Japanese Drama

Japanese Drama...

an overview

  

 About Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia located in the Pacific Ocean and it lies to the east of Japan Sea, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia. Japan means "sun-origin", which is why Japan is sometimes referred to as the "Land of the Rising Sun."

 

History of Theater in Japan

Japanese theater has a long, rich history.  There are four main types of traditional theater in Japan.  These are Noh, Kyogen, Kabuki, and Bunraku.  Each of these forms of theater performance is very distinct and unique from the other.

Types of Japanese Drama

 

Noh theater, also called nogaku, is a form of musical drama.  The Japanese started performing Noh in the fourteenth century.  Most of the characters in these plays are concealed by masks, and men play both the male and female roles.  The subject matter consists of a few historical stories. It is common for the performances to last an entire day.  Five plays are usually performed during each showing.

 
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The earliest scripts for Kyogen theater date back to the fourth century.  Noh plays were only put on to entertain people in the upper classes.  During that time, Kyogen was performed to give Noh theater an intermission between acts.  It would link the Noh play's theme with what was going on in the world at the time by using slapstick and farce.  One difference between Noh and Kyogen performances is that the Kyogen performers do not wear masks and the Noh performers do.

Kabuki is a form of Japanese theater that combines drama, dance, and music and is the most well-known to people around the world.  Okunis performed the Kabuki plays.  Kabuki theater is very lively.  Swordfights and wild costumes are the norm in the stage productions.  Until about 1680, the plays used real swords.  The art of Kabuki was actually created in opposition to the Noh theater.  The idea was to tell more timely and lively stories to shock the audiences.  The first Kabuki show was performed in 1603.  Eventually, it grew into a stylized art form that still remains popular today.

Bunraku is Japanese theater that uses puppets.  The puppets used are usually about three to four feet tall and are controlled by puppeteers who dress completely in black and can be seen by the audience.  In contrast, the omozukai (head puppeteer) wears colorful clothing.  Chants and music are popular in bunraku theater.  The leader of the plays also plays the shamisen, a Japanese stringed instrument.  'Chushingura: The Treasury of Loyal Retainers' is the most well-known bunraku play.  Unfortunately, the art of bunraku has been losing popularity since the second half of the eighteenth century.  Even with government funding, the art form looks like it has a bleak future.  The craftsmen of the intricate puppets are dying, and people are not very interested in taking the time necessary to learn how to replace them.  The puppeteers controlling the legs and hands are dressed entirely in black, while the head puppeteer is wearing colorful clothing. Music and chanting is a popular convention of bunraku, and the Shamisen player is usually considered to be the leader of the production.

Japanese theater is a traditional form of entertainment that can be enjoyed by anyone, whether fluent in Japanese or not.

Modern Theater

Japanese modern drama in the early 20th century, the 1910s, consisted of Shingeki (experimental Western-style theater), which employed naturalistic acting and contemporary themes in contrast to the stylized conventions of Kabuki and Noh.

In the postwar period, there was a phenomenal growth in creative new dramatic works, which introduced fresh aesthetic concepts that revolutionized the orthodox modern theater. Challenging the realistic, psychological drama focused on "tragic historical progress" of the Western-derived shingeki, young playwrights broke with such accepted tenets as conventional stage space, placing their action in tents, streets, and open areas and, at the extreme, in scenes played out all over Tokyo.

Plots became increasingly complex, with play-within-a-play sequences, moving rapidly back and forth in time, and intermingling reality with fantasy. Dramatic structure was fragmented, with the focus on the performer, who often used a variety of masks to reflect different personae.

Sho-Gekijo

The 1980s also encouraged the creation of the Sho-Gekijo, or literally, little theatre. This usually meant amateur theatrical troupes making plays designed to be seen by anyone and everyone — not necessarily as meaningful in nature as they were simply entertaining.

Example of Noh Play

NOH DRAMA

The Story of Atsumori 

Donald Keene :: Atsumori is the name of a young general. He's described in the work, The Tale of the Heike (Heike Monogatari), which in turn describes the warfare in Japan at the end of the twelfth century.

In the original text, we have him as a young warrior who is on a horse and is galloping away from the scene of battle, where his forces have been defeated.

Another man on a horse comes after him, and he says, "Stop, don't be a coward, fight."

And the two men fight, and in the course of the fighting, the young man is knocked off his horse, knocked onto the ground, and the other man tears off the young man's helmet, sees he's a boy of sixteen, and he doesn't want to kill him. His own son, who had been wounded that day, was miraculously saved. He's thinking, these boy's parents, they'll be thinking about him, I don't want to kill him.

But he sees other men of his side come, and then he thinks well, I haven't got any choice. And he says, "Tell me who you are. I would like to save you, but I can't. Tell me who you are."



And the young man is insolent. He's lying there with the sword pointed at his throat, but he says, "Oh, cut off my head and show it to the people on my side. They'll tell you who I am."

And in the end, the warrior, the older warrior, cuts off the head of this young man. But the experience has so horrified him that he becomes a priest, and he is resolved to pray for the salvation of the man that he killed.

So the central figure [in the Noh version of the play] is Atsumori himself — a young warrior. At first we see him as a reaper, with a group of other reapers, in the field. The priest [the older warrior who killed Atsumori] sees them, and he wonders who they are, and one of them seems a little bit different [to him]. He has a flute with him and seems unusual. And he talks to him, and gradually, he becomes aware that this is, in fact, the young man he killed [that is, the strange reaper is Atsumori], and this is a ghost he's talking to.

In the second part of the play, the young man [Atsumori] comes back in his splendid uniform, the form in which he was seen, and he thinks, "Now is my chance to get even. I've come back to the world, and now I can get even." But at that moment, they realize that the only salvation for them is if they both becomes priests, to be born again in the same lotus paradise. And this is one example of how Buddhism showed itself in the Noh plays.

 

And the young man is insolent. He's lying there with the sword pointed at his throat, but he says, "Oh, cut off my head and show it to the people on my side. They'll tell you who I am."

And in the end, the warrior, the older warrior, cuts off the head of this young man. But the experience has so horrified him that he becomes a priest, and he is resolved to pray for the salvation of the man that he killed.

So the central figure [in the Noh version of the play] is Atsumori himself — a young warrior. At first we see him as a reaper, with a group of other reapers, in the field. The priest [the older warrior who killed Atsumori] sees them, and he wonders who they are, and one of them seems a little bit different [to him]. He has a flute with him and seems unusual. And he talks to him, and gradually, he becomes aware that this is, in fact, the young man he killed [that is, the strange reaper is Atsumori], and this is a ghost he's talking to.

In the second part of the play, the young man [Atsumori] comes back in his splendid uniform, the form in which he was seen, and he thinks, "Now is my chance to get even. I've come back to the world, and now I can get even." But at that moment, they realize that the only salvation for them is if they both becomes priests, to be born again in the same lotus paradise. And this is one example of how Buddhism showed itself in the Noh plays.