Jinrikisha Days in Japan/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X
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 folklore, 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 Shintoiniza, 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
Received payment,
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 
SCENE FROM THE PLAY OF “THE FORTY-SEVEN RONINS.”
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 societaire with the Comédie Frangaise. 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.