Translator’s Introduction

Not long after World War II ended, the American Occupation, led by Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) Gen. Douglas Mac- Arthur was ready to administer a lethal dose of censorship that would have killed ’s great classical theatre, . The tombstone over its grave might have read, “Here lies kabuki, 1603–1946, able like a willow to adapt to three and a half centuries of native oppression, killed in a year by democracy.” Kabuki is famed for its remarkable diversity of styles, ranging from flamboyant fantasy to roguish realism and from everyday behavior to lyrical dance, with characters inspired by the highest and lowest of Toku- gawa (1603–1868) and early Meiji period (1868–1912) individuals, both fic- tional and real, and with themes reflecting the social, cultural, and political concerns of the premodern feudal era. Kabuki also had a long history of official oppression under both the Tokugawa shogunate and the imperial government that succeeded it. However, it has always managed to survive the efforts to control or even eliminate it and, while rarely overtly critical of the powers-that-be, to express the dreams and aspirations of the citizens who thronged to its playhouses. Although kabuki was never allowed to develop into a true theatre of ideas, evolving instead into a primarily aes- thetic genre, ideas cannot be eradicated from the drama; they live on in the theatrical subtext regardless of the playwright’s intentions. From today’s per- spective, in fact, even the distance of time does not hide kabuki’s poten- tially subversive tendencies. It is clear that, for a variety of reasons, one administration after another saw in this people’s theatre the threat it rep- resented to the maintenance of the status quo, which was always the Toku- gawa government’s principal objective. Thus, the first three and a half cen- turies of kabuki’s life were a constant struggle between this art form’s unquenchable desire for expression and the hegemony’s wish for control. Still, despite volumes of laws passed to suppress it, despite being forced to exist without women to play its female characters, despite being for- bidden to represent contemporary events or to use the real names of members of the samurai class, despite restrictions on the materials it could

vii viii Translator’s Introduction use for costumes and props, despite arrests of actors for living too well, despite limits placed on the number of theatres that could be licensed, despite the forced transfer of Edo’s three major playhouses to the distant outreaches of the city’s boundaries, despite being forced during wartime to change famous lines to make them sound more patriotic, despite these and other constraints, kabuki endured. But then came the Occupation Army and, in its attempt to democratize Japan, the ironic possibility that what had so long been able to skirt the dangers of native antipathy might, in the space of a few months, either die or be transmuted into a frighteningly pale reflection of what it formerly had been. But circumstances once more favored kabuki’s continuance, a major force behind its survival coming not from within its own domain but from the unlikely source of a member of the conquering army. That source was the late Faubion Bowers, the subject of this book. Although various aspects of the Occupation’s censorship activities have been described in many sourcesmost recently in a chapter of John Dower’s marvelous Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (1999)sur- prisingly little has appeared in English about its theatre censorship. This book is the first to address the issue at any length. One of the first books to address the subject was Bowers’s own 1952 Japanese Theatre, in which he very briefly discusses the Occupation censor- ship.1 A fuller, although still brief, treatment was provided by Earle Ernst, the man Bowers replaced as head of theatre censorship for the Occupa- tion. Ernst’s highly regarded book, The Kabuki Theatre, originally published in 1956, discusses the censorship in greater detail than does Bowers’s book.2 Neither man, by the way, mentions his own role as a censor. As The Man Who Saved Kabuki points out, there is still some controversy regarding who, Bowers or Ernst, accomplished more by way of “saving” kabuki. Other dis- cussions appear in a small number of scattered articles and interviews. Although this book’s principal concern is with Faubion Bowers’s achievement in Occupation Japan, it is also about the meaning and impact of that achievement on postwar Japanese culture. Many readers will want to know something more about Bowers than is provided in following chapters, where the focus is primarily on the years between 1940 and 1948. Thus, I have provided here in my introduction a brief sketch of Bowers’s career. As Mr. Okamoto’s own introduction suggests, The Man Who Saved Kabuki is far from an English-language double of his Japanese original. I have pared away much of Mr. Okamoto’s commentary on Bowers’s per- sonal life and character in order to emphasize the events through which Bowers lived and the historical role he played in them. The book, of course, Translator’s Introduction ix is called The Man Who Saved Kabuki and its inspiration was Faubion Bowers, so it must remain, in essence, a biographical treatment of a brief period in his life. Unlike Kyoko Hirano’s study of Occupation film censorship, which gives a comprehensive overview of that subject,3 this book tells the story of kabuki censorship as it was affected by a single individual who had a commanding influence over it. Thus, while it provides hitherto little-known details concerning this one facet of Occupation censorship, the focus always remains on Bowers’s relationship to that censorship and not on the censor- ship per se. Moreover, the overriding concern here is with kabuki censor- ship, although restrictions were placed on other forms of Japanese theatre as well, some of them briefly touched on in the text. Consequently, this book is not intended as a complete study of Occupation censorship of Japa- nese theatre from 1945–1952. Unlike censorship in other cultural areas, which shifted from a relatively liberal to an increasingly conservative posi- tion as Cold War realities moved in, kabuki, thanks to Bowers, was released from its principal censorship concerns by the time he left Japan in 1948. My biographical sketch gives both an overview of Bowers’s contribu- tions outside of his activities in the 1940s and, borrowing from material I have excised from Mr. Okamoto’s main text, introduces more personal material about him. h,H

Faubion Bowers was born in Miami, Oklahoma, on January 29, 1917, at- tended the University of Oklahoma for a year, and moved to New York, where he briefly attended in 1935, followed by a stay at France’s Université de Poitiers. In France, he also studied piano with Alfred Cortot at the École Normale de Musique, in 1936. Returning to New York, he was accepted as a piano student at the Juilliard School of Music but quit when he came to believe he was not sufficiently talented to have a career as a concert pianist. Nevertheless, reports by those who heard him in his youth claim that he was, indeed, gifted. Rootless and filled with wan- derlust, he decided to study Indonesian gamelan music. In 1940, on his way to Southeast Asia, however, he stopped off in Japan, and, as this book re- veals, thus began his intimate association with that nation. Bowers remained in Japan for a year. Mr. Okamoto describes aspects of Bowers’s life relating to Japan and the Japanese language between 1940 and 1948, so I will not repeat them here other than to note that, having served as an interpreter for the American military during the war, Bowers returned to Japan in 1945 and made his mark there as “the man who saved kabuki.” After he left Japan in 1948, he and his future wife, the Indian writer Santha Rama Rau (they married in 1951 and divorced in x Translator’s Introduction

1966) toured many countries in Asia, studying dance and theatre. This led to his books, Dance in (1953) and the epochal Theatre in the East: A Survey of Asian Dance and Drama (1956), the first truly comprehensive account of Asian theatre and dance ever published in English. By this time he had, of course, already published his book on Japanese theatre. Bowers eventually wrote other books, including a major study of the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. Writing about Scriabin was one of Bowers’s lifelong passions; indeed, he was one of the most highly respected Scriabin experts of his day. Thousands of Bowers’s articles on a variety of cultural topicsboth related and unrelated to Japanappeared in newspa- pers and magazines, and Japanese journalists often interviewed him. He also appeared in, wrote, or produced over fifty television programs on art, music, and travel. His kabuki documentary, The Cruelty of Beauty, aired on PBS (Public Broadcasting System) in 1981, remains a pathbreaking contri- bution. Bowers returned to Japan many times, usually as a guest of the Shchiku Corporation, which controls most kabuki production. Although he never obtained a formal degree, he taught for brief periods at several colleges and universities in Japan, Indonesia, and the United States. Many remember Bowers as the overseas voice of kabuki in English, as he was the principal simultaneous earphone interpreter for almost every kabuki postwar tour to the United States. Important non-kabuki Japanese tours also benefited from his simultaneous translations, among them the Ninagawa Yukio production of Macbeth (1990) and the Suzuki Tadashi stag- ing of Dionysus (1992). A polyglot, he also did earphone translations for several significant French productions, including the work of Jean-Louis Barrault and Ariane Mnouchkine. He was honored by the Japanese gov- ernment with the Order of the Sacred Treasure, presented to him by the emperor of Japan, and he also held the Bronze Star (1944) and Oak Leaf Cluster (1945) for his wartime efforts. Bowers was a tall, well-groomed, distinguished-looking man, who carried himself with theatrical flair. In cooler weather, he often tossed a scarf dashingly around his neck and shoulders. His refined speech was fre- quently interlarded with amusing outbursts of profanity. He was ineffably charming but wickedly manipulative, as Mr. Okamoto’s book reveals, and could be remarkably self-serving when the spirit moved him. Spirits of an- other sort were also one of his admitted weaknesses, and a car crash he experienced during his Occupation years was linked to this prediliction.4 One of his more engaging traits, which endeared him to his fellow censor- ship workers, was his propensity for reciting famous kabuki speeches in re- spectful imitation of famous kabuki actors, spouting the lines in authentic seven-five meter (shichigo-ch). Bowers was remarkably frank about his homosexuality and told the Translator’s Introduction xi rather embarrassed Mr. Okamoto that he could freely write about his sex life if he chose. He revealed that during the Occupation he had had flirtationsunconsummated, he insistedwith two distinguished kabuki stars, Nakamura Utaemon VI and Onoe Shroku II. At the same time, he insisted to Mr. Okamoto that he felt homosexuality to be harmful to kabuki’s female-role specialists, the onnagata. He did not elaborate on this notion other than to say, “I believed that the best onnagata were not homosexuals. I think that if an onnagata were homosexual, his art would deteriorate.” He noted that he shared this idea with the great but homophobic actor Onoe Kikugor VI, who played male and female roles with equal dexterity. Bowers was known for his affability at social gatherings, but he had a hard time employing his sociability during the Occupation, when he found himself very much a loner. A passage in the original book captures this aspect of his personality during that period.

Bowers was a lost soul among the members of the Occupation. He could not enjoy himself even with Americans, whose conversations he found meaningless. He barely participated in groups. The world of kabuki was always somewhere that Bowers could feel at ease. He found his mo- ments of greatest happiness while wrapped in his coat and gloves, shivering in the unheated theatre, watching the actors rehearse. He favored kabuki’s gorgeous, charm-filled, fictional world over the ugliness and filth of reality; he had little faith in reality but found truth in un- reality. In Japan’s traditional art of kabuki, Bowers discovered what was, to him, the greatest beauty, goodness, and truth. He was able to relax and entrust his body and soul not to a club where his own com- patriots gathered but to the world of kabuki, where people of another country gathered.

Bowers always considered himself something of a vagabond and, in later years, put material comfort second to the liberty he enjoyed as a free- lance writer and translator. Although he acknowledged it as a personal weakness, he considered holding a regular job boring. Consequently, he never had one. When a prewar Japanese friend came to him during the job-short Occupation hoping Bowers could snare him a position, Bowers considered the request trivial. The friend, interviewed by Mr. Okamoto, smiled wryly and recounted, “Bowers did not consider working as a means to make a living. Working so you could eat was not important to him. He lacked the smell of everyday life. Ultimately, he never offered or found me a job. What he said was, ‘To be in service to a lord is an unenviable lot.’” This remark was a famous quote from the kabuki play “Terakoya,” discussed in the text. As Bowers aged and was forced to live on a pension, his financial xii Translator’s Introduction status was always touch and go. Yet he was remarkably generous and, during my work on adapting this book, surprised me on several occasions by mailing me several beautiful kabuki books from his collection, paying the substantial postage himself. He lived in a shabby walk-up apartment on East Ninety-Fourth Street near Third Avenue in Manhattan, likened by Mr. Okamoto to Charlie Chaplin’s flat in Limelight. In his later years, he suffered from heart ailments and emphysema (he was a chain smoker) and needed a walking stick to help negotiate New York’s streets. Heand his apartmentcan be seen in the penultimate year of his life in Kabuki o Sukutta Amerikajin (The American Who Saved Kabuki), a documentary about him that was produced by Mr. Okamoto and shown throughout Japan on NHK (Nippon Hs Kykai) in January 1999. Late that year, his failure to attend an appointment alarmed his friends. The police were notified, and Bowers was found in his apartment. He had passed away at his desk on November 16 while editing an interview for The Journal of the Scriabin Society of America. It was three days after my adaptation had been completed. h,H

To tell the story of these activities, Chapter 1, which is the most tradition- ally biographical section of the book, follows Bowers from 1940–1945, cov- ering the year he spent in Japan, 1940–1941, when he first encountered and fell in love with kabuki; his wartime language training and intelligence work; and his arrival at Atsugi Airfield in 1945, when he may have been the first American soldier to set foot on postwar Japanese soil. This back- ground is essential to understanding his later accomplishments. As mentioned earlier, when the Occupation began to censor kabuki, this classical theatre only moved from one form of oppression to another. Wartime limitations imposed on kabuki by the Japanese government rivaled those of the Occupation in strictness. Therefore, in 1947, when Bowers “saved” kabuki, it had, in fact, been effectively silenced for much longer than the first two years of the Occupation. The details of this story are given in Chapter 2, which also presents a chilling picture of the hardships created by wartime conditions for kabuki’s artists. Very little of this chapter’s material has ever before appeared in English. Chapter 3 recounts the events following the arrival of Gen. MacArthur and Bowers in Japan and depicts the nature of the work that Bowers did for SCAP. This account allows us to appreciate the unique power Bowers accrued as MacArthur’s aide, without which he would never have been able to rescue kabuki from a censorship that sought to destroy or, at the very least, emasculate it. In Chapter 4, the story of the Occupation censorship is introduced, Translator’s Introduction xiii beginning with the principles on which it was founded. This includes a thoughtful discussion of the contradictions between MacArthur’s insistence on free speech as essential to a democracy and the lengths to which the Occupation went in controlling and monitoring all forms of public expres- sion, including kabuki. The chapter culminates in a description and exami- nation of the controversial events of November 1945, known as “the ‘Tera- koya’ incident,” when the Occupation censorship authorities first acted to shut down kabuki for what the American authoritiesand some Japanese considered its potentially dangerous feudalistic themes. Chapter 5 presents a well-documented account of precisely how Bowers was able to rescue kabuki from imminent destruction and why he became known as “the man who saved kabuki.” Chapter Six explains the happy results of Bowers’s intervention, when kabuki was effectively freed from censorship, and introduces some unusually controversial ideas related to whether kabuki was worth preserving after all. The concluding chapter, Chapter 7, while tying together and evaluating the book’s main issues, suggests the impact that Bowers had on traditional Japanese theatrical culture. I have, with Mr. Okamoto’s approval, made many large cuts and trans- positions. Material deemed digressive has been removed; the remaining contents frequently have been shortened and condensed. The original eleven chapters have been conflated into seven. Material has been moved from one section to another, and sometimes from one chapter to another. Chapter titles have been changed. Moreover, I have added notes, since the original does not provide them. At my request, Mr. Okamoto kindly re- turned to his sources in order to supply documentation for many of the sources to which I did not have access. Only the quotations from Mr. Oka- moto’s several interviews, with Bowers and others, remain undocumented. Except where the context makes it obvious, all other notes are mine. On several occasions, I have interpolated additional materialwith documen- tation, where appropriatein order to supplement Mr. Okamoto’s com- mentary. Apart from the author’s name, Japanese names are given in tradi- tional Japanese order, family name first. The translation retains the Japanese titles of books and plays mentioned, but the notes provide English versions of these titles. Where published English sources are quoted, I have given these in their original English form. I have also prepared two appendices. Appendix A is a detailed chronology of major kabuki events from 1940 to 1948. No such chronology presently exists in English. Appendix B provides brief summaries and background on the kabuki plays mentioned in the text. For the sake of narrative clarity, a small number of plots are also included in the main text. Finally, while the book’s English title is a direct translation xiv Translator’s Introduction of the Japanese title, Kabuki o Sukutta Otoko, the subtitle differs considerably. The Japanese subtitle, Maks no Fukukan Fubian Bawzu means “Mac- Arthur’s Aide-de-Camp Faubion Bowers.” I have changed this to “Faubion Bowers and Theatre Censorship in Occupied Japan.” h,H

Faubion Bowers provided invaluable assistance in the preparation of this volume. He read the entire manuscript and often corrected passages or suggested additional material for inclusion. I also must thank Professor Kei Hibino of Seikei University, , and Miss Keiko Yoshizawa, of New York, for their indefatigable assistance. Professor Hibino was a faithful respondent to my many e-mail queries about translation problems. Miss Yoshizawa, my graduate student at Brooklyn College, CUNY, read most of the manuscript and compared it to the original, red-flagging my mistakes or offering alter- native suggestions. Professor Kamiyama Akira of Seij University provided documentation to help flesh out the chronology, for which I am very grateful. Donald Richie, eminent expert on things Japanese and witness to various events described in the book, offered both extremely useful infor- mation and some provocative opinions. Professors Leonard Pronko and Bar- bara Thornbury had valuable suggestions for improving the manuscript. My good friend, Professor James R. Brandon, of the University of Hawai‘i, was a source of both constant encouragement and, because of his own as yet unpublished research on the period, critical stimulation. Finally, and as always, I thank my wife, Marcia, for sharing me once again with my computer.

Samuel L. Leiter