Looking for World Piece(s) of Music: Dr K Sees Japan 3
Showtime at the Kabuki-za
I’d already been to the classic National Kabuki Theater, so this particular day was my day for what I now think of as “The People’s Kabuki.” Attending the National Kabuki Theater and Kabuki-za is kind of like the difference between hearing Jazz in Carnegie Hall and hearing it in a club in Harlem. Both good, both experiences not to be missed, but definitely not the same.
Oh no, everything is sold out. As he’d done for my Rokuritsu venture, Colin phones around trying to get tickets. No luck. My only chance is to go to the Ginza district in Tokyo and stand in hitomarumi line for single show tickets. Okay. Always up for an adventure, I hopped it to the big city hoping to see a single show, just in case a monsoon or something kept me from going on another day.
There was a massive Beyoncé-comes-to-town length line for standing room tickets, so I decided to walk around the city (not too far, since my kangi sign-reading skills are nonexistent), then I’d come back later to stand in a (please, Lord) shorter line for the cheap seats. For ¥800 (about $10 back then, I think), I would stand for an hour. If I waited in line for two hours, I could pay more to stand for an additional 3 hours. ¥800 sounded very very good to me, with the added benefit that this left time for lunch before the show started.
I dropped in at a nearby noodle place. Tucked in among other tiny businesses, iIt seemed like one of those “how many people can you fit into a VW Beetle” gags. You can barely get in the door, only to find the place jam-packed with businessmen slurping to beat the band (a cultural thing I had forgotten about. See, this is why you’ve got to turn those Lonely Planet travel guides into exercises in close reading).
Back at Kabuki-za, I was in line for an hour and a half. I got my ticket and stood around for another hour before I got into the theater. Good golly Miss Molly, it was like attending Rocky Horror Show. Worth every yen. Everybody knew every line of the show, shouting with frenzied excitement the whole time. When favorite actors pranced and postured on the hanamichi (the traditional luminaria-lined entry ramp), the crowd went wild. Going to the People’s Kabuki — it’s like Showtime at the Apollo. If you do a good job, everybody’s yelling your stage name and your generation number. If not, well . . .
Oh, but let’s back up a bit. I bet you don’t know what this generation name and number thing is all about. It’s interesting. Professional Kabuki actors are named after past great professionals. Unlike U.S. sports where a star’s numbered jersey might be retired, the name is kept and the number is changed for each new generation because there aren’t that many names, so they add Roman numerals beside the traditional names. For example, Ichikawa Danjūrō XII — continuing a lineage that began in 1675 — died 2013. His son became Ichikawa Danjūrō XIII in 2022, a status change delayed for two years because of Covid-19.
The shūmei status-change ceremony where honored new names are awarded can occur repeatedly to signal different stages of an actor’s professional progress. “Ichikawa Danjūrō,” however, is only offered at a career’s peak. Danjūrō XIII, born Takatoshi Horikoshi, had two other professional names before reaching his father’s level. I should mention that the descendants of a name need not be biologically related to the family, because a good actor can be adopted into a family representing his acting specialty, specialties including roles like young hero or comic villain.
This photo from 2022 shows Danjūrō XIII as Musashibo Benkei, a real historical figure, a 12th century monk who left his mountain fastness to become the loyal heavily armed retainer to a noble lord. The tales of Benkei’s heroism are still staged in the 15th-century Noh drama, Ataka, which was later adapted as the 19th-century Kabuki play, Kanjinchō, then adapted once more in 1945 with Akira Kurasawa’s film The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail. (Because of the film’s positive portrayal of Japanese feudal society, it was banned by both the West’s Allied Command and Japanese censors until 1952.) By the way, in that 19th-century premiere, Benkei was played by Danjūrō VIII.
Each “family” of actors with the same name has a traditional “call” that the audience knows and uses. This is the kind of thing the textbooks never mention; you can’t even see it in filmed versions of Kabuki; exactly the kind of thing I had come to see. I don’t remember much about the show itself because I was watching the audience as much as I was watching the onstage antics. I could see a show on video; this might be my last chance to see the audience. Talk about energy! My head buzzed all the way back to Hayama. No headstones this time.
Next day, I was off to Tama to visit Pam’s job at Keisen University. Because one of their strong subjects is horticulture (don’t ask, I think it must be the ikebana* thing), they have an exchange program with a university in Arkansas that also has a strong horticulture program. My parents are both from farm families in Arkansas, so I was fascinated by the confluence of events that would result in several Japanese girls spending summers in the Deep South. The mind boggles.
*the traditional Japanese art of flower arranging
On my stroll through the blossom-studded campus on a mild midsummer day, I stopped by the university chapel. Inside, as luck would have it, a student choir rehearsed. As my ears strained to tell if they could possibly recognize any of my handful of Japanese words, I ever-so-slowly came to the awareness that they were singing in English. Oh. Their version of “All things bright and beautiful” had an accent pattern that was new to me, but like choirs all over the world, there was smiling, giggling, and hard work going on.
I couldn’t what the director said to correct her singers, but I knew what she was talking about. Wrong rhythms and slightly off pitches are universal. So is the laugh-out-loud joy of making music with others and, at the Kabuki-za, the yell-and-stomp joy of witnessing it with others.
