Introduction
Suzuki’s work in the context of Japanese theatre
Takahashi Yasunari
No historian of Japanese theatre will object to the view that modern Western-oriented theatre in Japan really started with the production of Othello and Hamlet in 1903 by one of the Shinpa (New School) companies, or perhaps more truly with the completely Westernized production of Hamlet in 1911 by a company called Bungei Kyôkai (the Literary Society) led by the famous Shakespeare scholar and critic Tsubouchi Shôyô.
It was Tsubouchi’s Bungei Kyôkai and later Osanai Kaoru’s Tsukiji Shôgekijô (Tsukiji Little Theatre), established in 1924, which in a real sense initiated and developed a special Western-oriented modern theatre usually known as Shingeki (meaning “New Drama”). This was a theatre form which finally succeeded in cutting itself off from the older theatre forms like Kabuki, Noh, and Kyogen as well as from more recent forms like Shinpa and Shinkokugeki (New National Theatre). Shingeki might be regarded as the culmination of long efforts in the genre of theatre which, like everything else in Japanese culture and society after the Meiji Restoration, tried to incorporate or imitate Europe.
The contemporary European drama which Shingeki made an object of devout adoration being what it was, it was only natural that all the tenets of realistic theatre were swallowed whole: the dramaturgy based on the dialectics of conflicting powers, the acting style aimed at the lifelike portrayal of individual characters, the belief in the psychological motivation of human behavior, and the underlying assumption that the ultimate standard of reality is logical explicability.
The extent to which Shingeki devoutly subscribed to the Western model might be suggested by an anecdote concerning Osanai, the great founder of the school. He went over to Russia in 1912 in order personally to watch Stanislavski direct at the Moscow Art Theatre, and, with an assiduousness which seems staggering to us today, made minute notes of everything said and done by the great master. Upon his return to Japan, Osanai immediately began to rehearse the same play at his Tsukiji Shôgekijô, trying to reproduce every detail he had jotted down in Moscow.
If, to Osanai, Chekhov and Ibsen were holy texts, Senda Koreya, the earliest and most important of his disciples, turned to a more avant-garde theatre, German Expressionism, and finally came to choose Brecht as his master. Imprisoned by the military regime for his leftist persuasion during the prewar days, Senda emerged after World War II as the leader of one of the major Shingeki troupes, Haiyûza (Actors’ Studio), and was greatly instrumental in bringing about the first joint production of The Cherry Orchard by all major Shingeki companies in 1945, which marked the promising rebirth of theatre in postwar Japan.
In fact the end of World War Ⅱ was a sort of “second opening” of the country (the “first” was the Meiji Restoration) and it gave a new sanction to the rationale of progressive Westernization in all phases of Japanese culture and society. It was Shingeki above all which benefited from this general “democratizing” tendency, synchronizing as it did with the political growth of the Socialist and Communist parties. In spite of the anticommunist policy carried out by the American authorities in the early 1950s, the period of Shingeki “flowering” lasted until the late 1960s.
Seen from another angle, this “flowering” meant that Shingeki had turned itself into a form of orthodoxy and neglected to question the contradictions inherent in its structure. The first of these was the illusoriness of its politically “leftist” sympathies which became apparent in the period of high growth and economic prosperity during the 1960s. People ceased to be moved by a political appeal which sounded hollow. They had become at once more materially satiated than before and more sensitive to political hypocrisy and condescension.
These attitudes of hypocrisy and condescension which people sensed in Shingeki were certainly there, for despite its “democratic” slogans, Shingeki could never shake off a certain didactic posture, the air of being intellectually elitist and preaching from above. It failed to reach down to the real grassroots of popular sensibility and culture, as is patent in its complete negation of the traditional and popular forms of theatre (Noh, Kabuki, etc.) and entertainment (vaudeville arts such as Manzai and Rakugo).
Last but not least Shingeki failed to establish its own theatrical esthetics about the ontological identity of the actor. It never questioned the priority of the written text provided by the playwright, taking for granted the idea that all that is required of the actors and director is to bring forward the meaning which has been authoritatively built into the text by the author. Shingeki naively relied on the simplistic mimetic doctrine of realism that the actor had only to try to imitate and reproduce the lifelike and lifesize reality of the ordinary world.
It was against this status quo of Shingeki that the violent Little Theatre movement burst out in the late 1960s. It coincided with a global upsurge of student revolt, and was part of the larger wave of radical critique of the assumptions which underlie modern rationalistic, technological, democratic culture. Among the prominent theatre groups involved in this revolutionary movement were the Jôkyô Gekijô, led by Kara Jûrô and nicknamed Aka tento (Red Tent) because of the color of the tent which they pitched for their performance, the Center 68/69 led by Satoh Makoto and nicknamed Kuro tento (Black Tent) also because of the color of their tent, and Terayama Shûji’s Tenjô Sajiki.
But perhaps the most austere, rigorous, and systematic troupe of all was the Waseda Shôgekijô (later SCOT) led by Suzuki Tadashi. Suzuki ruthlessly exposed the political and moral hypocrisy which was subconsciously built into Shingeki as a social institution. And he did this not only through his polemical discourses but also through the very form of his theatrical activities. His was typical Poor Theatre of which Grotowski would have approved.
Suzuki also drew much of his nourishment from the traditional and popular theatre forms of Japan. No other director has learned and stolen so much from Noh and Kabuki, and certainly none has utilized so effectively the popular folk songs (enka) which have entered the unconscious mechanism of the psyche of the nonelitist Japanese populace.
But one of Suzuki’s greatest subversive achievements was to undermine the privileged priority of the written text provided by the playwright at the top of the pyramidal structure of the theatre world. He triumphantly succeeded in transferring the priority from the text to the actor.
All of these critical-creative achievements by Suzuki were nowhere more powerfully apparent than in Gekiteki naru mono o megutte (literally “In search of whatever is dramatic,” usually translated as “On the Dramatic Passions”), which many critics consider one of the milestones in the history of postwar Japanese theatre. In this the heroine is a madwoman confined by her family who enacts in her fantasies several roles from classic Kabuki and Shinpa. Although structured as a collage of disconnected scenes, the play centers on the unrequited passions and savage resentments of an archetypal Japanese woman who, as played by the actress Shiraishi Kayoko, overwhelmed the audience with the all-powerful sense of her physical presence and metamorphosis.
Suzuki was fortunate enough to find in Shiraishi an actress who could perfectly embody his theories about the depths of the Japanese psyche and physique which had heretofore been left sadly unexplored by Shingeki. Shiraishi struck the audience as an incredibly atavistic reincarnation of the actress-founder of Kabuki in the seventeenth century, Okuni, with all her pristine magical power.
Suzuki and Shiraishi were able to incarnate a unique theatrical image between them. By creating an intricate spatio-temporal experience both in the actress and the audience, Suzuki could unleash a dramatic energy in a way which was totally out of the reach of Shingeki.
In doing this Suzuki was not only criticizing the Western-oriented realism of Shingeki and its shallow avant-garde modernism, but also revitalizing the tradition-bound possibilities of Noh and Kabuki. The riches of these traditional theatres have become so built into the unconscious memories of actors’ bodies and theatrical conventions that Suzuki’s searching eye was necessary to bring them out into the light of critical examination.
Number II in the series On the Dramatic Passions made it abundantly clear how much Suzuki had stolen from the “myth” and “method” of Japanese traditional theatre. But he did not remain content with the success. In 1974 he ventured on an experiment of fusing Greek material with Japanese theatrical form. He recast Euripides’ The Trojan Women in such a way that the wailing speeches of the defeated Trojan queen and princesses were made to recur in the fantasies of an old Japanese beggar woman who, helplessly cast out of the ruined city of Tokyo immediately after World War Ⅱ, bemoaned her fate and that of her country.
One may be reminded of Kurosawa’s film Throne of Blood (an adaptation of Macbeth), in which he attempted to deal with Macbeth’s story transposed into medieval Japan with samurai and witches. Suzuki in his The Trojan Women, however, seems to me to have gone deeper in search of common mythical layers of human (especially female) passion and suffering. Perhaps the difference is in the media used by the two directors. The theatre is obviously at a great disadvantage in that it cannot use the technical apparatus at the disposal of film. But in the hands of a shrewd theatre director that very disadvantage can turn into infinite advantage, for after all there is nothing like the real presence of actors on the stage with their power of gripping our imagination. I should add in passing that, in the first performance of the play in Tokyo, Suzuki used a famous Noh actor (Kanze Hisao), a no less famous Shingeki actress (Ichihara Etsuko), and Shiraishi Kayoko. It is impossible to describe how deeply exciting it was to watch the clashing of these three actors brought up in different theatrical traditions. One realized how skillfully Suzuki managed to visualize his critique of the whole gamut of Japanese theatrical tradition.
It is therefore no wonder that Suzuki proceeded further with this experiment to use both Japanese and American actors in his bilingual production of The Bacchae. It was a logical and necessary step in his insatiable quest for answers to the fundamental question: What makes it possible for histrionic acts and theatrical events to exist at all? And how can they be justified? Suzuki seems to believe that such a quest is ineluctable if one wishes to go beyond the apathies which numb the rootless Shingeki as well as the tradition-bound Noh and Kabuki. And he knows that the way forward is also the way back, the way up the way down; that an international communion is possible only through delving into one’s own body. That he is neither an anachronistic chauvinist exploiting a “samurai exoticism” nor a superficial cosmopolitan smoothing over undeniable differences will, I hope, be amply proved by our ensuing presentation of Suzuki’s major productions in relation to his training method. Through his rigorous and continuous negotiation of the many dislocations between traditional Japanese theatre and Western-imported realism, he, more than any other living Japanese theatre artist, has contributed substantially to the modernization and postmodernization of Japanese theatre.
1 Rethinking Japanese theatre: cracking the codes
Ian Carruthers
In America the theatre for the most part is naturalistic. People want to be comfortable. They want to identify immediately with the situation. They want everything finished, put in a box and wrapped up with a bow. But I believe, ideally, you want to leave the theatre still thinking about it, still questioning it. What I find exciting about Suzuki’s work is that we come into the theatre and we have a surprise. We have to think about what we have seen and we leave the theatre thinking about it.
I believe that in a sense my work is similar to what Suzuki is doing in his work. Theatre that you have to rethink. It poses more questions than answers.
Robert Wilson, “Theatre That You Have to Rethink”1
When I first visited Toga as a guest of Suzuki Tadashi to witness the two-month process of putting on an international festival in a remote mountain village in the Japan Alps, I had come fresh from six months of observing him engage with actors and audiences in Australia. His adaptation of Macbeth had been hugely controversial here, widely reported in the press and on television, its process made the subject of an SBS documentary and the performance screened on national television.2 It had even become the subject of a specially convened conference by the Melbourne Performance Research Group at Melbourne University.3 By the standards of the great experimental Russian director Vsevelod Meyerhold, the controversy generated would rate it a succès de scandale.
Detractors of the show – and there were many, though not nearly as many as its enthusiastic supporters – had loudly decried Suzuki’s impertinence in attempting to teach Australians a new approach to Shakespeare performance.4 Aware (from my own experiences teaching traditional Japanese theatre training) of the difficulties facing actors attempting to relocate their work in a wider cultural framework, I arrived in Toga eager to see how his Macbeth would be received “at home.”
The version I witnessed in 1993 (Greetings from the Edge of the Earth I) was much freer and more creatively intertextual than The Chronicle of Macbeth had been in Australia in 1992. In fact so free was Greetings that I came away, night after night, not only amazed by the superior invention and technical skill of SCOT (Suzuki Company of Toga), but irritated by my inability to grasp the production’s obviously complex meaning structures. It was all the more frustrating because Japanese audiences of different ages and from all walks of life were so vocally appreciative. I left Toga armed with a copy of the performance text, believing that translation would provide most of the answers. Three months later a rough draft had certainly produced answers – but also raised an entirely new set of questions. The truth of Robert Wilson’s observation about Suzuki’s work was becoming alarmingly evident.
Not only has Robert Wilson been astute in identifying the fascination of Suzuki’s directorial work, he has also appreciated his colleague’s significance as a festival organizer who continues to help shape cultural policy at national and international levels:
André Malraux said, just after the war, that what he would like to see as a cultural policy for France is a balance of interest in four areas. He said we want to create a balance of interest between protecting the art of our nation, and art of all nations. On the other side of the coin, we want to protect the art of the past along with the art of our time, the art of the future. We must maintain a balance in these four areas, the art of our homeland, the art of all nations, the art of the past, and [new] creation. What is happening in Toga in many ways represents the ideals of movements like the American regional theatre. It is artistic activity based upon principles very similar to those of André Malraux’s cultural policy. It is really quite extraordinary.5
Wilson’s reference to Malraux is apposite, for the latter’s cultural policies became familiar to the young Suzuki in 1972 through his involvement in Jean-Louis Barrault’s Théâtre des Nations Festival in Paris. Inspired by his experiences there, Suzuki returned to Japan determined to emulate what he saw Barrault, Grotowski, and Brook achieving in Europe. This would eventually lead him to set up the International Toga Festival in 1982, become a founding member of the International Theatre Olympics organization in 1993, and host the Second International Theatre Olympics in Shizuoka in 1999. Suzuki’s beginnings were more humble.
BEGINNINGS (1939–67)
He was born on June 20, 1939, the third child of a timber merchant in the small port of Shimizu, situated under Mount Fuji in Shizuoka Prefecture. He was old enough to remember seeing the bombing of shipping in the harbor at the end of World War II, and the terror on his mother’s face as she pulled him away. But his most vivid memories were of the difficulties of communal existence in an old-style Japanese house. Family members were only a sliding paper-screen away when his maternal grandfather chanted gidaiyû, his father intoned Zen sutras, his brother listened to Beethoven on a wind-up gramophone, and his sister read aloud with friends from the democratic literary journal Sekai (The World). According to Gotoh Yukihiro, he would jokingly refer to such extended-family living as a condition of “cultural schizophrenia.”6 The young Suzuki, like all Japanese caught in what Takahashi Yasunari has called a “second opening” of the country, was daily faced with the gap between traditional and modern (Western) values. One of his lifelong concerns as an artist has been not so much to resolve this dilemma as consciously to make theatre out of its tensions, contradictions, and ironies.7
In 1954 Suzuki transferred to a junior high school in Tokyo to increase his chances of getting into a top university. However, while happy about this opportunity to “cut off blood ties” (his father used to burn him with moxa, a Chinese medicine used in child-rearing in premodern Japan, as a punishment) the young fifteen-year-old found boarding-house life in the big city desperately lonely. He would drink alcohol to excess in cheap bars with lodging-house “friends” much older than he, sing enka, play mah jong into the early hours to socialize, and cut classes to sleep in and read.8 Paradoxically, on winning a place at Waseda University to study political science and economics, he never again had as much time to study the likes of Dostoyevski and Chekhov. The drama society he joined to avoid isolation discussed only Marx and Engels. To them Chekhov was not an artist but a harbinger of revolution.9
As Gotoh describes it, “In the late 1950s the WFS [Waseda Free Stage] was the most prominent student theatre group in Japan, having some 150 members and attracting 5,000 spectators a year.”10 Many of its graduates went on to careers in the theatre after graduation. But when Suzuki joined, the group was involved in violent mass protests against renewal of Japan’s Mutual Security Pact with the USA (AMPO), an agreement which gave the US military a nuclear presence in Japan. The failure of this mass student movement to achieve tangible results – the treaty was renewed in 1960 – led to widespread disillusionment as young radicals were faced with the hard choice of either joining the ranks of the “salarymen” or “dropping out” of society.11
When Suzuki joined the Waseda Free Stage, the Marxist “Old Left” were producing Hauptmann’s The Weavers. He was given a walk-on part to tell striking comrades that their leader Dreissiger had disappeared; however, as he recalls, he was criticized for failing to convey the look of a starving man. The approach to performance taken in the society was highly ideological and this was formative for Suzuki in both positive and negative ways. For Gorki’s The Lower Depths, he was asked to research the social and historical background, while a colleague was assigned to study how Stanislavski directed the play; and “[e]verybody had to submit reports once or twice a week. Actors had to write about their role’s personality, social background, age, personal history, family tree, everything. They even had to sketch a portrait of their character in costume, and always they kept on debating. I like debate now, because of this experience.”12
While theatre activities soon brought the reclusive literature student out of his shell, they also nurtured his growing awareness of the inadequacies of socialist realism. He noticed that when putting on The Weavers, his colleagues “felt they had to smear-on dirt, wear baggy trousers, and carry work-tools in their hands; but, because they were so self-conscious, they didn’t present their roles very well . . . Although they tried very hard with their realism to attract people to the revolution, their lack of skill showed because they had no adequate training system. It was unbearable just to be in the rehearsal room watching them.”13
Believing himself to be “a total failure” as an actor yet sensing what was wrong with WFS performances, he decided to try directing. His first production, Chekhov’s one-act farce The Anniversary, seems to have offered Suzuki the opportunity for a nonideological approach. As he was aware, “When drama is produced under the banner of revolutionary ideals, so much else goes missing, like kindness and consideration.”14
In early 1960 Suzuki was surprisingly elected president of the WFS. This was due to a power shift in the club from the “Old Left” to the “New Left” as AMPO street battles with the riot police intensified. In the faction-fighting between the Yoyogi (Marxist) and Zengakuren (Trotskyite) groups within the society, Suzuki rose to prominence as an articulate moderate and mediator, able to introduce a new system of balloting which avoided gridlock. As president he was expected to be at the head of demonstrations, but he would sensibly warn younger members that discretion was the better part of valor.15
Suzuki’s second directing assignment after his election involved two plays by a young radical student called Betsuyaku Minoru, later to achieve fame as Japan’s first Absurdist. The plays were Kashima ari (A Vacancy) and Hokuro sôsêji (Hokuro Sausages). The latter was about a butcher who kills his wife to make sausages for his shop; as Suzuki tells it:
one of the boarders in his tenement realizes this, and launches a campaign to boycott the butcher. Ironically, the Zengakuren (United Japanese Student Unions) demonstrate against the boycott, insisting the butcher is being made a scapegoat and the action is an infringement of human rights – in short, insisting that the butcher is being victimized. Then a tenant mentions that the butcher’s wife used to have a beauty spot from which hair grew. So the tenants cut open all the remaining sausages, find the beauty spot, and prove the butcher to be a criminal.
Suzuki wryly observes that “[s]uch a cynical play was troublesome to direct.”16 One of the obvious problems was that it provided no apparent psychological motivation for character or action; in his words, “The play was too much for my actors who only knew acting techniques and rehearsal methods based on the Stanislavski system.”17
Suzuki’s third directing assignment, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, was another indirect critique of current trends at the WFS; its choice demonstrated Suzuki’s sensitivity to the changing mood in the country after the failure of AMPO. For him it was:
a play about American consumer society. With the revolution in mind, I felt there was no point in selecting a play about Russia before the revolution. Because it was us seeking to make our own [failed] revolution, I thought we should produce a play about the kind of social structure in which we were enmeshed at that time . . . When I read Death of a Salesman, I found it very interesting, for it could be Japan too. It’s a tragedy about urban consumer society in an era of high economic growth – the world of the salaryman.18
One particular technique of Miller was to make a significant impact on Suzuki’s later approach to playmaking. As he noted in discussion with Betsuyaku, “The gap between [Willy Loman’s] illusions and reality . . . , the technique of transforming the space suddenly through a ‘mental flashback’ . . . surpasses anything previously seen in realism.” Just as significantly, all the actors in this production – including Ono Hiroshi, who played Willy Loman, and Takeuchi Hiroko, Suzuki’s future wife – were to join Suzuki and Betsuyaku in forming their own Little Theatre company in December 1961.