1994. Directed by Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams. Interviews by Jano Williams. Released by Women Make Movies. 50 minutes.
This is a portrait of the actresses of the Takarazuka Revue, one of Japan’s most famous popular entertainments. The Takarazuka Revue has something of the mass culture status in Japan that the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes or the Grand Ole Opry does here (albeit for quite different aesthetic attractions). It is also a stage for the enactment of multiple forms of gender and sexuality, and this gives it its special fascination for students of contemporary Japan.
The Takarazuka Revue was founded in 1913 in then-new resort town of the same name in the hills north of the city of Kobe. It was started by a Kansai region businessman, Ichizô Kobayashi, as a destination for passengers on his new private railroad line, Hankyû. He styled it as a female kabuki, reversing the kabuki practice of men playing all stage roles by having young women play both male and female roles. To recruit and train young actresses—and to allay parental concerns—Kobayashi started an boarding academy that offered rigorous instruction and carefully chaperoned discipline of the young girls. His didactic point was to provide “proper” training for young women and to stage correct gender relations for a new Japan between strong caring men and graceful, supportive women. The main features of the Revue structure remain intact today, and are documented in the video and in the assigned reading by anthropologist Jennifer Robertson.
At present, about forty out of several thousand applicants are selected each year to enter the Takarazuka Music School for a two-year basic course. Upon entrance, students’ stage gender is designated as otoko-yaku (male-role) or musume-yaku (female-role, although the precise term is revealingly “daughter-role”). From student ranks, eventual stars and supporting role players are selected, and remain for a several-year stage career after graduating. For the rest, the school is a highly valued marriage credential—a kind of tough-love finishing school.
Actually, some viewers may feel that a military academy (or maybe a Zen monastery) is a more apt analogy for the school’s regime. Under the motto “Cleanliness, Purity, and Grace,” the first-year students are seen here being put through a strenuous daily routine that seems to value cleaning above all else, in which they are monitored and hazed by ever-watchful second-year students. Some local military are even brought in at one point to teach posture and correct bowing. Endurance and strength are the pedagogical watchwords.
The documentary moves on to portray two other aspects of Takarazuka. First, it spends some time profiling several of the stars, who are coupled into stage pairs and enjoy brief but hugely feted careers. Then, we are shown the fans—ranging from high school girls to middle-aged housewives. Numbering in the millions and diehard fanatics all, they pursue their stars with passion and politeness. The brief interviews are deeply revealing: “From head to toe, I felt an electric shock,” said one of two housewife friends on their regular secret outing to a Takarazuka matinee.
Listening to these women, one wonders if the eventual effect of Takarazuka on its female audiences is to gain acceptance for the gender status quo or to fuel dissatisfaction with their actual experiences. What brings at least some of the women to the Revue is its special portrayal of maleness. The male-role actresses do not so much typify maleness as idealize and sentimentalize maleness. “They don’t have any of the coarseness or badness of real men,” says the same housewife fan about the stage heroes. In contrast, the men in her own life are weak, emotionally unresponsive, often absent, occasionally abusive (one thinks of Mr. Yamaguchi in the documentary we will see in a few weeks)—in all ways wanting and unappealing. Mr. Kobayashi, it would seem, has taken some risk in portraying “proper” genders and gender pairs!
There is actually even more to the Takarazuka Revue than the fans express in this documentary. Indeed, the Revue is a striking paradox-at once a celebrated mass family entertainment that dramatizes (or “melodramatizes”) proper gender roles and relations, but also swells an undercurrent of homoerotic passion in the subculture of Takarasienne actresses and fans that simultaneously and dangerously subverts and critiques those mainstream ideologies. That is, the Revue raises the larger question of the official management of sexuality in contemporary Japan.
I argue in lecture that characteristic of contemporary Japan is a certain family form, a pronounced gender asymmetry, and what I call the 4-D female role. We may also go on to argue that yet another dimension of twentieth-century nation building—and a necessary complement to these features—has been the abnormalization of non-heterosexual practices and relationships. “Compulsory heterosexuality,” as Judith Butler and others have phrased it, has become the official norm.
However, homoerotic and homosocial practices have a long history in Japan, and it is not simply a history of repression and marginality. They were at times established, sanctioned, and celebrated, although we must be careful not to idealize the tolerance of past centuries. Such practices were just as often commodified, available more to men than women, and not infrequently themselves as exploitative and power-laden as were heterosexual practices of the same era. Still, they were generally given more legitimacy and expression in previous eras than at present. They are certainly given no official sanction in Takarazuka, but alternative sexuality arises nonetheless.
The anthropologist Jennifer Robertson has been studying Takarazuka for several years, and has splendidly analyzed the crosscurrents of official intentions and subversive sexualities (most commonly taking a butch-femme coding) in the discrete but connected worlds of actresses, Takarazuka School students, and fans. The corporate descendants of Kobayashi intend that Takarazuka should entertain with proper male and female role-playing, but it has also become a stage for highlighting the vast gap between romantic notions of male and female and the sarariiman, OLs, and housewives of the real world. At the same time, even more radically, it is a venue for homosocial and homosexual feelings and practices that are suppressed and repressed in and by much of mainstream Japanese society. Unfortunately, little of this is made explicit in the documentary. Nonetheless, Takarazuka remains a theater where, as Robertson puts it in the title of one of her articles, gender roles and sexualities are both done (performed) and undone (subverted).
For further reading
Domenig, Roland
1998 “Takarazuka and Kobayashi Ichizou’s Idea of Kokumingeki.” In Sepp Linhart and Sabine Fruhstuck, The culture of Japan as seen through its leisure. Pp. 353-366. Albany: State University of New York Press.
MacGregor, Hilary
1996 “Top Starlets Walk Like a Man: Takarazuka Troupers Corner the Dream Market.” Japan Times. September 18, 1996.
Nakamura, Karen and Matsuo Hisako
2003 ” Female Masculinity and Fantasy Spaces: Transcending Genders in the Takarazuka Theatre and Japanese Popular Culture ,” in James E. Roberson and Suzuki Nobue, Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Japan: Dislocating the Salaryman Doxa. Pages 59-76. London and New York: Routledge/Curzon, 2003.
Robertson, Jennifer
1998 Takarazuka: sexual politics and popular culture in modern Japan. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Robertson, Jennifer
1998 “The politics and pursuit of leisure in wartime Japan.” In Sepp Linhart and Sabine Fruhstuck (editors), The Culture of Japan as Seen Through its Leisure. Pp. 285-302. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Robertson, Jennifer Ellen
1995 “Mon Japon: the revue theater as a technology of Japanese imperialism,” American Ethnologist 22 (4) : 970-996.
Robertson, Jennifer Ellen
1989 “Gender-bending in Paradise: Doing ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ in Japan,” Genders 5:50-69.
Robertson, Jennifer Ellen
1992 “The Politics of Androgyny in Japan: Sexuality and subversion in the Theater and Beyond,” American Ethnologist 19 (3) : 419-442.
Robertson, Jennifer Ellen
1992 “Doing and undoing ‘female’ and ‘male’ in Japan: the Takarazuka Revue. In Takie Sugiyama Lebra, Japanese Social Organization. 165-193. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Robertson, Jennifer Ellen
1991 “Theatrical resistance, Theatres of Restraint: the Takarazuka Revue and the “State Theatre” Movement in Japan,” Anthropological Quarterly 64 (4)
Singer, Jane
1996 “The dream world of Takarazuka,” Japan Quarterly 43(2):162-181.
Sischy, Ingrid
1992 “Selling dreams.” New Yorker. September 28. Pp. 84-103.
Zimmerman, Eve
1989 “On the dreamy stage with the Takarazuka Review Company,” Japan Society Newsletter, October, pp. 4-7.