CHAPTER FIVE

COMMUNISTS, TEENAGE GIRLS, AND LITTLE THEATRES: THREE ALTERNATIVE TROUPES

According to most accounts, kabuki was born in 1603, over 400 years ago.1 One reason it continues to survive after over four centuries is that its his- tory is one of ongoing development and change reflecting responses to shifts in Japanese society. This is true despite the fact that, as Western influences began to inspire new forms of popular Japanese theatre at the end of the nineteenth century, the stage business in many of its plays became increasingly formalized as a measure of self-preservation. Managerial methods evolved as well, and by the time of World War II there was what Loren Edelson calls a distinction between major league and minor league kabuki.2 This distinction had existed even in the period, but it was only in modern times that the major league component was controlled by a single, large entertainment corporation, Shōchiku, rather than by competing enterprises. Major league kabuki played in the large, well-equipped theatres of the big cities, such as ’s Kabuki-za, Shinbashi Enbujō, and Meiji-za; minor league kabuki was represented by a rapidly shrinking number of independent companies, most of which played in ill-equipped, secondary theatres (koshibai, literally “little the- atres”) or on tour, although one, the leftwing Zenshin-za, founded in 1931, was of sufficient stature to perform in mainstream theatres. When the war ended, the independent professional troupes had virtu- ally disappeared, while the main Shōchiku-operated companies returned to whatever viable stages had not been destroyed.3 Of the independents, only the Zenshin-za survived, but, aside from some appearances in the

1 Obviously, the determination of the year in which something as nebulous as the creation of a new form of theatre was accomplished is not easy to decide. Some sources give different dates, but, based on the available documents, most scholarship has settled on 1603, the year the Tokugawa shogunate was founded, as the best approximation of kabuki’s birth year. 2 See Loren Edelson, “Playing for the Majors and the Minors: Ichikawa Girls’ Kabuki on the Postwar Stage,” in Rising from the Flames: The Rebirth of Theater in Occupied , 1945–1952, edited by Samuel L. Leiter (Lexington Books: Lanham, Md., 2009): 75–87. 3 The story of the three surviving companies, the Kichiemon Company, Kikugorō Company, and Ennosuke Troupe, is told in chapter two. 136 chapter five immediate postwar period, its postwar financial and political struggles kept it off the beaten path and out of the major cities and venues for years. In 1950 a band of former little theatre actors created a new little theatre company, the Katabami-za. At around the same time, a rural company composed entirely of teenage girls arose in a backwater city and showed such remarkable progress in mastering kabuki plays and methods that before long it was appearing in the big cities to popular acclaim, even get- ting to perform at the Meiji-za. Several years afterward, other non- Shōchiku groups, using names such as Tōhō Kabuki, Koma Kabuki, and Tōei Kabuki, were vying for attention, although—like the Azuma Kabuki dance troupe that toured the West in the mid-1950s—they were more faux than real kabuki. Still, the “idea” of kabuki was definitely experiencing a renaissance of sorts in the 1950s, even if box office receipts did not always reflect commercial success. When a large group of established kabuki actors left Shōchiku in 1961 to form yet another troupe, the Tōhō Company (Tōhō Gekidan), kabuki found itself facing one more crossroads in its post- war history. This chapter looks at the three independent companies that repre- sented authentic kabuki artistry between 1952 and 1965. Since they were not affiliated with Shōchiku, the sole representative of authentic major league kabuki, they can be considered alternative theatres that challenged the conventional conception of what a kabuki company was.

Zenshin-za

On May 22, 1931, two Shōchiku actors, Nakamura Kan’emon III (1901–1982) and Kawarasaki Chōjūrō IV (1902–1981), broke away from that institution and founded their own, progressively oriented, troupe, the Zenshin-za (Forward Advance Theatre), because they were unhappy with the old- fashioned feudalistic policies that dominated kabuki. They and the thirty- one other actors who joined them wanted both to improve their own lives and raise their artistic goals. Until 1941, they performed in association with Shōchiku and Tōhō; afterward they were completely independent.4 Over the years the company gained respect for its performances not only of traditional kabuki but of modern plays as well, historical and

4 For the only previous in-depth treatment of the Zenshin-za in English, see Brian Powell, “Communist Kabuki: A Contradiction in Terms?” in A Kabuki Reader: History and Performance, edited by Samuel L. Leiter (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2002).