As part of its program to promote democracy in Japan after World War II, the American Occupation, headed by General Douglas MacArthur, undertook to enforce rigid censorship policies aimed at eliminating all traces of feudal thought in media and entertainment, including kabuki. Faubion Bowers (1917-1999), who served as personal aide and interpreter to MacArthur during the Occupation, was appalled by the censorship policies and anticipated the extinction of a great theatrical art. He used his position in the Occupation administration and his knowledge of Japanese theatre in his tireless campaign to save kabuki. Largely through Bowers's efforts, censorship of kabuki had for the most part been eliminated by the time he left Japan in 1948. Although Bowers is at the center of the story, this lively and skillfully adapted translation from the original Japanese treats a critical period in the long history of kabuki as it was affected by a single individual who had a commanding influence over it. It offers fascinating and little-known details about Occupation censorship politics and kabuki performance while providing yet another perspective on the history of an enduring Japanese art form. Read Bowers' impressions of Gen. MacArthur on the Japanese-American Veterans' Association website.

Kabuki Plays On Stage represents a monumental achievement in Japanese theatre studies, being the first collection of kabuki play translations to be published in twenty-five years. Fifty-one plays, published in four volumes, vividly trace kabuki's changing relations to Japanese society during the premodern era. Volume 1 consists of thirteen plays that showcase early kabuki's scintillating and boisterous styles of performance and illustrates the contrasting dramatic techniques cultivated by actors in Edo (Tokyo) and Kamigata (Osaka and Kyoto). The twelve plays translated in Volume 2 cover a brief period, but one that saw important developments in kabuki architecture, acting, dance, and the manipulation of characters and themes. As the series title indicates, the plays were translated to capture the vivacity of performances on stage. The translations, each accompanied by a thorough introduction that contextualizes the play, are based not only on published texts, but performance scripts and the study of the plays as they are performed in theatres today. Each volume is lavishly illustrated with rare woodblock prints in full color of Tokugawa- and Meiji-period productions as well as color and black-and-white photographs of contemporary performances. Published with the assistance of the Nippon Foundation.

According to a myth constructed after Japan’s surrender to the Allied Forces in 1945, kabuki was a pure, classical art form with no real place in modern Japanese society. In Kabuki’s Forgotten War, senior theater scholar James R. Brandon calls this view into question and makes a compelling case that, up to the very end of the Pacific War, kabuki was a living theater and, as an institution, an active participant in contemporary events, rising and falling in consonance with Japan’s imperial adventures. Drawing extensively from Japanese sources—books, newspapers, magazines, war reports, speeches, scripts, and diaries—Brandon shows that kabuki played an important role in Japan’s Fifteen-Year Sacred War. He reveals, for example, that kabuki stars raised funds to buy fighter and bomber aircraft for the imperial forces and that pro-ducers arranged large-scale tours for kabuki troupes to entertain soldiers stationed in Manchuria, China, and Korea. Kabuki playwrights contributed no less than 160 new plays that dramatized frontline battles or rewrote history to propagate imperial ideology. Abridged by censors, molded by the Bureau of Information, and partially incorporated into the League of Touring Theaters, kabuki reached new audiences as it expanded along with the new Japanese empire. By the end of the war, however, it had fallen from government favor and in 1944–1946 it nearly expired when Japanese government decrees banished leading kabuki companies to minor urban theaters and the countryside. Kabuki’s Forgotten War includes more than a hundred illustrations, many of which have never been published in an English-language work. It is nothing less than a com-plete revision of kabuki’s recent history and as such goes beyond correcting a significant misconception. This new study remedies a historical absence that has distorted our understanding of Japan’s imperial enterprise and its aftermath.

Revenge Drama in European Renaissance and Japanese Theatre is a collection of essays that both explores the tradition of revenge drama in Japan and compares that tradition with that in European Renaissance drama. Why are the two great plays of each tradition, plays regarded as defining their nations and eras, Kanadehon Chushingura and Hamlet, both revenge plays? What do the revenge dramas of Europe and Japan tell us about the periods that produced them and how have they been modernized to speak to contemporary audiences? By interrogating the manifestation of evil women, ghosts, satire, parody, and censorship, contributors such as Leonard Pronko, J. Thomas Rimer, Carol Sorgenfrei, Laurence Kominz explore these issues.

Unique in any Western language, this is an invaluable resource for the study of one of the world's great theatrical forms. It includes essays by established experts on Kabuki as well as younger scholars now entering the field, and provides a comprehensive survey of the history of Kabuki; how it is written, produced, staged, and performed; and its place in world theater. Compiled by the editor of the influential Asian Theater Journal, the book covers four essential areas - history, performance, theaters, and plays - and includes a translation of one Kabuki play as an illustration of Kabuki techniques.

Kabuki Plays On Stage represents a monumental achievement in Japanese theatre studies, being the first collection of kabuki play translations to be published in twenty-five years. Fifty-one plays, published in four volumes, vividly trace kabuki's changing relations to Japanese society during the premodern era. Volume 1 consists of thirteen plays that showcase early kabuki's scintillating and boisterous styles of performance and illustrates the contrasting dramatic techniques cultivated by actors in Edo (Tokyo) and Kamigata (Osaka and Kyoto). The twelve plays translated in Volume 2 cover a brief period, but one that saw important developments in kabuki architecture, acting, dance, and the manipulation of characters and themes. As the series title indicates, the plays were translated to capture the vivacity of performances on stage. The translations, each accompanied by a thorough introduction that contextualizes the play, are based not only on published texts, but performance scripts and the study of the plays as they are performed in theatres today. Each volume is lavishly illustrated with rare woodblock prints in full color of Tokugawa- and Meiji-period productions as well as color and black-and-white photographs of contemporary performances.

Darkness and Desire, 1804-1864, is the third volume in a monumental new series-the first collection of kabuki play translations to be published in nearly a quarter of a century. Fifty-one plays, published in four volumes, vividly trace kabuki's changing relations to Japanese society during the premodern era. The fourteen plays translated in Volume 3, Darkness and Desire, 1804-1864, mark an extreme point in the development of kabuki dramaturgy. The plays are remarkable, even within kabuki, for their intense theatricality, gutsy individualism of character, cold-blooded and ferocious violence, realism pushed into fantasy and grotesquery, novelty for its own sake, sexual aggressiveness, and assertion of female will. The plays depict a society in extremis, the end of an era, a time often marked by unmitigated darkness and desire.

This well-illustrated work is the first attempt to bridge the gap between several specialized discourses concerning Japanese theatre. Central are problems of scholarly and practical reception of Japanese theatre forms in the West. The essays by a careful selection of internationally well-reputed scholars range widely through Japanese theatre, from the ancient to the postmodern, or, one might say, from kagura to angura. It deals with reception of Japanese theatre in the West, the treatment of the body in stage art and drama, Western influence, the impact of Japanese theatre practice and theory upon the actor’s training, and stage directing in the West. Readers will come across a wide variety of intriguing topics, such as lion dances, kabuki, nôh, folk theatre, taishu engeki, and several important modern playwrights, etc. This book truly promises to intensify future dialogue between the many disciplines concerned with Japanese theatre.

The Five Continents of Theatre undertakes the exploration of the material culture of the actor, which involves the actors’ pragmatic relations and technical functionality, their behaviour, the norms and conventions that interact with those of the audience and the society in which actors and spectators equally take part. The material culture of the actor is organised around body-mind techniques (see A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology by the same authors) and auxiliary techniques whose variety concern: ■ the diverse circumstances that generate theatre performances: festive or civil occasions, celebrations of power, popular feasts such as carnival, calendar recurrences such as New Year, spring and summer festivals; ■ the financial and organisational aspects: costs, contracts, salaries, impresarios, tickets, subscriptions, tours; ■ the information to be provided to the public: announcements, posters, advertising, parades; ■ the spaces for the performance and those for the spectators: performing spaces in every possible sense of the term; ■ sets, lighting, sound, makeup, costumes, props; ■ the relations established between actor and spectator; ■ the means of transport adopted by actors and even by spectators. Auxiliary techniques repeat themselves not only throughout different historical periods, but also across all theatrical traditions. Interacting dialectically in the stratification of practices, they respond to basic needs that are common to all traditions when a performance has to be created and staged. A comparative overview of auxiliary techniques shows that the material culture of the actor, with its diverse processes, forms and styles, stems from the way in which actors respond to those same practical needs. The authors’ research for this aspect of theatre anthropology was based on examination of practices, texts and of 1400 images, chosen as exemplars.

On August 15, 1945, when the war ended, almost all of Tokyo and Osaka's theaters had been destroyed or heavily damaged by American bombs. The Japanese urban infrastructure was reduced to dust, and so, one might have thought, would be the nation's spirit, especially in the face of nuclear bombing and foreign occupation. Yet, less than two weeks after the atom bombs had been dropped, theater began to show signs of life. Before long, all forms of Japanese theater were back on stage, and from death's ashes arose the flower of art. Rising from the Flames contains sixteen essays, many accompanied by photographic illustrations, by thirteen specialists. They explore the triumphs and tribulations of Occupation-period (1945-1952) theater, and cover not only such traditional forms as kabuki, no, kyogen, bunraku puppet theater (as well as the traditional marionette theater, the Yuki-za), and the comic narrator's art of rakugo, but also the modern genres of shingeki, musical comedy, and the all-female Takarazuka Revue. Among the numerous topics discussed are censorship, theater reconstruction, politics, internationalization, unionization, the search for a national identity through drama, and the treatment of the emperor on the pre- and postwar stage. The essays in this volume examine how Japanese theater, subject to oppressive thought control by prewar authorities, responded to the new--if temporarily limited--freedom allowed by the American occupiers, attesting to Japan's remarkable resilience in the face of national defeat.