories of the great feudal houses,
furnish tragedies and sensational and spectacular plays without end.
There are, also, romantic melodramas, emotional dramas, and comedies of
delicious humor and satire.
New plays, while rare, are not theatrical events, and first nights by no
means indicate success or failure. The play is tried on the audience,
changed, cut, and altered as actors, manager, scene-painter, carpenter,
and patrons desire, without consideration of the author’s rights or
feelings.
I once asked a great star who had written his play.
“I do not understand,” said the tragedian; and a bystander explained that
the manager had cut reports of a theft, a murder, and a shipwreck from
a newspaper, and, discussing them with the star, evolved the outlines
of a connected play and decided on the principal scenes and effects. A
hack writer was then called in, who, under dictation, shaped the plot and
divided it into scenes. The managerial council elaborated it further,
allotting the parts, and the star then composed his lines to suit
himself. In rehearsal the play was rounded, the diction altered, and each
actor directed to write out his own part, after which a full transcript
was made for the prompter.
As to the authorship of the play of the “Forty-seven Ronins,” he said:
“That is our country’s history. We all know the story of their lives and
glorious deaths, and many novelists and poets have written of them.”
“But who made it into a drama?”
“Oh, every theatre has its own way of representing the different scenes,
although the great facts are historical and cannot be misrepresented, now
that the Tokugawa’s ban against the play is removed. Danjiro plays it in
one way, and other actors have their versions, but none of them play it
the same at every engagement, nor repeat just the same acts on every day
of an engagement.”
With dramatic authorship so vague and uncertain, the origin or author
of any play is far to seek. Revivals and rotations of the old favorites
constitute a manager’s idea of attractions, a new scene or two, a novel
feature, and some local picture or allusion being enough to satisfy
the most _blasé_ patron. No accurate libretto nor printed book of the
play can thus exist, but the illustrated programmes give a pictorial
outline of it—a veritable impressionist sketch, noting its salient
features, and leaving all details to time and imagination. There are no
dramatic unities, no three-act or five-act limitations, and no hampering
laws of verse and rhythm. An orchestra and half-concealed chorus
explains, heralds, and lauds the action, a survival of the No gradually
disappearing with other things before the demand for shorter hours and
briefer plays.
Women do not appear on the Japanese stage, female parts being played by
men, who often make these roles their specialty, cultivating and using
their voices always in a thin, high falsetto. The make-up, the voices,
gait, action, and manner of some of these actors are wonderful, and
Genoske, the greatest impersonator of female characters, when dressed
for the part of some noble heroine, is an ideal beauty of the delicate,
aristocratic type. Outside the great theatres, in plays and side-show
entertainments, that may be compared with our dime museums, a woman is
occasionally found on the stage; and, a few years ago, a Tokio manager
amazed the town with the performances of a company made up entirely of
women. In the interludes, where jugglers and acrobats entertain the
audience, women are sometimes seen, and, in time, plays will be cast for
both sexes, and female stars will shine. The infant prodigy is known to
the Japanese stage, and in some wonderfully pretty and affecting scenes
in the “Ronins” little children utter their lines and go through their
parts with great naturalness.
The great theatre of Tokio is the Shintomiza, a long, gabled building,
ornamented above the row of entrance doors by pictures of scenes from the
play. The street is lined with tea-houses, or restaurants, for a play is
not a hap-hazard two-hour after-dinner incident. A man goes for the day,
carefully making up his theatre party beforehand, the plays generally
beginning at eleven o’clock in the morning, and ending at eight or nine
in the evening. After a short run the hours during which the great
actors appear and the great stage effects are made become known, and the
spectator may time his visit accordingly. It is bad form for a Japanese
of position to go to the theatre door, pay for a box, and enter it. He
must send a servant, at least a day beforehand, to one of the tea-houses
near the theatre to engage its attentions for the day, and through its
agency secure a box. The tea-house people are the ticket speculators in
league with the box-office. At the proper hour, the party assemble at the
tea-house, and give orders for the lunch, dinner, and frequent teas to
be served during the day. The tea-house attendants conduct them to their
box, and at each intermission come to see what is wanted, bringing in
at the dinner-hour the large lacquer _chow_ boxes with their courses of
viands, that their patrons may dine comfortably where they sit. Everybody
smokes, and each box has its little tabako bon, with its cone of glowing
coals to light the tiny pipes, the rat-tat of the pipes, as the ashes are
knocked out, often making a chorus to the action.
Theatre buildings are light and flimsy wooden structures, with straw-mats
and matting everywhere. They are all alike—a square auditorium with a
sloping floor, a single low gallery, and a stage the full width of the
house. The floor space is divided into so-called boxes by low railings,
that serve as bridges for the occupants to pass in and out. Visitors
always sit on the floor, each box being six feet square and designed for
four people. The gallery has one row of boxes at either side, several
rows facing the stage, and behind them a pen, where the multitude stand
and listen, paying one or two coppers for each act. This gallery of
the gods is called the “deaf seat,” but the deaf hear well enough to
be vociferous. The theatre-goer takes a check for his shoes, and racks
hanging full of wooden clogs are the ornaments of the foyer. Within
the building are booths for the sale of fruits, tea, sweets, tobacco,
toys, hair-pins, photographs of the stars, and other notions, so that a
box-party need not leave the house in pursuit of any creature comforts.
The ventilation is too good, and the light and open construction invites
wintry draughts.
Charges are made in detail, and the following is one bill presented for
a party of seven at a Yokohama theatre. No charge was made for the two
family servants, who came and went at will.
Admission (seven persons) $ 98
Box 1.60
Carpeting, chairs, etc. 50
Messenger hire 10
Tea and confectionery 30
Persimmons, figs, and grapes 30
Eels and rice, etc. (seven persons) 3.50
Tea-house 1.00
Presents to servants 30
-----
$8.58
Received payment,
Fukkuya.
There is always a drop-curtain, generally ornamented with a gigantic
character or solitary symbol, and often nowadays covered with picturesque
advertisements. Formerly, so much of the play was given by day that
no footlights and few lamps were used. In those good old days a
black-shrouded mute hovered about each actor after dark, holding out
a candle at the end of a long stick to illuminate his features, that
the audience might see the fine play of expression. With the adoption
of kerosene the stage was sufficiently lighted, and the Shintomiza has
a full row of footlights, while the use of electricity will soon be
general. The black mutes act as “supers” throughout all plays where
changes are made or properties manœuvred while the curtain is up.
The actors enter the stage by two long, raised walks through the
auditorium, so that they seem to come from without. These raised walks,
on a level with the stage and the heads of the spectators in the floor
boxes, are called the _hana michi_, or flower-walks, and as a popular
actor advances his way is strewn with flowers. The exits are sometimes by
the hana michi and sometimes by the wings, according to the scene.
The miniature scale of things Japanese makes it possible to fill a real
scene with life-like details. The stage is always large enough for
three or four actual houses to be set as a front. The hana michi is
sufficiently broad for jinrikishas, _kagos_, and pack-horses, and with
the illumination of daylight the unreality of the picture vanishes, and
the spectator seems to be looking from some tea-house balcony on an
every-day street scene. Garden, forest, and landscape effects are made by
using potted trees, and shrubs uprooted for transplanting. The ever-ready
bamboo is at hand and the tall dragon-grass, and the scene-painters
produce extraordinary illusions in the backgrounds and wings. Some of the
finest stage pictures I have seen were in Japan, and its stage ghosts,
demons, and goblins would be impossible elsewhere. In the play of “Honest
Sebi” there was a murder scene in a bamboo grove in a rainy twilight that
neither Henry Irving nor Jules Claretie could have surpassed; and in “The
Vampire Cat of the Nabeshima,” or “The Enchanted Cat of the Tokaido,”
a beautiful young woman changed, before the eyes of the audience, to a
hideous monster, with a celerity more ghastly than that which transforms
Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde.
Japanese theatres use the revolving stage, which has been their original
and unique possession for two centuries. A section of the stage flooring,
twenty or thirty feet in diameter, revolves like a railway turn-table,
on lignum-vitæ wheels, moved by coolies below stairs, who put their
shoulders to projecting bars, as with the silk-press. The wings come to
the edge of this circle, and at a signal a whole house whirls around
and shows its other rooms or its garden. Sometimes the coolies turn
too quickly, and the actors are rolled out of sight gesticulating and
shouting. The scenery is painted on wings that draw aside, or on flies
hoisted overhead. Curiously enough, the signal for opening the curtain is
the same as that used at the Comédie Française—three blows on the floor
with a big stick.
The Japanese theatre of to-day is given over to realism and the natural
school, and Jefferson and Coquelin are not more quietly, easily, and
entirely the characters they assume than Danjiro, their Japanese
fellow-Thespian. The play is a transcript of actual life, and everything
moves in an every-day way, though Japanese manners and customs often seem
stilted, artificial, and unnatural to the brusque Occidental, with his
direct and brutally practical etiquette. Pathos is always deep and long
drawn out, and the last tear is extracted from the eyes of audiences
quick to respond to emotional appeals. Tragedies are very tragic and
murders very sanguinary. Death is generally accomplished by edged tools,
and the antics of the fencers, the wonderful endurance of the hacked
victims, and the streams of red paint and red silk ravellings that ooze
forth delight the audiences, who shout and shriek their “_Ya! Ya!_” and
“_Yeh! Yeh!_” The swordsmen are often acrobats and jugglers in disguise,
who enliven the extended slaughters with thrilling _tours de force_.
_Seppuku_, the honorable death, or _hara-kiri_ as it is most commonly
known, is always received with breathless interest and wild applause,
and the self-disembowelling of the hero, with a long last oration, still
seems to the Japanese something fine and heroic and the most complete
revenge upon an insulting foe.
The detail and minuteness with which everything is explained, and the
endless etiquette and circumlocution, are thoroughly Japanese. Little
is left to the imagination in their dramatic art, and an ordinary play
has more sub-plots and characters than one of Dickens’s novels. With the
rapid adoption of new customs, the theatre is becoming the only conserver
of the old life and manners.
If the Japanese stage has its blood-and-thunder and its tank drama, it
has also its millinery play. The costumes alone are often worth going
to see, and the managers announce the appearance of historic brocades
and armor worthy of museums. Danjiro owns and wears a sacred coat of
mail that belonged to one of the Ronins, and his appearance in it is
the signal for the maddest applause. Such treasures of costume and of
armor are bequeathed from father to son, and from retiring star to
favorite pupil. As tokens of high approval rich and noble patrons send
to actors rare costumes, swords, pipes, and articles of personal use.
Excited spectators even throw such tributes upon the stage. One approving
foreigner, seeing the rain of hats, coats, obis, and tobacco-pouches,
once tossed his hat down. Later the manager and the actor’s valet
returned the hat and asked for ten dollars, as those seeming gifts from
the audience were merely pledges or forfeits, to be afterwards redeemed
by money under the star’s regular schedule of prices. As protests availed
nothing, and the whole house only roared in derision when he said that
he had wished Danjiro to keep the battered derby as a souvenir, the
enthusiast paid his forfeit.
[Illustration: DANJIRO, THE GREAT ACTOR]
The audience is as interesting a study as the players, each little square
box being another stage, whereon the picturesque drama of Japanese life
is enacted. Trays of tea and sweetmeats and single teapots are constantly
supplied to the spectators by attendants, who tread the narrow partition
rails between the boxes like acrobats. Whenever the curtain closes
there is a swift scurrying of these Ganymedes to the boxes, while the
children climb upon the partition rails and the hana michi, or run about
the theatre, even romping upon the stage itself, and peeping under the
curtain to see what the carpenters are hammering; all with perfect ease
and unconsciousness.
Visiting the star in his dressing-room is a simple commercial
transaction. The actors make a fixed charge for receiving such visits,
deriving a regular income from this source. Danjiro’s dressing-room is
high up among the flies back of the Shintomiza stage, with a window
looking down upon it, so that he needs no call-boy. He often shouts down
to the stage himself, and has the action of the play delayed or hastened,
according to his toilet or his humors. Nothing could be more scornful
and indifferent than Danjiro’s treatment of the high-priced visitors
to his dressing-room. Fulsome flattery, if offered with the florid and
elaborate Japanese forms, will mollify him, and the old fellow—eighth
idolized Danjiro in succession—will finally offer tea, present a hair-pin
to a lady, or write an autograph on a fan in his most captivating stage
daimio manner. When making up for a part, the great actor sits on the
mat before a large swinging mirror. Except for a character face little
disguise is used, as daylight spoils its effect. Three or four meek
valets wait upon this spoiled and whimsical old autocrat, and the whole
theatre staff attends. The value of his wardrobe, kept in immense covered
bamboo baskets, is very great, and its care a serious matter. Part of
it was once stolen, and when the whole Tokio police force succeeded in
restoring it Danjiro announced that he could never again wear what the
touch of a thief had defiled.
Genoske, fourth of his name and line, and Sodanje, a cousin of Danjiro,
equally prove the heredity of Japanese genius, and are favorites of the
Tokio public. Young actors pay the great stars for the privilege of
joining their companies, and studying their methods. Danjiro is said to
receive three thousand dollars from the Shintomiza theatre for the year
or season, which lasts from early fall until after the cherry blossoms.
His connection with the Shintomiza is like that of a _sociétaire_ with
the Comédie Française. Yet he plays in other Tokio theatres, has filled
engagements in other cities, and everywhere receives from perquisites,
fees, and gifts more than the amount of his salary.
The Japanese artist is fully aware of the aid ingenious advertising may
lend to genius. Drawing-room engagements do not yet contribute a part of
the income of a great actor; but such a one was once brought to drink
tea at a foreign house, and obligingly recited from his great roles,
and through the interpreter, talked most interestingly to us of his art
and stage business. In a few days the native newspapers, the vernacular
press, as the British dailies term it, contained accounts of a great
entertainment offered this favorite actor by some foreign residents,
and the simple afternoon tea of six people was lost to view in the
description of the elaborate banquet and attending crowd.
The Government exercises a certain censorship of the stage, as of the
press, suppressing an obnoxious play, and arresting manager and company
if necessary. No allusions to present political events are allowed,
and the authorities permit the expression of no disturbing ideas. The
Tokugawas exercised this censorship towards the play of the “Forty-seven
Ronins,” because its main argument and many of its scenes reflected
too clearly the corrupt practises of the Shogun’s court. Even its
name was changed, and, until the Restoration, it was presented as the
_Chiushingura_ (Loyal League), and the scenes strayed far from historic
fact. Since the new era, managers advertise their representations as most
closely following the actual records, and every fresh contribution from
historian or antiquarian is availed of.