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Translator's Introduction 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 Japan’s great classical theatre, kabuki. 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 sourcesmost 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 Columbia University 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 India (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 topicsboth related and unrelated to Japanappeared 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.
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