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Faubion Bowers and Theatre Censor- Ship in Occupied Japan Books The Man Who Saved Kabuki: Faubion Bowers and Theatre Censor- ship in Occupied Japan. By Shiro Okamoto. Translated and adapted by Samuel L. Leiter. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001; 210 pp. $40.00 cloth, $17.95 paper. A half-century has passed since the end of the American Occupation of Ja- pan. Although much has been written about that period, until recently schol- ars ignored (or were unaware of) hundreds, perhaps thousands, of file boxes stacked somewhere in the darkened corridors of Washington, DC. These doc- uments form a rich archive of information about theatre censorship during the Occupation. While we await the results of research being conducted by Japa- nese theatre scholar James Brandon and by Michael Cassidy, a doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh writing his dissertation on “The Propaganda Picture Show: Kamishibai during the U.S. Occupation of Japan,” we can get a peek of what lies inside by reading Samuel L. Leiter’s translation and adap- tation of Shiro Okamoto’s remarkable The Man Who Saved Kabuki: Faubion Bowers and Theatre Censorship in Occupied Japan (originally published in 1998). Despite the title, the book is not so much a hagiography (though it is that, too) as a history of the complex interplay between the psychology of a defeated na- tion and its occupying conquerors. We are reminded of General Douglas Mac- Arthur’s absolute belief in his own infallibility and his draconian, paternalistic, often Orientalist ideas, such as his famous dictum that Japan was a nation of 12-year-olds. MacArthur’s goal—that is, the goal of the Occupation itself, for like Louis XIV, MacArthur and the State were one—was nothing less than a total reversal of 2,000 years of Japanese thinking, accomplished through the imposition of American-style “democracy.” Kabuki (all male, filled with de- votion to duty, vendettas, ritual suicide, prostitution, etc.) seemed to embody the feudalistic elements that the Occupation was determined to sweep away. To the defeated Japanese, however, American “democracy” seemed a hypo- critical ideal: the Occupation government advocated free speech while en- forcing strict censorship, and the war crimes tribunal demanded the execution of military leaders deemed responsible for atrocities while the Emperor escaped punishment. Faubion Bowers (1917–1999) served first as MacAr- thur’s aide-de-camp cum official translator and personal secretary, and subse- quently (after the departure of Earle Ernst) as head censor for the Occupation. Through a series of nearly accidental events, Bowers became one of the most powerful people in Occupied Japan. Before the war, this free-spirited and tal- ented pianist had decided to go to Indonesia to study gamelan. On the way, his ship stopped in Japan. Thinking he was entering a temple, Bowers stumbled into Tokyo’s Kabuki-za Theatre, where some of the greatest pre-war actors just happened to be performing one of kabuki’s greatest plays, Chuˆshingura The Drama Review 48, 3 (T183), Fall 2004. ᭧ 2004 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 186 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204041667640 by guest on 26 September 2021 Books 187 (The Treasury of Loyal Retainers). Bowers, who was ignorant of kabuki and did not speak Japanese, was stunned. He dropped the rest of his trip, immersed himself in Japanese language studies, and began to attend kabuki almost daily. He returned to America shortly before Pearl Harbor and was drafted. When the army realized his Japanese language skills, they made him an officer and trained him as an interpreter. Young Major Bowers’s position in the Occupation government was such that he could circumvent his superior’s wishes. Even as civilian head censor (he was required to resign his commission) he maintained nearly absolute au- thority over the contested fate of kabuki. He diverted attention from the scripts’ social implications by emphasizing that, in kabuki, the art of the actor is primary. His subtle rereadings of key plays emphasized reflections of Amer- ican ideals rather than Confucian values. His authority extended to actual kabuki production. He insisted on all-star casts (despite the costs to the producers), nurtured new talent, dictated the as- signment of roles, and even influenced actors’ performances and interpreta- tions. Such clout was possible because kabuki actors and theatre owners respected his knowledge of kabuki and his aesthetic judgment. Initially, they had been stunned when, as a member of MacArthur’s advance team, his first question was about whether or not his favorite kabuki actor was still alive. Years later, he remarked, “I fought the war pro-Japanese, and was twice deco- rated for my services—a Bronze Star and Oak Leaf Cluster” (11). With Okamoto’s approval, Leiter wisely condensed and reordered the English-language text, eliminating many details of Bowers’s life as well as sub- sidiary debates regarding Japanese responses to the Occupation. In addition, Leiter added extensive reference notes and three valuable appendices. One ap- pendix summarizes kabuki plots, a useful tool for anyone interested in the art. Another chronologically lists major kabuki-related events from 1940 to 1948; this, too is an important contribution to scholarship in English. The third transcribes a letter of thanks to Bowers from a Japanese scholar. The task of adaptation was of such magnitude that Leiter is virtually a coauthor of the English-language version. My only real complaint is that there are several errors that a proofreader should have caught. For example, the incident that inspired Chuˆshingura took place in 1703, not 1701 (18); a footnote gets the title of a well-known book by Kyoko Hirano on film censorship wrong—it is Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo (1992), not Washington (187); another footnote mistitles John W.Dowers’s monumen- tal Embracing Defeat (1999) as Embracing Japan (191); an entire phrase is repeated on page 124; and on page 129, Professor Kawatake is referred to by his personal name, as Professor Shigetoshi. These are, of course, minor items which can be corrected in the next printing. What really matters is that this book, like its Japanese original, offers a unique and valuable glimpse at a world we have seldom seen before. The heartfelt statement of kabuki actor Koˆshiroˆ IX helps us understand the Japa- nese perception of Bowers: From the viewpoint of Japanese theatre history, when kabuki was purged, Bowers was the reason it continued and thus he became its great benefactor. [...] This is what I think, although it is not easy to under- stand and maybe I’m going too far. It was as if the gods spoke through Bowers and told him to please let kabuki continue. I really think it was the work of the gods. (120–21) Gods or not, Leiter notes in his introduction that the question of who really saved kabuki remains unanswered—Bowers or his former superior, the pre- Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204041667640 by guest on 26 September 2021 188 Books vious head censor Earle Ernst. Perhaps the dusty archives now being re- searched will help to solve that riddle. Historians of theatre, scholars of Japan, those interested in issues of cen- sorship, and anyone intrigued by the legacies of the Cold War (of which the Occupation was an important element) will find this extraordinary book fas- cinating and ultimately indispensable. —Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei is Professor of Theatre at UCLA. She is Associate Editor of Asian Theatre Journal and Editor of the AAP Newsletter of the Association for Asian Performance. She has written extensively on Japanese and cross-cultural perfor- mance and has translated contemporary Japanese plays. She is also a playwright and director. Her book Unspeakable Acts: Terayama Shuˆji and Postwar Japanese The- ater will be published by the University of Hawaii Press. The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater. Edited by Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla. New Yorkand London: New YorkUniversity Press, 2002; 282 pp. $55.00 cloth, $17.95 paperback. This stimulating collection of essays critically examines and celebrates what, for centuries, many have deeply feared and many others have known and cher- ished to be true—that theatre is, indeed, the queerest art. Where other studies of queer theatre have been more literary or biographical, or period-, city-, or genre-specific, this volume casts a wider net, one thrown by both leading scholars and practitioners, in order to capture the manifold nature of theatre’s queerness and to consider why diverse queer people have been so drawn to the world of the stage. But while embracing theatre as the queerest art, the editors and contributors also try unabashedly to confront the terminological problems and ethnic, class, and gender tensions that inflect the word “queer” and estab- lished dynamics of queer theatre practice. As coeditors Solomon and Minwalla note in their preface, the volume was inspired by the 1995 Queer Theatre Conference sponsored by CLAGS (Cen- ter for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York), an event that helped mark a decade of unprecedented visibility of lesbian and gay culture. The Queerest Art comprises 16 pieces, a mixture of verbatim conference proceedings and essays penned on reflection about ideas raised by presenters. Jill Dolan’s stirring keynote address introduces the vol- ume. “To be queer is not who you are, it’s what you do, it’s your relation to dominant power, and your relation to marginality, as a place of empower- ment,” she asserts (5). Moreover, she posits theatre as a form of historiography encompassing the cultural memory of queer people, a compelling notion given that so much evidence of the queer past was destroyed or never written down, and embodied performance and oral communication have had to be our primary forms of knowledge transmission.
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